Hello thebax and thanks for your input. The whole point with this early WIP is that I want this to be right and I’m no city designer in real life. So hopefully people like you can help me to get things straight.
Well at the moment the map is in a very early Alpha stage so hopefully the visuals will improve a lot :-) At least you have put some pressure on me now.
At the moment the scale is about 12 km across. This in miles would be something around 7.5 miles. It might change however depending on how this map develops. But something around that scale it’ll be.
Spot on :-) I went for looking good here, but I might change some parts of it to a more straight path. However is the terrain some of the reasons that the canal isn’t completely straight. The canal has a small story to itself as well. The city of Ankh-Bathor is situated on the remains of a much older city from the times before the great war between the Archonts and the humanoids in the seven worlds. By then magic was very common in the world and the canal was created to connect the two seas, “innerhavet” and “Etrakiska sjön” (by then they had different names of course). After the war the city was laid in ruins but the canal remained as a scar in the earth. So we are talking of a canal that has existed for some thousands of years (haven’t really decided the timeframe here, but it’s not very important). So maybe the course of the canal has changed some bits because of earthquakes, changes to the world during the great war and so on, but a canal created by magic can’t seize to exist, not this one at least. And it looks better than a straight line :-)
Thank you for this input, I love locks so of course I have to put some of them in. Didn’t know that the panama canal had them. So now the Ankh-Bathor canal will have them too.
Another good question. This one made me think. First of all there are aqueducts going into the city from the hills surrounding the area, so some of the water comes from them. Secondly there are hot springs in this area that feeds the canal with water. The same hot springs are also used to heat some of the more luxurious houses during the winter.
Yes there will be towpaths, at least on one side. At the moment the graphics are just placeholders for me to know where city, countryside and water will be. So the pattern used for the city is not the one to be used, therefor no markets, villas, palaces and so on. When it comes to defense the whole city is surrounded by a wall. Parts of the wall are from the times before the great war, these parts are of hard black stone that are impossible to break, protected by long time forgotten magic.
Hopefully this answers your questions to some degree.