Haelwal - Sun Elf Stronghold

[bellbookandcandle]

Hey! I'm really new to this, this is my third proper illustrative map, so be gentle!

(I also know now thanks to some lovely forum-goers that the rivers in this map branch backward, I've elected not to fix it right now (complete laziness feel free to grab your harpoons) but other advice for this map (or future maps if I continue to be a bad lazy person) are heartily encouraged! I'm about to add roof details and that kind of thing, which I'm terribly bad at, so advice on that especially would be lovely.

I hope I'm doing the latest WIP thing right!

### Latest WIP ###

[tilt]

heya Bell, rivers aside lol, its looking good. The road running through the city is perhaps a bit wide considering the smallest houses - or perhaps they are sheds and everything is fitting nicely .. good luck with all those roofs, its a big job, especially since old style roofers I've seen like a good beer an hour while working that's a lot of beer

oh .. and the "latest WIP" is only necessary in the challenges

[bellbookandcandle]

Thanks once again Tilt! I definitely should have spaced things a little bit better; I tried going against all advice with this one and did buildings before streets so it's very messy. I think it fits the kind of excessive manner that a lot of the elves in the city have, though; wide decorative streets are definitely something I see them having haha.

Here's with a bit more detail, finally getting into the sunset/fall feeling I'm going for!

[Mouse]

You have some very pretty colours going on with this map, Bell

Are those cliffs that are going through the heart of the city?

[bellbookandcandle]

Thank you so much Mouse! And yes, they are, I hope it's a little more obvious with me getting some shading in here.

[Mouse]

Oh yes. The whole city just pops now

That split river is starting to worry my brain just a bit now that everything is a bit clearer, but you could easily resolve it by having another separate river enter from the lower left to create the southernmost waterfall section, then you could erase the section of the existing one that goes around the back of the city. A bit like this in composition (Please excuse rough sketch).



Of course - if you are very fond of your splitting river, you could always claim that there is some kind of magic causing it to happen. There are, after all, no rules where fantasy creations are concerned

[bellbookandcandle]

I tried changing the rivers for your brain, Mouse. They still split at the bottom (I'm sure I can come up with an excuse for that when I'm less tired in-universe), but I realigned the tops so they're not so glaringly backward

[arsheesh]

Really cool idea for a city location, very picturesque. The colors look a tad bright and over-saturated to my eyes, you might try toning it down a bit.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Mouse]

The rivers are much better this time, and if you want a less than magical excuse for splitting them right at the bottom you could have a very large obstacle such as a rock at one of those junctions to cause the split, and make the other into a millstream - a manmade split with a sluice gate?

I have to agree with Arsheesh on the colours. They are quite bright. I liked them a lot better when the city stood out as the most colourful thing in the map, and the rest of the land was relatively muted. Sorry!

[Caenwyr]

Heyhey, just my two cents here, but while I'm usually a rigorous follower of the river police myself, I tend to be a little more lenient when it comes to city maps. Bifurcating rivers are an abomination in nature, but in a cultural landscape like the outskirts of a city, it's actually pretty normal for part of a river to be diverted to provide a defensive structure.

Provided the local terrain is flat enough, you don't even need a lot of flow to maintain the defensive capabilities of the channel. If you connect two rivers at points equally high above sea level, water will stream into the channel from two sides and then stagnate as soon as it reaches the same level as in the river. There might be a weak current in the channel if one of the rivers has a substantially higher stream rate than the other, but it certainly wouldn't be anything dramatic. You could add locks to tweak it to perfection, but these wouldn't even be essential.

In really flat terrain you could even connect two parts of the same river: if you have city on a riverbank, you could dig a channel around the city with in and outflow in the same river. But if you were to connect two points of significantly different elevation (either two rivers or two parts of the same river), the water flow will very quickly be diverted to the steepest channel completely, and abandon the other entirely.

You COULD alleviate this by adding locks on both sides, but these would logically be outside of the city, and since the whole idea of this channel was to provide an extra line of defense, these locks would be obvious targets for an attacking force... So they would need to be defended as well, and this usually is just a bridge too far.

But, to get back to my point: if you connect your two rivers at points of equal elevation and similar stream rate, it should actually work perfectly!