The one that extended the PNW one column into the Pacific?
[Development] Alternative Map during 1.17
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Publicola
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Yup, to make room for Portland/Seattle/Vancouver without as much overlap.
Publicola
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Considering that the Pacific Northwest has to support three cities, when other regions only have one or two (all of Northern California = San Francisco) it makes sense to expand that region to compensate. Plus, the 'inward bend' of the coast in that area doesn't really correspond to the world map -- the whole Pacific Coast of the US is almost perfectly flat from Northern California to Vancouver Island. The extra tiles give a more accurate shape to the coastline, allow specific features like the Willamette River and the Olympic Peninsula, and allow all three major cities to be settled without occupying each other's BFC.
I think it looks better like this.
I kind of agree, would like to see a proposal to address this.
Definitely agree.
I think you're right that Africa looks to fat, it looks like the correct solution is to take a column worth of tiles from the west coast as opposed to the east coast. I'm also inclined to agree that another row at the southern tip might be right ... looking at the southeastern part of Africa right after the "corner" of Mozambique it looks like the coast should be longer.
Speaking of the African east coast, the Horn of Africa could maybe also use a touch up ... it's more rounded and not as triangle shaped as the current map portrays it.
You're probably right, it's not too relevant right now. Although if in doubt I am inclined to go with the more visually interesting alternative.
Too flat as in straight horizontal? I don't think it's wrong, while the coast isn't a straight line in reality there isn't significant enough variation north-south for tile wide variations to look right either.
About the Baltic Sea, what solution would you propose here? Moving the Baltic states west seems wrong because it messes up the Polish coast.
Yeah, I agree actually, even moving 2S may be justified.
I tried it, I think the shape of both Europe and the Black Sea are worse off for it.
Let's start with Bangladesh here, I agree that one more row would look right here, and actually also produce a more accurate coastline down the Indian peninsula. I guess we could just extend the rest of SEA's west coast one tile south with it to maintain proportions, resulting in a longer Malay peninsula. Moving Australia south leaves some room for this too. The question is where do we stop moving stuff south. If we look at the bay near Hanoi, it should also move south with Bangladesh, but not sure if extending Cambodia/Vietnam 1S too is the right call here. In either case this needs to be accounted for somewhere if Indonesia moves south.
As for the horizontal width ... I think it's alright, and it seems considerably harder to fiddle with the width of the peninsula because that would have ripple effects through everything in China and east of it.
By the way, now that I can look at Europe in context of the rest of the world I might actually consider moving the British Isles 1N, plus extending France and Iberia one row in the north. It might produce a more pleasing looking western Europe and also give us the extra row in Iberia people wanted to have. Let's see.
British Columbia plus Washington plus Oregon are 16 million people, California is 40 million. That matters more than the number of cities, but in any case that part of the map is not significant enough to deserve enlargement on par with the Acela corridor.
Also, the coastline is accurate when looking the Robinson projection map.
ozqar
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I tried changing that region to account for the same curvature you see, but it's difficult because the straits are too narrow (keeping them as sea tiles makes them far too big, but can't change that) and on the far end of the horn, I don't think the curvature justifies additional tiles north - sadly at this scale they look waaaay to big.
Oh - well, for what it's worth, I find the present shape very distracting and uncomfortable - it's the first thing that catches my attention when looking at India. To my eyes, without a doubt, the more interesting alternative is with the land gap closed there, but of course that's just my opinion.
Yes, I meant the northern coast of Germany and Poland looks too flat (especially considering it actually extends all the way to the Northern Netherlands (ignoring Denmark) without any changes in latitude. Compare to a real map, the coastline actually has a lot of curves up and down. If it helps for inspiration, look at the proposal I made earlier for that region, I added two tiles (also proposed earlier by someone else) and it gives some welcome variation.
If you want to go further with getting a nicer coastline, you can also add two land tiles to Germany, but that requires moving Denmark north (changes to Scandinavia are minimal). I think you reviewed and discarded this idea earlier though - but it's worth to point it out if it makes sense to you now.
Yes, my proposal would be to do both - move the Baltic States (and Finland and St Petersburg) west and move the Scandinavian peninsula east. If two tiles is too much, I'd first move the Baltic States West. I don't think it messes up the Polish coast, actually it improves it. See how it in the same post linked above, you can see how it looks with cultural borders. Measuring a straight line from east to west, about 50% of Poland's length has a coast on the Baltic, while the other 50% is bordering Russia and Lithuania (and Belarus, a bit). Hence, I think losing a tile of coastline is more accurate.
