Best Map Style(s) for Creating a Set of Maps from Large Scale, to Medium, and then Small
JulianDracos
Mapmaker
Suppose you wanted to create a set of maps in the same/similar style starting with a world or continent, down to regions, then smaller regions, and perhaps finally a town. Other than the default Schley, what map styles do you think would work?
Comments
I will be curious to see what others think. I don't think there are any with a fraction of the assets that Schley has for overland, city, and dungeon scale.
I really like Spectrum, but haven't tried it at a continental/global scale. The largest map I've used it for was 1000 x 1000 miles. (But now I really, really want to try it with something bigger.) You can make cities with it using unwalled cities/towns/villages, but it's really limited in how you can use it. I would love it if that style had a city expansion. In the meantime, I think the Darklands City style is complimentary enough if you used that for the city style and Spectrum for the overland style.
I believe there are Job Roberts styles for overland, city, and dungeon, but I haven't worked with those styles enough to see if they scale in a complimentary way. I thought Herwin Wielink might as well, but now I'm not sure.
I suspect that for large continental or world maps I will be using the upcoming Birdseye style being created by sue Daniels. For regional maps, I will nearly certainly stick with Mike Schley, and also for smaller maps. This is just what I will use, and I am sure many others have many different ideas.
As for the variety of possibilities (big overland, small overland, Ricko zone style, city, city isometric, dungeon) none beats Mike Schley.
I've been enjoying mapping with the earlier CC2 Pro style of options recently (cities need something like the CD3 Vector Shaded option instead, as there isn't a CC2 version for those), and they also provide a near-Schleyian-huge range of vector symbol options, from continental overland right down to dungeon scales. The vector styles are also easier to create additional symbols with, should you need to, as they are straightforward drawings in the main, with a simple colour scheme.
Interesting. Based on the responses, I am guessing that having a large number of symbols is the most useful for this. I was just thinking in terms of the general style matching up.