First Overland Map
Hi all! This is my first map since way back in the original CC days, when I was in college, and I'm hoping people might be willing to take a look and make some general suggestions, as well as help me with a technical issue.
As you can see, it's not the greatest of maps, but I figure it's solid enough for a first go to share and get some feedback on without entirely embarrassing myself.
As for the technical problem: if you take a look at the roads, you can see that sometimes the darker border disappears for stretches. I've tinkered with the drawing tool settings, but nothing I've done seems to help. Does anyone have any idea on why they'd be going in and out like that? If nothing else, I'd like to fix that before sharing things with my players.
As you can see, it's not the greatest of maps, but I figure it's solid enough for a first go to share and get some feedback on without entirely embarrassing myself.
As for the technical problem: if you take a look at the roads, you can see that sometimes the darker border disappears for stretches. I've tinkered with the drawing tool settings, but nothing I've done seems to help. Does anyone have any idea on why they'd be going in and out like that? If nothing else, I'd like to fix that before sharing things with my players.
Comments
Use "Change Properties" on the road, and set the line style to "solid".
One is that the forests have vertical lines in because they have been filled in in blocks. My style is to have a coloured background area, and then fill in trees by hand so you can still see the background. A bit like what you've done in the bottom left corner. (There are also macros for doing that, I understand, but I've not yet picked up that habit.) The other thing I would do is take the green rectangles that make up what I guess are farms and make them less regular. I'd have them all shaped around the river, as if you're going to be ploughing you don't want to take your team up and down hills all the time, so presumably boundaries and land will be chosen with that in mind. However, as long as it's not obviously inorganic, any shape should do.
probstette, thanks for the suggestions. I used the standard forest drawing tool in this case, which I'm guessing is attached to a macro that fills in all the forest symbols on top of the underlying flat-color polygon. I gave it another go with the smaller forest in the south, doing it by hand. I'm happier with that one than the big forest, but I think for first go I'll just chalk this one up to a learning experience and consider taking more time with the bigger-scale map I'll eventually be doing. And yes, the green rectangles were suppose to be fields and large farmsteads. I'm not sure what I feel about having them go right up to the edge of the river, though...there are probably smaller farms that are that close and might do that, but it feels like the bigger steads would appreciate their nice straight boundaries. Could just be me, though. I'm not ENTIRELY happy with the way I ended up doing those, truth be told, but I couldn't find a better option with the style I'd gone with. I suppose that's really the fault of the scale I went with -- a little too small compared to most overland options. Hopefully when I get up to the scale of mapping the continent, or even just the single kingdom, things will fit together better.