Oh well, that's unfortunate. It was the one change I was most looking forward to / keeping my fingers crossed for. Do you see any other possibility to create more room in the Balkans, especially Romania (incl. the Transylvanian part for Austria-Hungary) and Bulgaria (for the Ottomans)?
Yes, I kind of agree now that horizontally it's wide enough. If the area gains a row crossing by central Myanmar, northern Thailand, and northern Vietnam, I think that might resolve everything. An additional row would still be needed in the Thai part of the Malay peninsula (ie, near Krabi). Malaysia itself (like Cambodia and southern Vietnam) is I think perfect as it is. This means, in total, Singapore will be 2 tiles south of its current location. I think that's enough. As you noted, Australia and Indonesia should be moved even 2 tiles south, so it all fits.
Glad you are considering this! The changes in the British Isles and France I think is close to what I proposed earlier (post here), perhaps you can give it a look to see how that looked. In that proposal, also the Netherlands/Belgium gained one tile. The change to Spain I proposed I think actually relied on expanding Iberia south, not North. You can see the final form of that in the same link I just added. I imagine that if you extend Spain northwards instead of southwards, you might shrink the French western coast a bit too much, not sure. In any case, a southwards expansion fits with the current Moroccan coastline. Consider both possibilities!
Just to weigh in on this - I think that if all those three cities are wanted, that could be fine, but I think it's unrealistic to want to have that with no overlap in the BFCs. Having all three basically means keeping the minimum 1 tile distance between them, and probably even then Vancouver would have to be 1 tile north of the real location, to fit.
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merijn_v1
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I was thinking of adding them below, or move things so that the point of the horn is 1S.
Yeah as I said I'm going to try it.
Yeah I saw that, as I said above, it's true that the coastline has a lot of curves but nothing that exceeds the size of one tile. You can't represent everything on any granularity. The way it was in your proposal looks much more wrong.
I don't really share your objectives in that part of the map.
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How did you move the Scandinavian peninsula east? What happens to Denmark?
I guess I'll look into it.
No, but that's not too bad.
How do you end up with Singapore 2S?
Nah, the extension south looks seriously wrong. I'm not sure why you are concerned about the French coast with this change when its length remains unchanged.
ozqar
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Thanks!!!
Publicola
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I'm pretty sure I'm not going to change your mind on this, but:
National Geographic uses the Winkel-Tripel projection, which has the same distortion (turning straight north-south lines into a wide curve). I own one of their Pacific-centered world map, which uses the same Winkel-Triple projection, but focuses on the Pacific rather than the Atlantic Ocean. Because the new center puts the Pacific Northwest (barely) further from the edge of the map, there's much less of a curve. Basically: the Pacific coastline of the US almost perfectly follows a straight north-south longitude line, as can be seen in the Mercator map.
Pretty much the only other region of our new map that follows the Robinson projection is Japan, with its rounded western coast. Yet we've all seen how much of a nightmare it was to figure out the shape of Japan, and that conversation largely focused on how to fit the key cities of the Japanese civ.
Los Angeles alone accounts for 20 million, about half of California's population. As I showed with the figures here, the other four big cities on the Pacific coast are roughly equal -- San Francisco is slightly large than Seattle, but not by much. And that's reflected in the fact that San Francisco gets basically its entire BFC to itself, while even in my expanded map, Seattle's bottom two rows overlap with Portland, and its top two rows overlap with Vancouver.
That's because the Robinson projection has a heavily distorted shape around the east-west edges of the map, order to minimize the north-south distortion of Mercator.
National Geographic uses the Winkel-Tripel projection, which has the same distortion (turning straight north-south lines into a wide curve). I own one of their Pacific-centered world map, which uses the same Winkel-Triple projection, but focuses on the Pacific rather than the Atlantic Ocean. Because the new center puts the Pacific Northwest (barely) further from the edge of the map, there's much less of a curve. Basically: the Pacific coastline of the US almost perfectly follows a straight north-south longitude line, as can be seen in the Mercator map.
Pretty much the only other region of our new map that follows the Robinson projection is Japan, with its rounded western coast. Yet we've all seen how much of a nightmare it was to figure out the shape of Japan, and that conversation largely focused on how to fit the key cities of the Japanese civ.
Well not like this, no.
I really don't follow this reasoning. Los Angeles and the Bay Area metropolitan area are larger than PNW cities, agreed. You can place the PNW cities but they won't grow as large because there is less room in the PNW. Seems like everything is consistent with itself already. Not much of a reason for more space.
