The lost city of Scylese

Deep within an unexplored marshland lies the ruins of what was once one of two capitals for an ancient race of angelic beings - the lost city of Scylese:

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Not quite sure where to go from here. I know the ruined rooftops make the buildings look like solid blocks, but not quite sure how to fix that without going over every house individually.

Aside from that, any advice or good ideas to improve the map before I let my players charge in like a herd of unstoppable elephants?

You might experiment with some colour on the white buildings. You could have a few layers and select out random buildings. Unless you want everything to be white marble terra cotta roofs, mold, fire, etc... might individualize your buildings a bit.

Also have you considered a few roads or statuary?

Thanks! I'll try to work on that. There's already a lot of roads, though...but maybe they don't look like roads to anyone but me, heh he?

I can see the roads but the jungle has reclaimed so much that they kind of get lost. Try some color variations on the trees as well as the buildings and maybe make the roads a slightly different color from the buildings. If you don't want to use the paintbrushes then use cloud layers with differing colors and change the blend modes to experiment...it's rather random but it'll give you a start.

The buildings are still pretty uniform, so I'll have to work on that. But I feel like I'm getting somewhere now.

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I really like your water highlights! Did you draw them by hand? That must have been quite a lot of work...
Also you could raise some of the sunken houses so that they are only partially under water, making the transition between the submerged and non-submerged buildings a little softer.

The water is a white area on a mulitply layer with Pillow Emboss and a black Satin (Multiply) with 50% opacity as well as a water/ice pattern I made (Pattern Overlay at Normal blend and 77% opacity). Here is the pattern if you'd like to toy around with it:

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I will try to make some of the roofs partially submerged :D

I should be more or less done with this now. However, I have no idea if the colours I've added work or not. So if I have messed up anyplace, please let me know. I've also added a couple of details around the map which I hope will spice things up a bit :D

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This is coming along nicely, but I think you still need more color variation in your trees. The concept is way cool and I like the fish.

By colour variation, do you mean other shades of green or colours other than green? I'm a bit afraid to mess around with the forest, since everything greenish is like a walk in the dark for me :lol:

Suddenly I'm looking at pink trees which everyone but me can see....