[Development] Alternative Map during 1.17

[Leoreth]

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.

Likewise, I don't really think it's possible to extend Burma. Adding tiles in the south moves Rangoon/Pegu way too close to Ayutthaya/Bangkok, and if all of Thailand is extended south to account for it we just end up extending all of SEA one south without fixing its proportions. In the end, Burma isn't really worth moving all of Australia and Indonesia south. I get that Australia may be more correctly positioned 1-2S but actually doing that just creates a heap of follow up corrections like moving islands in Indonesia and Polynesia to make the relative positions work again. And they work now so that's worth more.

 

[Leoreth]

That said, I made the border between Burma and the Indian subcontinent more mountaineous. Also I added horses in Manipur state that fielded the cavalry of the Burmese and British empires.

Spoiler :

 

[Vectors]

I'm pretty sure I'm not going to change your mind on this, but:

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.

SF and LA do not get an entire BFC to themselves, SF would be 1S or 2S of the gold, and LA would be 1 SE of the Rare Earth Elements, there is only two tiles between them in the former case, and they are in each other's BFC's in the latter case (the tile 2S of the SoCal gold is San Diego).

Furthermore, SF is much bigger than Seattle, because the metric you used does not count the San Jose MSA, which is in a neighbouring tile. The combined Oregon+Washington Population is 11.7 million people. Meanwhile the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland CSA is 9.7 million people, adding in the Sacramento Area which is in the SF BFC adds another 2.4 million people, that is 12.1 million people, more than Oregon and Washington combined.

 

[ozqar]

Likewise, I don't really think it's possible to extend Burma. Adding tiles in the south moves Rangoon/Pegu way too close to Ayutthaya/Bangkok, and if all of Thailand is extended south to account for it we just end up extending all of SEA one south without fixing its proportions. In the end, Burma isn't really worth moving all of Australia and Indonesia south. I get that Australia may be more correctly positioned 1-2S but actually doing that just creates a heap of follow up corrections like moving islands in Indonesia and Polynesia to make the relative positions work again. And they work now so that's worth more.

I see - indeed, my thought was from the start that the corrections would require moving 1S everything south of Burma/Thailand, and a further 1S everything south of Krabi. Yes, that includes moving most of Oceania, but the other part of the equation was that that movement would also give Oceania a better position. Should I try tonight and see how that looks? or should I not bother?

 

[Leoreth]

As I mentioned, it gives it a better position but at the price of disrupting all relative positions. Not worth it imo.

 

[ozqar]

As I mentioned, it gives it a better position but at the price of disrupting all relative positions. Not worth it imo.

I disagree with the "at the price of disrupting all relative positions" - I'd say, "and it benefits all relative positions", but sure, will forget about it.

 

[Leoreth]

No I mean if you think that convince me. Are you saying that relative positions are wrong right now? Which land masses do you intend to shift south exactly? All of Polynesia?

 

[ozqar]

Let me take a look at the map tonight, I can post pictures of what I meant, that will make things more clear.

 

[TJDowling]

I don't know if this is relevant to the discussion of Burma, but it seems to me something odd is happening in Southeast Asia. Looking at the Robinson projection (latitudinally speaking) it appears the Malay peninsula should extend well past the Southernmost tip of Sri Lanka, the Northernmost tip of Sumatra should be just South of Sri Lanka, Manila and Yangon should be on a latitude a bit south of Visakhapatnam but on our map they are the same latitude as far as I can tell.

I assume India has been enlarged to represent its relative importance but are we satisfied with the size/position of Southeast Asia? Australia could really afford to be 1 or 2 tiles South which would give room to move Indonesia, and adjust Southeast Asia. That is assuming we haven't determined these regions should be smaller for whatever reason.

Spoiler :

 

[ozqar]

I don't know if this is relevant to the discussion of Burma, but it seems to me something odd is happening in Southeast Asia. Looking at the Robinson projection (latitudinally speaking) it appears the Malay peninsula should extend well past the Southernmost tip of Sri Lanka, the Northernmost tip of Sumatra should be just South of Sri Lanka, Manila and Yangon should be on a latitude a bit south of Visakhapatnam but on our map they are the same latitude as far as I can tell.

