[Development] Alternative Map during 1.17

Per the link, the Seattle shipyard built 40 destroyers over the duration of World War 2. That is the third-most for individual shipyards, but about a tenth of the total production of destroyers during WWII, and other shipyards along the Pacific (mostly Oregon and California) were producing all the other classes of ships, including aircraft carriers.

In game terms, Seattle built one destroyer over a five-turn span, while the rest of Oregon and California built nine destroyers over the same time, plus all the other ships (especially aircraft carriers) for the Pacific theater of the war.

Seattle does have shipyards, and the Port of Seattle is a major center for shipping. But, especially compared to the rest of the Pacific Coast, it was not a major center for ship construction.

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Per suggestions above, I made two adjustments -- changed the Olympic Peninsula to a rainforest hill (since the rainforest peak didn't look good), and changed the tile NW of Portland into a coast, so it has direct access to the ocean. It looks remarkably good.

I also changed a peak in Eastern Washington to a hill, representing the city of Spokane, and changed the tiles from grassland to plains (since Eastern Washington has basically the same dry climate as the Midwest states, aka the Great Plains).

Spoiler Updated Pacific Northwest :

Spoiler For reference: original map :

 

There are temperate rainforests in other parts of the world such as Australia and New Zealand (that I know of) and these are currently represented by temperate forest features. I would prefer consistency in this regard, in the new map. Personally, I would prefer that the feature used to depict them is a temperate forest feature, as imo "rainforest" in this game actually represents tropical forest, and is often placed in areas with drier climates, or wet/dry seasons. The temperate rainforest in Australia has a very different understory to other forest or woodland in the area but wouldn't look much different from an aerial view, I think.

 

That's fair. Part of my interest in making it an actual rainforest was a) because holy crap, there's a rainforest there, and b) to ensure that it wouldn't be removed for a mine or used for a lumber mill like most forest tiles. A normal peak would fulfill the same function, of leaving the tile unexploited, but a rainforest felt more appropriate. OTOH, you're right that it isn't visually consistent -- though I wonder what those regions of Australia & New Zealand would look like with a rainforest feature....

 

That might work for Portland. I'm still not convinced that Seattle works like that though. Normally we want to incentivise canonical city locations, and I'm not sure that's the case here. I think I would likely go with Victoria and forego both Vancouver and Seattle with this setup. I suppose Victoria was a more important centre than Vancouver early on, but Vancouver and Seattle are both much larger than Victoria now. Although Victoria is the capital of BC. I still think I'd rather see Vancouver and Seattle. All that said, I could be missing something, and I'm also only one person.

 

This is a really strange hill on which to die. Seattle should have access to the coast (hey, Rome does & when was the last aircraft carrier built there?). Similarly, if Vancouver Island is going to be represented, then it's connection to the continent should be north of Vancouver & not to the Olympic Peninsula.

 

Seattle is about 100 miles away from the Pacific Ocean. Rome is maybe 15 miles away from the Mediterranean. It's fair to depict Rome on the coast, but erasing the Olympic Peninsula (a 3600-square-mile mountain range) to get coastal access for Seattle feels wrong. I agree I would very much prefer to give Seattle direct access to the ocean, but the only way to do so is to erase a bunch of land. We could add a bunch of tiles (one tile for Strait of Juan de Fuca, one tile for Olympic peninsula, two tiles for Puget Sound) but that'd be even more distorted.

As for your links, note that in the updated map, Seattle does have access to a coast tile (the San Juan islands) which allows it to construct a harbor, lighthouse, port, etc. That coast, plus the river tiles, allows Seattle to fully exploit the commercial benefits of a coastline. It just doesn't allow Seattle to build warships (or rather, it wouldn't allow Seattle-built warships to enter the Pacific Ocean), and my argument that Seattle is much less notable for ships than it is for everything else, especially planes. A historically accurate play-through would see Seattle building fighters and bombers pretty much non-stop for most of WWII and the post-war period, up until the 80s when Microsoft entered the scene and turned the region into a technology powerhouse.

