Republic of Valocea - Modern Political (June 2010 Annual) style

I've posted a number of times on these forums asking for help with various features and issues of CC3, but it just occurred to me that I've never posted the actual map I've been working on here. So yus! Be sure to click on the image to view the full-res version (which is 4500 x 2800), since a lot of the detail is lost in the large thumbnail visible here in the thread.

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Valocea is a country situated just off the pacific northwest coast of North America - it is, of course, not real, but the idea was to create a modern country that could be real, more or less. Since I'm a huge public transit and passenger rail geek, part of the idea was to create a place that would host the kind of modern, efficient transit systems that I wish America had in real life. So the creation of the country and map was for its own sake; it wasn't originally conceived as a setting for stories, but since I began making it, several sci-fi and fantasy ideas that would work well set here have occurred to me.

As you can see from the large swaths of space with no cities, the lack of identified mountains and ranges, etc, this is still a work in progress. Also, on many of the islands (smaller ones especially), the colored regional border lines didn't come out right, looking far too light. I'm still working on balancing that for the smaller islands so they look right. Still, I like how the map is shaping up so far. Major kudos to Brian Stoll and ProFantasy for creating this style.

A few factoids!

-The country's total population is roughly 144.6 million, with a total land area of 1,032,262.77 square kilometers. This area includes all of the islands on the map; the Valocean archipelago contains well over 2000 total islands, with most of them being too small to show up on the map. Most of the 219 visible islands are uninhabited, or at least minimally inhabited.
-The 24 administrative divisions visible are simply known as "regions". Unlike its North American neighbors, Valocea is a unitary state, not a federation, so these regions do not have nearly the same level of autonomy as the states of the US or Canada's provinces.
-You can see how each symbol correlates to a population size in the legend in the upper left (eventually I plan to do a much nicer one with its own box and more info!). The most heavily populated city in the country is Lennvale, located along the central coast of the Pascale region, with 4.1 million people. The second most populous city, Anshala, is located in the far southwest region of West Portal, has a population of 3.6 million and contains Valocea's largest and busiest port. The national capital, Issa, located about 250 km west of Lennvale, is the country's fifth most populous city, with 2.7 million people. Generally speaking, Valocea's population is heavily urbanized, with the 20 most populous cities containing almost 25% of the country's total population.
-It's not visible on the map, but there is a bridge connecting the east coast of the East Portal region, just east of the city of Oran, to Vancouver Island. A limited-stop express rail line, the Lennvale Vancouver Express (LVX), runs between those two cities, crossing that bridge, the island itself, and then another pair of bridges to reach the city of Vancouver. Note that in real life, there are no bridges between Vancouver and Vancouver Island, though my understanding is that there have been a number of proposals to build some over the years. The idea is that, with an entire other nation sitting out there ripe for tourism and trade, one of those proposals would have succeeded.
-Speaking of trains, as mentioned above, part of the point of this was to create a place with excellent public transport. This is something Valocea is known for: car ownership and use is not as ubiquitous at a local/regional level, with various options from city buses to commuter rail being plentiful and reliable in just about every decent-sized metropolitan area in the country. And when it comes to longer-distance travel, the government owns and administers a massive intercity rail network that covers much of the mainland. Mostly electrified, Valocea's conventional speed rail system is considered among the best in the world. The entirely electric high-speed rail network, while newer and not yet as developed as networks such as those in Japan, France, or Spain, continues to expand. Travel by sea is quite common as well, from numerous ferry services connecting various points within the central channels and seas, to private boats out on leisure cruises. Air travel is still available, and of course, there is plenty of international traffic in and out of the country, but domestic flights are not nearly as common as they are in the US.

Feedback on the map is appreciated! =)

Comments

  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    edited August 2015
    Quite a nice map, but personally, I am not too fond of the colored edge borders from this style, I feel it detracts a bit from the clean style. For modern maps, I prefer the more simple lines you find on most real-world maps, especially since your map has quite few of these borders, it becomes a bit clutter imho, and they obstruct some of the details of your map.

    You mention your rail network in particular, are you planning to add these to the map as well? Some infrastructure will make the map even more interesting, although on this scale it would only be the main connections.
  • CielCiel Traveler
    edited August 2015
    Posted By: MonsenQuite a nice map, but personally, I am not too fond of the colored edge borders from this style, I feel it detracts a bit from the clean style.
    Thanks! As for the borders, that's interesting, I've been using them for so long I've gotten used to them, I'm not sure if I could take them away at this point, heh. When I get home I'll take a closer look at what the map would be like without them though, I'd never really thought about it.
    For modern maps, I prefer the more simple lines you find on most real-world maps, especially since your map has quite few of these borders, it becomes a bit clutter imho, and they obstruct some of the details of your map.
    Hmm... If you mean like an atlas then yeah, but I think the idea with the borders (and this is certainly how I've envisioned my map) is the kind of thing you see if you look for a "political map" of a real place, i.e. something along the lines of this or this.

