Map: A little artisanal map... with 1225 provinces

[Twan]

... 170 underwater, more than 100 in an underworld of cave provinces. This map also features naval roads and gateways allowing to travel to distant locations.




The zip file is too big for this forum, you can download it here :

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1SG62P4Z
or here... http://rapidshare.com/files/7260437/oeridia.zip.html

(I'm searching a better host as these free download services are very slow, if someone want to host the file just do it)


This map has a very long story. It was the map of a diplo/role artisanal pbem game on the World of Greyhawk I've organized about 10 years ago, including provinces for areas like the temple of elemental evil, the drow underworld etc... (I've for sure ftaghned a lot with the size, just imagine that it was the board of a non automated game, with a printed version where I moved the units each weak following the orders of about 40 players -I've stopped after a year, realizing I couldn't continue and do anything else of my life in the same time-).

Anyway, having this map on a disk since my first PC, it would have been criminal not to adapt it for dominions, so I've started to add sea provinces (the first version had just naval roads) and to "white pixelise" it for dom2. Then I've realised that the game was scandalously limited to 500 provinces, I've waited 3 more years, and finally I've finished the adaptation for dom3.

Note that this map is more than a little old and isn't as pretty as many recent creations.

Considering the size of the map I can't also be sure that I've given to all provinces the right terrains and neighbors, I publish it now mostly because it would take some more years to fully test it alone, so consider it a beta version. Normally borders you can cross are orange and unpassable borders red, and all the special connexions are resumed on the left side of the map. If you find errors pm me.

You are supposed to start on a province with at least 4 land neighbours if you are a land nations (or 3 sea for a sea nations) and all wastes, caverns, underworld entrances and swamps are nostart as well as the isles and the two southern continents, but I may have forgoten some bad start positions. The central region around the Nyr Dyv Lake counts many very big cities like Greyhawk, Dyvers etc... and all these provinces and their neighbors should be nostart too. So the players start in the positions of the civilized kingdoms of the Oeridia continent, with lots of lands to colonise out or under it, as well as the vast uncivilized wastes of the north and the west to explore and the rich free cities to conquer in the middle.

In this first version, the map hasn't special garnisons and poptypes and has only a few special provinces, mostly the biggest cities.

In the next versions I plan to develop more special locations, with special guards etc... like in the Faerun map, especially the underworld regions. I will perhaps also make a Greyhawk mod to create adapted poptypes, monsters, etc...

[Gandalf Parker]

OK
http://www.dom3minions.com/files/oeridia.zip

[WraithLord]

Looks good

Looking forward to the specialized map.

[Edi]

Hmm, I seem to be getting competition for the big maps.
This monster only outweighs the biggest Faerun map by a factor three...

Should be REALLY good when you add the specials. I like the graphics just fine, even if a bit more earth-tones plains would perhaps look better.

Edi

[Twan]

Thanks Gandalf.

[Agrajag]

Wow, this is pretty awesome!
I think I'll try it today

By the way, Opening up the image in Photoshop and applying a Smart Blur (2[or maybe 3?] pixels, 45 threshold, high quality, normal mode) smooths most (though not all) of the more troublesome over-pixelated areas, with only mild damage to the image (swamp bushes of a specific kind got blurred). It keeps mountains/castles and the like the same way they were before, but makes most of the terrain easier on the eye.

Also, Edi, 666 Posts

EDIT: Forgot to mention you should first copy-paste all your white pixels to a new layer, then do the blurring, then make sure no new white pixels were added, then past the white pixels back.

[calmon]

Great map, i'll try it out in a very big sp game and hopefully in some mp games later!

In addition to #knownfeature "Volcano" you could also add the new dom3 sites:

#knownfeature "Desert" (+death/heat scale)
#knownfeature "Rain Forest" (+growth/heat scale)
#knownfeature "Tundra" (+cold scale)

for the deserts, jungles and tundras. That would be some nice features and provide some natural heat and cold in the provinces.

Some little bugs i found:
987 seems to be a forest but the map means its farmland.
382 should've farmland
461+481 have 2 mountain symbols, maybe this is intended!?

[Edi]

Agrajag, yes, I know I'm evil.

Do you by any chance have the possibility to post the smoothed map? Or do you know how to do the same in GIMP?

Because as soon as I'm done with the bulk of the DB work, this map is going to get a spin.

Edi

[Agrajag]

Edi said:
Agrajag, yes, I know I'm evil.

Do you by any chance have the possibility to post the smoothed map? Or do you know how to do the same in GIMP?

Because as soon as I'm done with the bulk of the DB work, this map is going to get a spin.

Edi

I'm not sure how you would do that in GIMP.
I will however try and upload a zipped version of the smoothed map.

The problem is that the last time I smoothed the map I missed some white pixels (got my technique wrong), so now I have to redo it. Only since its a 150 megabyte map, Photoshop now claims it can't save it as .tga because there isn't enough space in the scratch disks (??).
I'm now trying some stuff to force it to save it, and if I'm successful, I'll upload it to one of those servers Twan initially used and see how that works.

And will edit accordingly

EDIT: GAH! The most compression I can get is an unwieldy 33.7 megabytes, unlike Twan's magical 10 megabyte file :\
I'm not sure where I can upload such a massive file, nor do I know if my internet connection will handle it :X

[Twan]

Mine was zipped with ALzip, a very good freeware (it takes 1 or 2 minutes to zip big files but really reduce the size to a minimum, not like the official Winzip). But even a 10MB file is too much for the forum (3 MB max IIRC).

As I haven't photoshop and Xnview offer no way to save the white pixels if I use filters (I've tried to reduce the pixelisation effect before releasing the map but abandonned as I had 600 white pixels to recreate) I'm interested by your blurred version too.