Making City Maps

amdobritt

Ok, when any of you make a city map (large city to metropolis size) what size template do you use or recommend?

Anna M Dobritt
Cartography Unlimited for RPGs

JimP

I make my cities in pieces. Generally it varies. But most tend to be 500'x400' or 1000'x800' templates.

I draw the roads, etc. so they match along the edges.

One example is here:

part 1 of the city Tooshla, Gashtra

part 2 of the city Tooshla


One method I use to get the edges to live up is here:


JimP.

Skaran

I find most of the standard templates too small for my cities so tend to make up larger versions such as 6000 x 4800 for my City of Pathen which you can view here.
this was for a city of around 50,000. Also the bigger the city the less detail/shading you should put on things like the buildings unless you want a really large file size. I can see this becomming even more so assuming CD3 makes extensive use of png symbols.
If you rummage around the site you will find some other cities and villages too.

LisaHartjes

What genre are you talking about? It could make a difference. The location could make a difference too.

Skaran

Thats right, modern settlements tend to spread out over a much larger area. The place where I live, Bakers Hill in Western Australia had at the last census a population of about 600. The centre of the "town" has about half of this with the rest in a rough circle around on blocks no smaller than 5 acres each.

Futuristic towns may be even bigger in area if they have such facilities as starports etc. While medieval and ancient towns would generally be more compact for a given population and thus could use smaller templates. One way to achieve this is to assume that average population per house in the medieval and ancient periods is between 6 and 8 and for modern and future less than 6. (Our house sitting on 9.8 acres currently has 3 residents).

This will make a big difference to the template you use. Taking my city of Pathen as an example this is a late iron age city of approximately 50,000. This was done on a custom template of 6000 x 4800 feet so the template is just over a mile across. The same city designed for the modern era may be two to three times larger, partly due to less crowded housing and partly because more facilities may be present, you know things like an airstrip on the outskirts, railway station, petrol/gas stations etc. You need to keep in mind what your settlement is going to be like and then select or create a template for it.

Rob

Anna,

I tend to work in two ways.. some times I'll just map the entire city on one main map, other times I'll go and map it on one then split it into several smaller maps.

In part it depends on what your doing etc. I find that the templates are normally way to small for me most of the time, I posted two maps I upload a while ago to the mailing list a while back, and I've got a few others I need to upload and the like to show, I'll try and get around to putting them up soon.

The end result though is that it comes down to what you want and how long you want refresh's to take. Even the vector stuff takes a while to draw (Heck actually I find it tends to take longer then the bitmap stuff after a while) which is in part why i keep hoping that CD 3 will hurry up and come out hehe.

-Rob

amdobritt

All right, fantasy city, located on a coast. The city is a port and the largest in the region. More like a city-state. Population 55,525, mixed races (humans, dwarves, elves, half-elves, half-orcs, gnomes, halflings, kobolds (no these kobolds are not evil, but live in the slummiest of the slum area.) North of the coast, the land is flat, with lots of farming communities and crafting communities.

Heh. Thought about making the population 100,000 but that seemed too much for me to work with.

Anna M Dobritt
Cartography Unlimited for RPGs

Tallknight

Anna, your proposed city sounds a little like Ptolus. Monte Cook's DnD setting. I know thats not what you are making but it fits your criteria :)
Tallknight

amdobritt

Hmm. That's one I haven't looked at. This city is based on something I wrote 15 years ago. While looking for something else, I came across a bunch of notes in a binder.

Highland_Piper

I will do mine in several ways. If it is a very large map I will just sketch out the roads and natural features on a large map, then do the rest of the details in smaller maps so I can print them out and put them together. This is also a good way of doing it if your computer is a bit slow.

Protharsus

Posted By: SkaranI find most of the standard templates too small for my cities so tend to make up larger versions such as 6000 x 4800 for my City of Pathen which you can viewhere.
this was for a city of around 50,000. Also the bigger the city the less detail/shading you should put on things like the buildings unless you want a really large file size. I can see this becomming even more so assuming CD3 makes extensive use of png symbols.
If you rummage around the site you will find some other cities and villages too.

Did you use CC2 symbols on a CC3 map for your creation? If not, what was your technique?

Skaran

Technically the settlement maps are a mixture some are still in CC2 format though the fill patterns have come from CC3. Some are in CC3 format but still using the CC2 symbols. As for techniques some experimentation. Some things I do do though. In some old cities you will find houses in clusters with streets going around the clusters rather than the houses all being on streets with gaps behind them. For poorer areas I also tend to make the houses smaller so giving the appearance of more crowding. I also sometimes change the colours of the houses. For example the thatched building are much too bright so after placing the houses I exploded them and changes some of the roofing colours. For those placed with the random street commands you can also set up your own colour schema.

amdobritt

Thanks all for your help. Feel free to post any other good tips.

Anna M Dobritt

jackypaper

So what's the ETA on City Designer 3?

JimP

Don't have one.