    And of course, the map of the (fictional) Empire of Torentine, created by the person who originated the style itself, as seen here. The borders in his map do look a bit different, the fade is cleaner and the overall effect is present but more subtle. I've found that hard to duplicate in CC3 in a way that looks good. Might try to play around with it some more, though. I'll have to give this some thought, I do like the borders but as I said, I haven't tried it without them really. Might try keeping them but toning down their brightness/visibility, too, and see how that looks.

    I wouldn't mind hearing other opinions on this too, for anyone else who happens by!
    You mention your rail network in particular, are you planning to add these to the map as well? Some infrastructure will make the map even more interesting, although on this scale it would only be the main connections.
    Yep, that's exactly what the main map is going to have: the main intercity rail lines, high-speed lines, and perhaps a few of the largest/busiest freight lines, but that will probably be it. Eventually, I'll do regional maps that will show regional/local lines.

    None of them are visible yet for a couple of reasons:

    1. I need to place more cities before I can really plan the rail lines out, in a lot of cases. Even if a line's termini are already on the map, the intervening cities need to be planned out so I can determine what other stops it will make, how it will route around (or through/under) major mountain ranges, etc.
    2. I'm still figuring out exactly what to use, visually, for lines. The "railway" tool in the Modern Political style produces a black line with little dashes crossing it - the idea is that it kind of looks like train tracks. But I actually don't like the look that much in the map, I think I'd prefer to use simpler, smooth color lines for rail lines. So I still need to figure out just what those will look like (and set it up in CC3).
  • I would love to know how to do the political borders like you have done.
  • Posted By: Mako1975I would love to know how to do the political borders like you have done.
    Part of the Annual mentioned in the subject of this thread.
  • Yeah can't afford those right now :)
  • Profantasy gives some Annual issues out as freebies, you might check their main web site.
  • For some reason when i click the freebies on the annual page it just says denied and my IP address
  • CielCiel Traveler
    Posted By: Mako1975For some reason when i click the freebies on the annual page it just says denied and my IP address
    Out of curiosity, I clicked over to the "Free Samples" section in Annuals and got the same thing. Seems to be a site problem.

    That aside, yes, the borders are part of this annual style. Without effects on they are just big flat blobs of color, but with effects they can be tuned to be anything from a faint color strip just around the border, to what you see in my map, to a uniform, transparent layer of color covering the whole region. Takes some tinkering and experimenting to really get them looking just right, but the effect is pretty neat.

    Speaking of, what do you guys think? Monsen mentioned he actually wasn't a fan of them, and that they make the map look too busy. I hadn't given it much thought before... I think I'd still like to keep them in, but I'd love to get others' opinions on the matter too (and anything else about the map you want to comment on, whether it's praise or criticism!).
  • I actually like it for political borders, makes it clear where things start and stop.
  • AEIOUAEIOU Newcomer
    For my political borders, I changed the transparency to about 25% to make the coloring and the borders faint but still noticeable. With the bright borders, it gets too busy.

    I think the real question is what are you trying to focus on? For my maps, the political borders are just another feature (along with forests, roads, points of interest, mountains, etc) and I don't want them to overshadow all the other information. In your case, the borders are the focus.

    Try messing with transparency. Make the shading opaque, make it just a shimmer, increase the fading. See what makes your map pop and tells the story you are trying to tell.
  • CielCiel Traveler
    Mako1975: Thanks. Still gonna refine them based on the feedback here, but I think I'd like to keep them.

    AEIOU: Thanks for the comments! Hadn't thought about it like that before, in terms of what ends up being the focus of the map. When I think about what the answer to that question is, I'd have to say that the regional borders are certainly important, but they probably shouldn't be quite so much of an immediate focus. They shouldn't, as you said, overshadow everything else.

    I made a small, fairly subtle change to those borders. I lightened the edges up just a bit, so they look less solid, and eliminated the transparent covering over the whole region entirely, so now the line around the edge of the region is the ONLY part visible:

    image
  • AEIOUAEIOU Newcomer
    I particularly like your font choices. Very atlas-y. :)

    I started with random colors for my borders but another option I've been exploring is border colors by alliance. For a world map I'm working on, I'm keeping all of the provinces/holdings of a kingdom the same color (actually, they vary by one step each so they don't auto-blend). This helps me see the political landscape at a glance. It also makes the map less busy because there are larger blocks of similar colors.
  • 7 days later
  • Saito,

    Fantastic work! I love the concept.

    -dennis
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