Thanks very much folks!

@Mike: Weirdly, the Ireland maps are the only ones I showed that have never been published! The main Erin one is still one of my favourites, partly because it was done so early in my CC mapping and yet turned out so well, partly because of all the interesting things I was able to find while researching it.

@Sue: I rather envy people who can just sit down and create a map from scratch, or have an idea in their head they can bring to life as they go. I have to plan in detail in advance!

@OverCriticalHit: All these maps were done using CC3, not CC3+, and so far as I recall, there wasn't any other option beyond tracing the coastlines in by hand using that. There are options now that would let you automatically trace a sufficiently contrasting edge within an imported image, for instance, and that would have helped to a degree.

One big problem I had was that with the Near East and Black Sea maps, the areas covered weren't available on any single atlas or paper maps I could source, where there was a consistent scaling and use of contours. The problem was so great for the Near East ones, I eventually abandoned attempts to draw them as contour maps, and opted for the simpler Mercator-style drawings instead. Even on the Black Sea map, I simply had to wing-it to fill gaps towards the eastern edge on the maps I had.

Of course, things get still more complicated when you're trying to adjust coastlines to their ancient appearance using what may be a simple line-drawing map in a published research paper, a sketch-map that may not be even in the same projection as that in the atlas chosen as a potential base map, let alone have a similar scale, or show any contours or other connecting features!

I suspect that because I've been drawing maps for a very long time, at first only by hand, then later using various DTP or graphics programs, the idea of hand-drawing suitable polygons, both of the coasts and the contours, which may each sometimes take a number of sessions scattered over several days, hand-tracing something like these isn't such a big thing in CC. Indeed, there may be advantages to this, as several problems appearing on the Forum in recent times have resulted from traced coastlines having too many fractal nodes along them, and crashing the program as a result. Approaching mapping from the direction I have, means that for many years, I've tended to draw things like coastlines using only straight-edge polygons, since at this kind of regional scale, you can't tell any difference. If you need a curve, you just add a few more nodes. So if you look at the Black Sea map, for all the seeming complexity of the coasts there (many of the contours were done using smooth polygons instead), I didn't have a single CC3 crash while drawing it this way. I did foul up a couple of times, and have a lot of redrawing to do as a result (there may have been Naughty Words said as well...), but that was down to me, not the program!

Should I make sure I can't attend now, so the stream will work this time 😊?

Have you tried drawing either a simple, quite thin, line, or segments (like logs), to make up a line? Use either black or a suitable log-brown colour. Booms would be typically made up of low-lying, floating obstacles, like logs, rafts, barrels, even ships, linked by lengths of chain under the water, and probably fastened at the shore ends by a boom tower, which would allow the chains to be raised or lowered to prevent or allow access, so you could add some of those floating objects along the line too. You could also have a couple of free-floating patrol boats alongside it for waterborne protection.

30 minutes! (With apologies to Sue!)

Ordinarily, if there were a lot of symbols there that your computer can't find, you'd end up with a load of shapes filled with red X's. As there aren't, that doesn't seem to be the issue here.

Have you tried doing a List command using "Select all"? That should tell you exactly what is actually in your drawings.

There are various possibilities for why so much seems to be missing from your drawings, and it may help if you're able to post copies of the FCW files here for others more expert than me on the Forum to examine, to try to identify what's going on here.

The problem my colleague was having after importing the JSON file into QGIS (free software) was that just the roads showed up. I was vaguely assuming that at least some of the available GIS software would have the topographical geoid data pre-loaded, but maybe that's not the case? I'm approaching this from the perspective of having no idea about GIS software in general though! Is there, for instance, a set of said topographical data available that could be imported into a program such as QGIS, over which the roads could then be overlaid?

In answer to Marja's point, judging by the discussion from 2023 on this Forum my first post here linked to, GIS data can't be directly imported into CC3+ or FT3, so could only be imported as an image that would then have to be traced.

Incidentally, a further colleague commented on that ancient history forum that it seems for Britannia, the Itiner-e map has used only the roads known and suspected from the original 1955 version of Ivan Margary's monumental work "The Roman Roads of Britain". This is odd, because there was an updated version published that expanded and corrected the earlier edition in 1973. I'd already expressed concern on that other forum, because I'd found at least two roads known to exist in Scotland that aren't on the Itiner-e map. In addition, it seems the Itiner-e map has excluded at least some British Roman Roads that don't connect into the rest of the network, despite the fact they're archaeologically attested. This could mean there are similar problems elsewhere, of course, for all it remains a fascinating resource map.

Plus of course on the snowy roofs, you'd really want to have the snow melted/cleared a bit round the chimney pots on the roofs sometimes too, and that'd be much trickier to manage!

You're not alone in battering away at unwanted nodes to get rid of them! I usually end up hiding or freezing any overlapping entities (like the LAND sheet here), and then just clicking to remove a node or two nearby more or less at random till something useful happens (and using "Undo" if it makes things worse!). Of course, the trick is then to unhide the LAND sheet and lose the same nodes in that, otherwise, as Sue said, the outline may no longer match the landmass...

Just time to generate a quick sample random city map before the stream (it may not take anything like that long, depending how long you take adjusting the parameters first)!

It's perhaps worth saying too that rooftops are rooftops, and haven't changed a tremendous amount over time, within a fairly limited range of forms (flat, sloping, domes/spires). In the basic City Designer 3 package you already have the option to draw your own rooftop (= house) shapes, using a variety of textures, so you can add exotic shaped pieces/materials to any ordinary roof to make them look weirder. If you'd prefer ready-made domes in a variety of colours and textures, try the bonus issue of the 2018 Cartographer's Annual, City Domes.

Don't forget too to explore the house symbols style options in CD3 anyway - Classic (loosely ancient Greek-Roman), Mideast, Thatch in the Bitmap A collection; Classic, Fantasy, Hovel and Thatch in the Bitmap B set; some of the Gothic items in both could provide some especially weird structures as well; many of the Vector symbols could be used in this regard too.