Advice for planning a major city?
I am in the early stages of planning to design a major city for the Atlas, and I wanted to get advice from those here who have done big cities. This is for the city of Khemtufu, which is in Doriant - Gold Coast - Eknapata Desert. My goal is to provide a home for the Temple of Fah that I designed nearly a year ago, so that it can finally have a home in the Atlas. (Here are the discussion threads for the exterior and interior maps of the temple.)
I am planning to use SS5 Cities of Schley as the foundation. It has good Middle Eastern-style symbols as well as a great variety of symbols in general, and I might supplement with some assets from SS4 Dungeons of Schley. I also plan to also use domes from the City Domes annual, but that's probably it. I am planning to create canals using the Color Key cutout approach since Schley's fills don't meet up as seamlessly as fills from other annuals sometimes do. That will allow a nicer connection between the canals and the river, and will make it easier to add to the canals as I go along.
For those of you who have designed big cities before, I would love to hear your tips and strategies for how to approach it.
Size
My thought is that this will be a major city, definitely the largest in the portion of the Eknapata Desert that spills into the Gold Coast region. What are your thoughts about how geographically large it should be before it becomes unwieldy?
I looked up some comparable cities from the medieval period, picking the year 1000 A.D. for comparison. In 1000 AD, Cairo had an estimated population of 135,000 and a geographic size of "a few square kilometers" (according to Google AI). Constantinople had a population of about 500,000 people and a geographic size of 14 square kilometers (5.4 square miles, or 2.3 x 2.3. miles). I am thinking that Khemtufu would have a population closer to 50,000 to 100,000 people if that seems feasible.
I tried checking the Atlas for other cities to get a sense of a good scale for a large city. Sue & Lorelei's City of Sanctuary was 15,000 x 15,000 feet, IIRC, making it about 2.8 x 2.8 miles, or about 5.7 square miles. Quenten's Dun Fingolfin was 10,000 x 6,000 (feet, I think?). His city of Torstan is 1,364 x 1,364 meters (4,475 x 4,475 feet).
Does a map of 10,000 x 10,000 feet (1.9 x 1.9 miles) seem feasible? Any tips or recommendations on scaling? I realize that buildings would be very small, but zooming into neighborhoods would show more detail.
Mapping Strategies
I assume I will end up turning off sheet effects a lot of the time while I'm working to reduce refresh lag.
In a previous thread that I cannot find at the moment, someone suggested creating layers for each neighborhood, and then putting buildings on a neighborhood layer rather than a layer denoting its type of business. That way you can hide every neighborhood you aren't working on to also reduce system strain.
(Related: I am making a list of potential neighborhood names, though that will flow better once the basic layout of the city is done. Things like Garden District for a posh neighborhood, Northgate for the neighborhood closest to the northern entrance, Eastern Addition for a newer expansion on the eastern side, Oldtown for a central area that was the original town before it gradually expanded to be a city, etc. Thoughts and recommendations welcome.)
In his second Big City Project tutorial (around the 35 minute mark) Ralf creating a building-block tool for creating temporary blocks of buildings as placeholders until building symbols can be placed.
For those of you who have designed big cities, what strategies like these do you recommend? What did you do -- or what to you wish you knew to do before you started?
Advice?
Any advice or recommendations you have, especially things I should plan for at the outside (like setting up layers and sheets) is most appreciated.
Comments
I have worked on updating the city of Suzail from the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas. It's my campaign city.
Using the lots of png symbols really slows stuff down, even with no effects. I am using a massive variety of the symbols which may be the problem. Have not even tried adding effects and sheets yet. Suzail is about 1.75 miles by 2.5 miles or so.
Doing the base with vector symbols and going neighbourhood by neighbourhood would be the best bet.
If you look at the Waterdeep map the main massive map is then broken up in to neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods then have small block maps.
With my map I use layers to show specific types of buildings. Like Inn's, points of interest, character houses etc etc. Usually with arrows or something. I also have a full sewer system, linked to the surface. Then all the well's are far away from those.
I also have a multilayer dwarven stronghold underground. So there is a lot going on in a large city map.
Cannot recall how many total buildins there are in the city but it is in the thousands. I'll open the map and come back with some more info.
Using the lots of png symbols really slows stuff down, even with no effects. <snip> Doing the base with vector symbols and going neighbourhood by neighbourhood would be the best bet.
Oh! Interesting. I was under the impression that vector symbols use more system resources than raster symbols because (I thought) there were more mathematical computations with vector.
Your campaign city sounds fascinating!
City has about 1750 buildings. Seem fine with effects off. I used so many symbols from so many different locations so that is why it may have been slow on the old mini pc.
The base city is vectored buildings, with about a quarter of the city now raster symbols.
That's unusual. Generally speaking, if you have a very large city vector symbols like House entities and some of the more complex vector symbols the node count gets rather large and causes things to slow down.
Either way, an extremely large city will be slow, but you can put your districts on different layers and hide the ones you've finished already while you are working on the next one.
When calculating a municipality’s population, I have usually come up with a multiplier by the number of residential buildings. I’ve been using 5.7 (since I am 57), figuring that smaller households will be offset by larger ones and multi unit buildings, and it all averages out. For those of you who come up with populations for your cities, what multipliers (or other process) do you use?