 

"Puget Sound /ˈpjuːdʒɪt/ is a sound along the northwestern coast of the U.S. state of Washington, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and part of the Salish Sea. It is a complex estuarine[3] system of interconnected marine waterways and basins, with one major and two minor connections to the open Pacific Ocean via the Strait of Juan de Fuca—Admiralty Inlet being the major connection and Deception Pass and Swinomish Channel being the minor."

I dunno, looks like it is on the Pacific Ocean... It's definitely more on the Ocean than Portland but you're more willing to put Portland on the Ocean than Seattle?

Alternatively we can add a water tile that appears as an unuseable land tile, kind of a reverse-lagoon in order to accomodate the Olympic Peninsula.

 

You should also consider gameplay - most people aren't going to settle a city one away from the coast like that unless there's a strong incentive to.

I might also add that putting Vancouver and Seattle so close together (within each other's BFCs) might be problematic if we want to see them coexist most games.

 

Sure. An inland Seattle still has coastal access for buildings and trade; just not for ships. An inland Portland has none of those things. The easiest way to fix Portland is to change the mouth of the Columbia to a coastal tile, which would also give the city access to the ocean for ship-building (which is something Portland was especially notable for).

That's a pretty good point -- my plan was to use the peak + rainforest to keep the Olympic Peninsula intact, but that's not going to fly if it's just a hill + forest.

This gives me an idea... why don't we move Vancouver Island up by one tile? Then we'd have room for a three-tile Puget Sound (one for Strait of Juan de Fuca, two for the Sound proper), which would give a direct coastal connection to both Seattle and Vancouver, and separate the two cities by one extra tile so they'd be outside each other's BFC.

Here's my latest pass at the Pacific Northwest. I kept the Olympic Penisula a rainforest rather than temperate jungle because a) I'm not completely sold on making it a normal forest tile and b) to clearly indicate what it represents. I moved Mt. Rainier north one tile, kept the changes to Spokane, and adjusted the whole Vancouver (city) and Vancouver (island) group one north as well, removing the mountain tile 1 NW of the current Vancouver tile.

Considering that whole area is basically empty (full of mountains in -game, full of wilderness in real life), shifting Vancouver to give the three big cities more space seems like a workable solution.

Spoiler Round 3 :

 

@merijn_v1, as long as you're working on forest variants, would you be willing to put together a variant for temperate rainforest? I'm thinking something like: replace the rainforest's coconut trees with normal 'temperate forest' trees, and adjust the color level a bit so it's brighter than most forests but darker than the default rainforest. That way it'd have the properties of a rainforest, without looking like it belongs in the Amazon.

This sort of 'temperate rainforest' could be used in places like:

• Pacific Northwest
• southern tip of South America
• Australia and New Zealand

We might also be able to use that terrain type for a tile in southern Appalachia (in the U.S.), as well as in Northern Iran.

 

I don't hate this one but I'm not sure how I feel about shifting Vancouver up, giving it even less space before we hit mountains/tundra. That's the problem while moving Vancouver up keeps it out of Seattles BFC it gives Vancouver a much worse BFC compared to Seattle. Also, still not sure why it's entirely necessary to put a massive non-existant bay there for Portland. I'd just accept that it is an important "coastal"ish city and put the canonical on the coast. From gameplay and aesthetic, it's better. No one thinks of Portland as an inland city and it functions as a coastal city so what's the appeal of placing it inland?

 

Re: Portland, just map the borders of the state over the game map, and see where the exact location of the city falls (ie, in relation to the state as a whole, not to the coast). My guess is that it's not sufficiently inland for it to fall outside the coastal tile.

Although, some time ago Leoreth was considering a "port" tile improvement, which could provide sea access and allow marine unit construction for cities that are one tile away from the coast. If that gets implemented, then that would also solve this problem.

 

Then we can adjust Vancouver's BFC accordingly. The northern part of British Columbia is basically empty, so it shouldn't be too difficult to adjust its tile quality.

