Scaling a city map

Ok, so I'm new to CD3 and am trying to figure out how I want to handle scale in the map. Here's my theory so far.

The actual area is meant to be about 1 mile wide x 2 miles long. The map units are 528 x 1056 (each map unit being 100' or 1200"). Now, admittedly, I went into my field of work (law) because I was told there would be no math (Lies! You still have to multiply by 1/10th of an hour), but I'm having a hell of a time figuring out how I want to handle scale on most of my other symbols and such. Basically, I'm confused on how to approach scaling things like walls, roads, and buildings for purposes of this map.

Now, I know on overland maps, you default to basically 1/1000th of the map width, so a 1000 unit wide map usually has a default scale of 1. That seems...like it won't work on this map, right? If each map unit is 100', and I want to draw a 10' wide wall, then wouldn't I need the wall itself to be scaled to 0.1? And if I want to draw a 20' wide road, wouldn't that need to be scaled to 0.2? Or am I mixing my "scales" here, and confusing the actual drawing width of the drawing tools (Which will need to be changed per tool) as opposed to the symbol scale itself, which is....uh.....something else? I dunno. I'm still new to all of this.

Thanks in advance!

Comments

  • CC3+ uses different scales for what are called "map units" depending on what type of map you're drawing. When you start a new map, going through the usual set-up process through the New Drawing Wizard, you'll spot a note on the Map Style page that tells you what the Map Units will be for that map. With overland maps that's usually Miles, or Kilometres if you choose a metric template. For city maps, the default setting is Feet (or Metres for metric).

    So the map units you noted tell me your chosen setting is currently 528 feet by 1056 feet. If you need the area to be 1 mile by 2 miles, you need to set-up the dimensions for the map as 5280 feet by 10560 feet. Your symbols should then scale appropriately automatically (you might need to tweak that sometimes if things don't look quite right), and when you set things like width parameters for a drawing tool, whatever you decide will be in feet - so for a 10-foot wide wall, use a width of 10 map units.
  • Yeah, that's what I wound up doing. I realized I was wracking my brain for nothing when I could just make the drawing area in feet instead of in hundreds of feet and then try to somehow downscale the rest of the stuff. I'm using the SS5 symbol set, too, which hopefully has the symbols appropriately scaled (I'd read that SS4 had an issue initially where imperial was set to metric values for some reason). Anyway, so I just went bigger and now stuff looks like it ought to. Next time I won't try to reinvent the wheel. :)
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