With a projected city size of 50,000+ people, I may need over 8,700 residential or mixed use buildings, unless my multiplier is too low?
I know when Forgotten Realms first started coming out, so many Cities, Towns and such had way off base populations. The persons per building was unrealistic.
Calimport was said to be a million, they retconned it to be 200 000. Suzail was over 150 000, then they set that back to about 45 000.
With Suzail being that big I subtracted army from that. Then divided 40 000 by the 1750 buildings. Giving 22 per buiding. I still think that is steep, so I just said it included all the nearby farms and maybe small villages. (all of this is just to give you an idea of how WotC set populations) Oh yea I put a few thousand underground in the Dwarven halls.
So I figured A lot of buildings must be a few stories, which would make the persons per building a bit better. Lankhmar has a huge city and big population. What is different here is how tall the average building is there. The tallest is 10 stories, a bunch are 8 stories, so the average would probably be more in the 4-5 range. I can't find my numbers of buildings and population for that right now.
So any number is good for population as long as the buildings have a reasonable amount of floors. You could also fudge it a bit with encampments and non-permanent strutctures. Like a marketplace of "temporary" but permanent stalls.
I hope this info helps you flesh out a city. Cities have always been my preffered campaign base. Ran one campaign where half of the action was in the city proper.
I am a bit puzzled by the comment that raster as opposed to vector slows things down. My experience is the opposite, as I guess Sue's is too. So my tip would be to keep vector symbols to a minimum. But I am open to correction.
So I figured A lot of buildings must be a few stories, which would make the persons per building a bit better
In some of my villages, I put buildings on different sheets with different wall shadows to reflect 1, 2, and 3 story buildings, and had different multipliers for each. That works ok with a town but not sure it scales well with a big city.
If the population is above 20,000, I use the following rule of thumb to work out size. On average, each building has 30 x 30' (or 10x10 m) footprint, with 2 stories. Each 100 M2 houses 4-6 people, thus on average, each 100 m2 houses 8-12 people. So the formula for distance (in square Metres - I just cannot think imperial - we have been metric since 1970's) is Area = Population x100/ people in each 100 m2/ number of stories per building.
So, if you want a sparsely populated city. make it 5 people per 100 m2. Say the population is 50,000. For all single storey buildings of 100 m2 average, that is 10,000 buildings requiring 1,000,000 ie 10,000 x 10,000 m in area.
But make the city more densely packed, say 10 per 100 m2, with average of 2 stories per building, and the area required is greatly reduced. Area = 50,000 x100/10/2 = 250,000 m2, or 500 x 500 m2. Add some extra for very large buildings, and you get an idea of the dimensions required for your city - but remember to add extra to make room for space outside the city walls, or building extents.
In general, for a 50,000 city, I would allow about 1000 x 1000 m dimension (or 1 sq km).
Dun Fingolfin has 16526 buildings, and dimensions (of the city, not the map) of about 6600 x 3100 ft (yes, I used feet for the Atlas to fit in with all you imperials) which is about 35 x 35' per building (close to 10 x 10 m) with average of 2.5 stories per building, and a dense population of 10 per 35x35', that gives a population of Dun Fingolfin of about 413,000. But if I had made it a sparsely populated city with average of only 1.5 stories per building, and only 5 people per 35x35 ', the population would be only 123.000.
So decide what population you want, how many would fit into a 100 m2 space (you will have to work out what this is in sq feet), what the average number of stories per building is, then that works out the number of buildings (Pop/ number per 100m2/average stories per building) and area (no of buildings of 100 m2 average x 100) in m2. Hope this helps you gauge your area and buildings required.
Metric is the far superior measuring system. As a Canadian who has been in carpentry most of my life, I need to know both systems.
I like how Camapign Cartographer allows maps to be started in either system of measurement.
Quenten makes some good points. Also you have to think a lot about what your world setting is.
Here are a few examples Elversult is in a safer region, no walls, lots of sprawl, lower buildings.
Suzail is always wary of attack, due to their annexation of regions, so it's walled, with tons of livestock yards within the walls. So much taller buildings because there is no room for sprawl.
So region details will dictate some of the factors for density.
I play with: https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/demographics/ whenever starting a major city to get an idea of what I'm interested in developing.
I cheat and simply don't mention population in my games. If a party walks into a city, it's "small," "huge," or something like that. Your average barbarian can't count to 10 let alone 100,000. I might have a number in mind, but it really doesn't matter much to me.
Vector graphics use a mathematical formula to draw it. Thus, it requires the CPU (not GPU) to redo the calculation when it needs to render. The more vectors it has to draw, the more time it will take.
Now, if PNG symbols taken up memory, then that could be the issue. CC3 is only 32 bit so it limits the available ram. That would be the only reason I could think of as to why it runs slow. You can always force CC3 to load lower resolution images to make it easier.
I would say that it is more likely that once you get to a large map with a lot of buildings, vectors will make things much worse than raster, but I can't say I have done a giant city. If you are really worried, then wait for CC4 ;)
As a person who has done a big city with vectors, i can certainly say vectors are slower the bigger the city gets, whereas using pngs means the map has a pointer to that symbol just once, no matter how many times you use the symbol.