I was curious, so I found a transparent U.S. outline map, cut out the PNW, and rotated it to fit the coastline. Here's the result:

Spoiler Changed map w/ state borders :

So yes, you're right. Portland is sufficiently ambiguous (it's pretty much exactly where the Willamette River sits) that we could push it 1W and put it directly on the coast. That would also allow us to add the grassland tile above it and put the mouth of the Columbia River in the proper place.

On the other hand, Seattle's position is a mess. Giving a full tile to the Strait of Juan de Fuca gives Seattle coastal access (yes!) but looks fairly messy. I still consider it worth it, especially since it provides the proper spacing between Portland -> Seattle -> Vancouver. Pity that it erases the land tiles for Everett or Bellingham, but they're not nearly as important as the big three.

 

Buddy, a 16 tile Washington State is ridiculous. New England plus New York & New Jersey on this map is 14 tiles. Now, you may be thinking "well, if each tile represents around 5k sq mi, then Washington State would be around 14 tiles so this makes sense"... but that also makes for a 32-tile California. At this level of abstraction, paired with the PNW's general level of importance, it needn't be so large.

 

My impression was that most map decisions are not based on absolute size, but on the viability of specific major cities.

Along the Pacific Coast, there are five primary cities that should be settled:

• Vancouver (population 675,000)
• Seattle (population 725,000)
• Portland (population 650,000)
• San Francisco (population 885,000)
• Los Angeles (population 4.0 mil)

If we're going by metropolitan region:

• Greater Vancouver (2.5 mil)
• Seattle Metropolitan Area (3.5 mil)
• Portland Metropolitan Statistical Area (2.2 mil)
• San Francisco Metropolitan Statistical Area (4.7 mil)
• Greater Los Angeles (~20 mil)

California is big enough that San Francisco and Los Angeles both get a full BFC without interference by the other. But Portland is on the very northern edge of Oregon, and Vancouver is on the very southern edge of British Columbia. So, if we don't want all three of those cities to be within the BFC of each other, then expanding Washington state is the only way to do it.

If absolute size is a sticking point, we could probably shrink the eastern part of the state -- I doubt anyone will be settling Spokane in-game, the region has much less population than the megacities of Cascadia, and it's mostly farmland anyway. Cutting out a column from Eastern Washington would leave us with 11 tiles total. I have another idea that'd result in 13 tiles, though I don't have time to make a screenshot, but that's still in the same ballpark.

 

I support moving the PNW coast out, I suggested such on page 5 but there are a couple things I don’t like about this case. First off, I don’t like the shape of Oregon. You can see it in your state overlay map, the ocean tile is clearly for no other reason than to give Portland ocean access. It plainly isn’t, it’s a river town, a Pittsburgh of the west coast. Now if we really wanted to have a coastal Portland to favor gameplay it makes more sense to just settle it on the coast rather than shoehorn an ocean tile and throw off the shape of the coast.
As for Seattle, it absolutely must have ocean access. The baseball team is the “Mariners” football is the “Seahawks,” famous tourist attractions are the fish market and the wharf. It makes more sense to just represent the tile south of Victoria with islands. As for the rainforest, I think it’s ridiculous. I’ve been there, it’s by no stretch of imagination a jungle but instead, a densely vegetated, mossy forest. It’s a really cool place, but not nearly important enough to deserve its own tile nor are the tropical plants aesthetically faithful to the region itself.

 

All right, here are two more updates.

The first option fixes the Oregon coast, to put Portland directly on the Pacific and with a proper shape for the Columbia River. (I highlighted the five tiles of new land, along with the new location of Mt. Rainier, as well as the new placement for Vancouver and Victoria.)

Spoiler Oregon fix :

The second option goes back to the original version, and simply adds three tiles along the coast. It leaves the Columbia River flat, but it does add a Willamette River, along with a tile for the Olympic Peninsula and a Puget Sound. I prefer the one above, because it creates a bit more distance between Seattle and Portland, and permits both cities to be settled. However, if you want to limit the size of the PNW, this 'minimalist' version does the job.

Spoiler Minimalist fix :

Thoughts?