The City of Sanctuary (restarted)

[MistyBeee]

I was a silent observer until now but it's time to tell it's a real fun to see the city progressing : I love your updates, and have the feeling it's just as discovering a city during a trip, with a travel book in my pocket ^^. Yesterday, I visited the Fish Market and the Mandel theater, and today I'll have a walk around the dwarves hole

It's good to see you mapping, Mouse ! It's not Krita yet, but it's something

[Mouse]

Thank you, Misty

I have a lot of fun making cities, but they do require a lot of time to get right. I find it easier working on urban areas in CC3, since drawing each building is as simple as clicking four corners into place once you have a house style set up.

This will remain a CC3 map throughout - partly because I can't produce anything of this size in a bitmap editor right now (what you see above is less than half the map area), but mostly because the CC3+ file will eventually be uploaded to the community atlas over at Profantasy for other people to download and use in their private games. Also hopefully for a few useful tricks to be passed on

Maybe once I get some more RAM for this machine and have enough memory to run more hungry apps like GIMP and Krita, I might do a touched up version of it. I'm not sure yet. Maybe not.

I think Sanctuary would be better left as it is - a CC3+ city.

[Vobland]

Nice layout, love the area of docks! But why fort so far from the harbor? Fort artillery should cover the banks, or in case of sea invasion – enemies can take town ignoring fort! Guess best places to build fort – where you got Mandel or Sanctuary.

Waterfalls are super cool!

[Mouse]

Thank you, Vobland

The fort is where it is because that was the layout I chose from the watabou.itch.io random city generator site. I must admit that its possibly not in the best position, but in my mind it was originally built as an outpost before there was ever a city there to protect. The village of Sanctuary grew up between the fort and the river, and the rest is history.

The wall itself is 30ft thick, 50ft tall, and built on a dyke with a 300 ft wide base section.

As for the harbour - well, there's a Constantinople-style chain on the sea bed between the two winching stations buried in the cliffs either side of the city that can be raised if a fleet of invading ships appear in the sound (the sea channel leading to the city), and though I haven't drawn them yet there will be 4 substantial defensive towers - one at the end of each of the dock arms.

I'm actually more worried about the potential flooding of the new cavern, but I've been asked to keep it in place for now. I think there will have to be some kind of hole in the floor of that cavern leading to some kind of underdark, so that fluids that would otherwise collect in the cavern can drain away

[SteffenBrand]

I'm very excited where this is going! Looks very good so far =)
From a physical standpoint, I'm unsure about the length of the chain to be honest - it will get extremely heavy if it should stand to hold off ships. But it's a minor thing =)

[Mouse]

Aw thank you

It's been an adventure so far. I really never meant to dig a big hole just there. It just kind of happened that way!

The chain is about 800m long, and would probably weigh far too much for any medieval fantasy winch to hold, never mind reel in. I'm thinking about building sea walls out towards the channel to narrow the gap and support most of the length of the chain. It would also give the harbour more protection from tidal surges - it being at the top of a natural funnel shape

How is the Capital of Barradesh coming on?

I must go and have a look!

[Falconius]

There is a whole other option for the chain. I read that the ottoman one was held up by buoys. So what you could do is have a floating chain that is normally all gathered in at one end (and likely kept out of the water so it doesn't rust as quick), and have one end attached to a rope, and when they want to block off the harbour they winch the rope in and the chain floats out across the mouth there, and then they secure it at the winching end and viola, blocked. Although it's a lot of trouble for the general layout of the land, since one could presumably land ships just up the coast on either side. The ottoman one actually forced armies into attacking strong points and blocked a passage up around the city.

Also yay for the incline plane! I actually made something like that for my dwarf city, never felt comfortable with it though. Yours looks awesome.

[Mouse]

That's a really good idea, Falconius.

But then, I wonder why no one ever dropped the chain by severing the buoys?

They must have had their own ships guarding the chain from the inside.

That really is the weakest point, since the wall is far taller and broader than any on Earth. I think the widest curtain wall in existence is 20ft, whereas this one is 30ft wide and built of solid stone blocks instead of being filled with rubble as many of them are (thanks to the engineering genius of the dwarves). The wall should hold out any ogres or giants, since its also very much taller than any on Earth. The next weakest point is where the river enters the city, but there are at least 2 culverts there, probably more. It wouldn't be possible to ram through all of them in one go, and any attempt would soon raise the alarm at the nearby city gate.

If I was going to plan an attack on Sanctuary, I would do as you say - land ships up the coast. I might then attempt by some means to enter the caves where the chain is anchored into the solid rock and try to break the harbour defences - sending a second fleet into the harbour once the chain was down. That plan has a weakness, though, in that the caves where the chain is anchored are buried in cliffs that have been deliberately chiselled smooth as glass, and are inaccessible except through the tunnels that lead to them from secret places within the city known only to the guards.

So I suppose I might infiltrate the population several months beforehand and try to find out where these tunnels are and get some of my men down to one or both of the anchoring points.

I expect, though, that they would be so heavily guarded and locked away inside the king's/queen's buildings that I might have to admit defeat and give up

[Azélor]

Are these chains really that effective? Is it that hard to cut? Is it likely the attacker would be unaware?

[Mouse]

The information about whether it made a difference if the attacker was aware or not doesn't seem to be available, but I'm sure most of them were. It was such a uniquely brilliant idea that I'm sure the whole world knew about it.

The chain at the Golden Horn in Constantinople was effective for 400 years, until the great tower anchoring one end of it was blown up during the fall of the city, and only then because the invaders slid their boats across land and entered the water above it.

Boats were a lot smaller and slower then, and hitting a massively weighty chain, even at top speed would have been like hitting a springy reef. They would simply have slowed down, and been rebounded as the chain pulled tight like the string of a bow.

I assume that when it was in use the defending fleet would have made it impossible to attack the chain itself.

Its a good example of a totally simple idea that was massively useful at the time, though of course it probably wouldn't provide much of a barrier to any modern steel hulled icebreaker, I shouldn't think - especially not if the crew just happen to have a cutting torch handy. It would still take them a while. The individual links were really huge.

EDIT: Here's a picture of a segment of the actual chain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanb...3%BCze_971.jpg