I assume India has been enlarged to represent its relative importance but are we satisfied with the size/position of Southeast Asia? Australia could really afford to be 1 or 2 tiles South which would give room to move Indonesia, and adjust Southeast Asia. That is assuming we haven't determined these regions should be smaller for whatever reason.

Spoiler :

View attachment 532572 View attachment 532573

That's exactly what I was trying to point out earlier, thanks for making the images, they're really helpful. The India question you raise is valid, though... Is India also not aligned to eg, Arabia and Africa?

 

[Leoreth]

Yeah, this is because Sumatra is deformed a bit so Java can fit next to it and the Malay peninsula is deformed further because it cannot be as close to Sumatra as in reality without closing the strait of Malacca.

 

[TJDowling]

Further thoughts (if we want to do anything to change this):
We could move the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia and Australia 2S and move Southeast Asia and the Phillipines 1S. This would bring at least some of these places more into line and would give a much better shape to the sea around North Vietnam. I think that the Malay peninsula and Phillipines would have to be adjusted somewhat to fit in the new situation but I think it might be worth a shot.

This situation would bring the SW tip of Australia 1 tile S of Africa by latitude.

Spoiler :

 

[ozqar]

Oh, Leo, that above is exactly what I was going to propose (Thanks TJDowling!!!).

After doing those movements, we'd just need to check/adjust the coastallines for mainland Southeast Asia; for the smaller islands of Oceania, I'm actually not sure what they are supposed to be (other than Easter island and New Caledonia), but I'd just adjust them accordingly (or, just move all of them south like Australia - it's the one place where I think alignment is least important.

 

[1SDANi]

Oh, Leo, that above is exactly what I was going to propose (Thanks TJDowling!!!).

After doing those movements, we'd just need to check/adjust the coastallines for mainland Southeast Asia; for the smaller islands of Oceania, I'm actually not sure what they are supposed to be (other than Easter island and New Caledonia), but I'd just adjust them accordingly (or, just move all of them south like Australia - it's the one place where I think alignment is least important.

That's starting to get a bit Konigsberg. Then again, one could say the map is currently Konigsberged and this suggestion is just to undo the Konigsberging.

 

[Leoreth]

Not really. If you move Australia and Indonesia you also need to move New Guinea, which means you need to move the Solomons, which means you need to move New Caledonia etc. Not sure if you can easily move all of Polynesia 2S but it seems wrong to me, and you certainly cannot just brush that off as an afterthought. Island configuration in Polynesia also should not be touched because it is fine tuned for the Polynesian UHV. To be honest casual disregard for these issues does not increase my confidence that this is thought through.

 

[ozqar]

I was aware that this meant moving most of the islands of Oceania and that was always part of the proposal. My point is that having Polynesia not aligned to the other continents (ie, South America) was less relevant than keeping it aligned to the closer landmasses of Australia and the Malay Archipelago (hence why these islands should be moved as well).

About the Polynesian UHV, however, I'd imagine that the bigger map has resulted already in a different configuration of those islands (I don't know if it was something that Bautos copied exactly from the small map, or if he placed the islands with reference to a real world map). If that's the case, then we would need to revise the map to keep the UHV feasible. On the other hand, even if the island configuration was copied exactly, I'd expect that the bigger map should mean making adjustments to the configuration and to UHV (settling additional island groups? changing dates?).

 

[Leoreth]

I already adjusted Polynesia to suit the UHV, it's mostly the same as in the previous map now. And we still don't want Polynesian islands unrealistically south either.

 

[1SDANi]

When I said this was undoing a Konigsberg, I meant that their argument seems to be that while making the map a good number of landmasses were shifted around from their real life position and that the suggestion is an attempt to rectify that. In other words, the map was created with a Konigsberg situation already in place, and this is a suggestion to do what, in their eyes, is undoing those changes.

 

[Leoreth]

Well to torture the English language a bit more, we definitely want an unkoenigsberged map. I'm open to concrete proposals (i.e. with a map) but remain skeptical.

 

[1SDANi]

Well to torture the English language a bit more, we definitely want an unkoenigsberged map. I'm open to concrete proposals (i.e. with a map) but remain skeptical.

The English language is a mutilated mess. The Celts, Roms, Germs, Nords, Anglos, Scots, Franks, Spans, and Dutches all took turns of varying lengths and extents using the British Isles as their punching bag. A lot of language-shaped bruises were left and never really healed.