Mapmaker(s): Minister X with HitRed on the XML
Number of Territories: 25
Special Features: Bombardment, decay and autodeploys
What Makes This Map Worthy of Being Made: I made a careful study of all the CC maps that employ made-up geography meant to simulate an actual region or continent and I believe this map fills something of a void in that genre.
Map Image:
This map has been tested for color-blindness and works quite well. It can easily be reduced from the current 840x800 to 630x600 by replacing the fancy outside frame with a thin black or dark blue border and just reducing everything else.
BONUSES: I ran the calculation spreadsheet but finagled it to include consideration of the bombardments, decays and autodeploys as explained below.
I counted each source of bombardment as half an attacker thus the four castle continents had 1.5 added to "attackers". Mediatus, at 4.6, would normally be rounded up to 5 but since there's an autodeploy mountain there, I rounded down to 4. Ditto for Austellus at 5.46. Ditto but even more so for Orentolus at 4.87. Graecum, at 4.45 could go either way but because there's swamp with decay I rounded up. Littus, also with decay, gets rounded up from 2.71 anyway.
NOMENCLATURE: I am not at all wedded to "Fictavia" or the six continent names. I'm a cartographer, not a poet.
I'd be thrilled if anyone wants to suggest alternatives. I recently posted questions about tert naming; it was because of this map. I'll repeat them here: If I make a map with terts named with unique initial letters (Abacus, Bamboo, Cambric, Davida, etc.) on the large map, on the small map can I use just that initial letter (A, B, C, D etc.)? I'm assuming just the initial letters show in the log. Does that cause unacceptable confusion?
Alternatively, can the small map employ just the first three letters (Aba, Bam, Cam, Dav, etc.) without any legend referencing the full name?
As posted, I've used just letters. I could replace them with full names. In keeping with the quasi-Latin theme, I've already chosen Abante, Bravio and Conceptus. I'm not at all sure I'd want to replace the letters with these names (or any others). With invented instead of real geography, tert names are somewhat superfluous.They might add some atmosphere and poetry to the map but they also take up space and make the map look more cluttered than it has to. I think the background of this map, with its depiction of rough terrain in the corners and agricultural land in the river valley is part of its charm and long tert names will detract from that visual. So I'm happy just using letters. And since I have less than 27 terts, lettering can be really simple and easy to follow. But I'd consider full names IF I could use just the initials or just the first three letters on the small map.
GAMEPLAY: I like the modest degree of complexity due to the decays, autodeploys, and bombarding castles. I'll grant that an autodeploy for a hill doesn't make a HUGE amount of sense, but in battles holding the high ground is always important so making hills advantageous to hold isn't irrational at all. Swamps are sources of disease. Castles are a natural home for cannon.
I think the variation in bonus amounts from 2 to 5 and their spatial distribution are appropriate but the range really is 2 to 6 because of the autodeploys. Littus is really a 2; Graecum is really a 4. So the real range is 2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 6. If G and I in Orentolus were combined, the result of the calc would be 4.23 instead of 4.87 and instead of rounding down to 4 because of the autodeploy mountain we could round down to 3. But it would seem odd that a continent with 5 terts would be worth less than one with just 4.
I have one critical question: Are three bridges too many? The middle one could be removed and maybe the southeastern one moved up an inch to connect V to I instead of Y to I. This might alter bonus calculations - I'd redo them and publish if this option is taken up. But I suspect the river and forests do a good enough job of breaking up the battle space and that three bridges are fine. What do y'all think?
ARMY NUMBERS: I've shown just a few so you can see that brown ones are fine against the rough ground and green ones are fine against the farmland and swamp. I set the transparency of the white blobs under the army numbers so as to allow easy reading of the numbers while obscuring the background as little as possible. There's plenty of room for army numbers in all terts and will be on the small map too.
I just noticed that a "field" near the northwest corner of tert Q is a garish bright green. Please ignore that (now that I've mentioned it) - I've fixed it and that fix will appear in v2.
COMMENT: Up above I wrote that "I made a careful study of all the CC maps that employ made-up geography meant to simulate an actual region or continent and I believe this map fills something of a void in that genre" as what makes this map worthy of being made. Those maps are: Age of Merchants, Age of Realms, Archipelago, Atlantis, Austrum, Castle Lands, Clandemonium, Dawn of Ages, Discworld, King's Court, Krazy Kingdoms, Middle Ages, Midgard, Midkemdil, Oasis, Pirates and Merchants, Siege, Tamriel, Thyseneal, and Vertex. While there are certainly exceptions, there are two things these maps have in common: they don't look at all like real-world maps and they don't get a lot of play as measured by games per month. Some are quite large and complicated. Some are hard to read. One of the more popular is Midgard, which happens to be small, simple, easy to read, and looks like a real map (except for having beige-colored seas). As I say, there are exceptions but the overall impression I get is that these artificial-geography maps are a challenge. Perhaps CCers just relate more to real places and times. I can't be sure, but I wanted to try my hand at a made-up map that differed fairly significantly from these others in ways that would be maximally magnetic to potential players. With all my maps my goal is frequency of game-play not because I'm after fame and fortune (good luck with that!) but because players are the ultimate arbiters of whether I've succeeded as a CC cartographer. One has to have a purpose if one is going to put in the hours it takes to make a map like this; what better purpose than supplying demand? The problem: understanding the "demand" of such a diverse group with whom I interact fairly little is VERY difficult. I wish more of them would comment in this forum.
How I do go on.
Latest version:
