First BIG cities - critiques?
This is my first large city - I'm planning for it to me the starting city of a D&D campaign, so I want it to be excellent. Please let me know what you think, and feel free to be nitpicky.
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Now, you wanted critique/suggestions:
- I would bulldoze the district outside the walls near the rivers and place several warehouses there (not sharing walls and with wooden roofs, mainly to break monotomy). This is to facilitate barge traffic for example.
- The rivers seem pretty small compared to the houses and look almost liks small streams. If you want them to resemble rivers, I would broaden them a bit. This would also mean the keep to the right is better protected.
- If you want the right castle to be even safer, I would also make sure there's almost no land between the walls and the water. It would make it a lot more difficult to cross the water as you would immediately be confronted by walls. At the moment enemies could cross the river and have a small staging area there.
- You might also want to remove the walls connecting the city and the right castle. That way the castle has it own walls and is more isolated.
- The souther district looks a bit weird: the roads seem to be planned, but the houses are built in different directions, making them look like they weren't planned. This doesn't mix well I think. If you want to give this district a more ramshackle look I would mess with the road system a bit and make it look roads just sprung into existance. If you want the district to look planned I would make sure the houses are built in only a few directions.
- Maybe place some towers on some of the normal houses to break up the monotomy.
- Maybe add a watermill near the river.
- Maybe add a cemetery.
- Maybe add some beaches to the sea.
I elected to keep the walls going from the left-most keep to the bailey (the main walled courtyard) because in my design the only way up to the walls is through staircases located in the keep towers.
Current revision below:
Couple questions:
1) How does it look now? Further critiques?
2) I'm have a major issue now with some of the walls, which have some black noise on them. Apparently it is being caused by the stone squares below them, but nothing that I've tried (except removing the stone) has worked - moving sheets, disabling effects, nothing. Suggestions?
I see the black noise on the walls, but I have no idea what's causing it. Maybe one of the others knows. Or maybe you can attach the FCW file for people to look at (if you don't want to share the entire map, bulldoze most of the map before saving and uploading, and keep only some areas with the problem).
And don't worry Gandwarf - I know you are only making suggestions
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e27dc7b30f0b9270391d7d881749d3a7e04e75f6e8ebb871
(It's too big to upload here - hence the 3rd party file service)
I took a look at your .fcw in CC. If you delete your "WALLS DIKE" sheet the black noise on your walls goes away. The odd part is that you don't have anything on your WALLS DIKE sheet. There are no objects allocated to that sheet at all, and yet if you delete it from your map, everything clears up. Just turning off the GLOW effects isn't enough. The WALLS DIKE sheet must be removed from your map.
I'd suggest that the tech guys here at PF look your map over and see if they can figure out why it's having such an odd interaction.
Try it on your computer and see if it has the same effect. I'd hate to tell you that I found a solution only to discover that it only works on my system.
I've got many city maps with empty sheets that don't erase on save. Does CC place something on each of the sheets by default? A non-printing place holder of some sort?
BTW... I often use a sledgehammer where a hammer will do so in response to the original poster, merlinus12, if you HIDE the WALLS DIKE sheet, your black noise goes away as well. The only reason I would delete the sheet is because I'm not comfortable leaving behind a sheet that seems to be mucking up the works of a map.
Very odd.