Now here is where you're really losing me. We aren't just following the Robinson projection in Japan or at the American west coast, we are following it across the map. Distortions are a natural property of any map projection and Robinson happens to have them at the edges. You can't just decide to ignore them and do something else because that misses the whole point of using a map, of any projection.
Deciding to use Robinson was literally step one of this map development process, so if your argument relies on asserting that it should instead be Winkel Tripel or centered on the Pacific then it's really quite a reach that only highlights its weakness.
Publicola
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My argument is that the PNW cities are too close, and have much less space than they'd need to grow to their historical size. My change would not allow them to grow to San Francisco size, but would at least allow all three of them to be settled in the first place. As matters stand now, at least two of the three cities would lie within each other's BFC -- especially during the late game, this means that one or more of them would never get settled at all. My change would add a single tile between them, so at least they wouldn't overlap as much.
Are we? I was flipping back and forth between the Robinson and our new map, and I really couldn't tell. For one thing, our Europe looks much more akin to Europe in the Mercator projection. We basically cut out the massive Arctic and Antarctic regions of the Mercator, but otherwise, there's very little difference.
Primarily that's because in most areas of the world, there is a minimal difference between any map projections. The only two areas of our world map that follows the Robinson distortion, are the PNW and Japan. In Japan, we kept that distortion in order to provide space for the major urban areas of the Japanese civ. In the PNW... that distortion interferes with the ability to settle and grow the three major cities in that region.
And yes, I mean those are the only two. The Chilean coastline in South America bulges out slightly to the west -- that follows its real coastline, but not the Robinson projection where it is perfectly straight north-south. The Pacific coastline of Australia is curved, but not nearly as rounded as it appears in Robinson -- this again follows its true shape, with little distortion. Kamchatka falls due south, not curved to the east as it appears in Robinson.
Sure we can. We ignore them all the time. That's why Europe is bigger, so it can fit more cities. Every map has distortions, and the Robinson map arranges those distortions to fall on the edges, to ensure it accurately represents most of the world. We don't have that handicap -- our goal is to create a playable game map where those inevitable distortions have the least negative effect on gameplay. So instead of arranging all the distortions to fall within a certain area, we place such distortions everywhere: the Incan highlands are bigger, Siberia is smaller, Europe is huge, the Pacific is narrow, etc.
We established that they are significantly smaller than LA or SF metro. So that would be accurate.
Yes, and Europe is important to the game and history while the PNW is not. Come on, you know the reason why Europe is larger and it has nothing to do with map projection.
Well if you want to go that route, the bend in the NA coast is beneficial because it adds more tiles to California and to correct that would be to remove them, not to add more tiles to a less important part of the map.
So, I'm dealing with the shape of Africa right now. It is definitely wider than it should be, this is in part due to Europe being wider and Africa needing to adjust to that. However, I decided to remove one tile worth of coast from Africa's west coast from Cameroon through Angola. The Congo basin was somewhat exaggerated already, and Angola is not very relevant, being mostly dry and empty, so that was an easy change to make. I spent some time adjusting the rivers in the Congo basin, adding some minor tributaries and a river in Cameroon. I also tried to make the marshes less of a uniform blob. One advantage of this change is that there is slightly more space in Nigeria, which is a positive in my book. I also added Oil in the Niger delta and iron in the Nigerian uplands.
Lastly, I reshaped the Horn of Africa a bit to make it less triangular and more rounded like in reality. Screenshots to follow, including one of the entire continent. Let me know if I destroyed something during the remodeling. Oh and I will also move Madagascar later.
Lastly, I reshaped the Horn of Africa a bit to make it less triangular and more rounded like in reality. Screenshots to follow, including one of the entire continent. Let me know if I destroyed something during the remodeling. Oh and I will also move Madagascar later.
Spoiler :
Looks mostly great. The Horn of Africa definitely comes to a bit more of a point than that but I don't see us getting a much better proposal than that while still maintaining the rounding.
As for South Africa, I think adding 4 or 5 tiles South is still a good option. Here's what it looks like before terrain adjustments with some cities and landmarks to contextualize the shape.
Spoiler :
AtlantaMarty
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I would recommend adding one more tile to the tip of Somalia, but other than that, I really like it
Also, looking at Bangladesh, its size seems appropriate at four tiles tall, and five tiles looks wrong compared to the size of the entire subcontinent. It's somewhat unfortunate that its relative position to the Pakistani coast is not entirely correct but that sort of issue is not possible to completely avoid it seems. I will still work to make the border to Burma more accurate and look into an enlargement at the west coast of SEA.
Temüjin VIII
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