In my map of Tyr Alomere Township, you'll see a Roman-style villa on the left side of the map. Although I had planned to work on a major city next, I couldn't resist diving into mapping the villa. I was going to hold off on posting anything until I had finished at least one floor of the interior, but I just couldn't wait.

I knew when I placed the villa in the town that when it came time to mapping the villa, I would do so with the Marine Dungeons annual. The structure fills in that annual seem so Roman to me.

So here's the outside, and then we'll zoom in a bit.

At first glance, it looks very similar to what you see on the town map. Since Marine Dungeon's vegetation symbols are primarily stuff you'd see in the water, like kelp and coral (it is a marine dungeon, after all), I continued to use the trees from Forest Trail and Japanese Temple, and other terrain fills from Darklands City. But there are some important changes.

First, the town had bluffs that used Creepy Crypts (because the wizard's tower that I built the town around used Creepy Crypts to make it easier to do the basement areas). When I brought in the villa to my Marine Dungeons map, I wanted replace as many fills as I could with Marine Dungeons ones. So the cliff walls use Marine Dungeon's pebbles fill, and the rocky covering was replaced with a Marine Dungeons rock. Works really well with the special effects that Sue developed for Creepy Crypts!

The building structures continue to use the tile fill from Darklands City, and continue to use the RGB Matrix to redden them in a way that seems more Roman to me. But the water was redone using Marine Dungeon's water techniques, though I had to make some tweaks. And the marble around the fountain and pools also comes from Marine Dungeons, though I tweaked the effects to make them more of a grayish-white.

(The building on the left side is the baths -- many of the fancier Roman estates had their own baths.)

Also, you might have noticed shadows from columns around the courtyard. If I take the roof off, you'll see that I replaced the CC3 columns with the beautiful ones from Marine Dungeons.

And now for the defensive walls surrounding the villa. They had been designed in the town using the beautiful fills from the Beaumaris Castle annual, also used with the wizard's tower, but I replaced them here with the beautiful wall symbols from Marine Dungeons. I love how nicely the window symbols work as crenellations when plopped directly on the walls. I also used the arches from Sinister Sewers to show entrances to the top of the walls from the towers.

I know the paved road going to the gate is a bit off-center, but I decided to keep it consistent with the parent map.

Interiors coming soon!

In some of my villages, I put buildings on different sheets with different wall shadows to reflect 1, 2, and 3 story buildings, and had different multipliers for each. That works ok with a town but not sure it scales well with a big city.

Oh! Interesting. I was under the impression that vector symbols use more system resources than raster symbols because (I thought) there were more mathematical computations with vector.

Your campaign city sounds fascinating!

I am in the early stages of planning to design a major city for the Atlas, and I wanted to get advice from those here who have done big cities. This is for the city of Khemtufu, which is in Doriant - Gold Coast - Eknapata Desert. My goal is to provide a home for the Temple of Fah that I designed nearly a year ago, so that it can finally have a home in the Atlas. (Here are the discussion threads for the exterior and interior maps of the temple.)

I am planning to use SS5 Cities of Schley as the foundation. It has good Middle Eastern-style symbols as well as a great variety of symbols in general, and I might supplement with some assets from SS4 Dungeons of Schley. I also plan to also use domes from the City Domes annual, but that's probably it. I am planning to create canals using the Color Key cutout approach since Schley's fills don't meet up as seamlessly as fills from other annuals sometimes do. That will allow a nicer connection between the canals and the river, and will make it easier to add to the canals as I go along.

For those of you who have designed big cities before, I would love to hear your tips and strategies for how to approach it.

Size

My thought is that this will be a major city, definitely the largest in the portion of the Eknapata Desert that spills into the Gold Coast region. What are your thoughts about how geographically large it should be before it becomes unwieldy?

I looked up some comparable cities from the medieval period, picking the year 1000 A.D. for comparison. In 1000 AD, Cairo had an estimated population of 135,000 and a geographic size of "a few square kilometers" (according to Google AI). Constantinople had a population of about 500,000 people and a geographic size of 14 square kilometers (5.4 square miles, or 2.3 x 2.3. miles). I am thinking that Khemtufu would have a population closer to 50,000 to 100,000 people if that seems feasible.

I tried checking the Atlas for other cities to get a sense of a good scale for a large city. Sue & Lorelei's City of Sanctuary was 15,000 x 15,000 feet, IIRC, making it about 2.8 x 2.8 miles, or about 5.7 square miles. Quenten's Dun Fingolfin was 10,000 x 6,000 (feet, I think?). His city of Torstan is 1,364 x 1,364 meters (4,475 x 4,475 feet).

Does a map of 10,000 x 10,000 feet (1.9 x 1.9 miles) seem feasible? Any tips or recommendations on scaling? I realize that buildings would be very small, but zooming into neighborhoods would show more detail.

Mapping Strategies

I assume I will end up turning off sheet effects a lot of the time while I'm working to reduce refresh lag.

In a previous thread that I cannot find at the moment, someone suggested creating layers for each neighborhood, and then putting buildings on a neighborhood layer rather than a layer denoting its type of business. That way you can hide every neighborhood you aren't working on to also reduce system strain.

(Related: I am making a list of potential neighborhood names, though that will flow better once the basic layout of the city is done. Things like Garden District for a posh neighborhood, Northgate for the neighborhood closest to the northern entrance, Eastern Addition for a newer expansion on the eastern side, Oldtown for a central area that was the original town before it gradually expanded to be a city, etc. Thoughts and recommendations welcome.)

In his second Big City Project tutorial (around the 35 minute mark) Ralf creating a building-block tool for creating temporary blocks of buildings as placeholders until building symbols can be placed.

For those of you who have designed big cities, what strategies like these do you recommend? What did you do -- or what to you wish you knew to do before you started?

Advice?

Any advice or recommendations you have, especially things I should plan for at the outside (like setting up layers and sheets) is most appreciated.

Properly labeled now.

Have to write up the full description, then do the same with all of the Wizard's Tower files, to get it ready to submit for the Atlas. I also want to design the sewers and the Villa Citri, but those can come later.