CWBP 2 Deciding the map

[Neyjour]

Yeah, the squares are do-able, but the hexes definitely work better with the buffer idea.

One of the reasons why I prefer the hexes over the squares is simply because they look so much more interesting and visually appealing. And much more fun when it comes to picking out plot combinations.

[Ghostman]

Thanks for making those example pictures Neyjour, they do a lot better job of explaining the system of tile claiming than my post did.

As for the grid resolution, a simple setup might be 200 tiles west-east, 100 tiles north-south. On Earth-sized planet that would mean each tile is 200 kilometres wide at the equator, but much smaller near the poles.

If we chose to use rectangular tiles rather than hexes, we could vary their density by latitude -- instead of a uniform grid, we'd be dividing the map into horizontal bands and then dividing each band vertically into a number of tiles, with the bands close to the equator having more tiles than the bands close to the poles. I don't know of any way to automate this process though, so it might be too much work for too little gain.

[Azélor]

What is the point in having buffer zone if they are as big as the other tiles? While these tiles are locked, they can't be mapped and according to Neyjour example, it's well over 50% (72% in that case). Or 2,5 buffer tiles for each selected tile.
Are buffers made to make a better transition between maps ?

[Neyjour]

Ghostman - No prob! For stuff like this, I need a visual, and I thought it might help others too.

Azelor - Yes, that's it exactly. I've been reading over some of the threads from the previous project and have seen a few instances where people had to go back and edit their maps to match them up properly. Having buffer areas that can only be mapped after their bordering areas are finished would eliminate that problem.

[Azélor]

So the buffer tiles will have to take surrounding maps into account. But, won't this make these tiles unpopular since they will be harder to map ?

[Neyjour]

I'm not really sure why you think they would be harder to map. I think some people might actually find it fun and inspiring to match up their borders with other people's roads, terrain features, special areas and points of interest, neighboring villages or settlements, etc. Or some may just find it easier to have an actual detailed guide along their borders, rather than mapping something out in the middle of an empty space, with no real idea of what's going to be surrounding you.

I mean, I could be wrong, but I think instead of being unpopular, they actually provide more choices for different people's preferences.

[jbgibson]

Issue I would see with hexes is just that folks are more likely to want to make nice traditional rectangular map sheets. If one was claiming territory for a game, hexes would work really well - I've been part of such a scheme. The first incarnation of the geofiction world of Aurora had a claim map in hexes, like so:
currentauroraimagemap.gif

That way of allocating space (take one, two, or three hexes) led to nation boundaries that were not *too* blatantly geometric - many of us fudged irregular borders into place to suit our individual ideas of what was realistic. The raw political map wound up like
AuroraPolitical.gif

and individual nations became lumpy or greatly distorted hex-based... things. From
SzereloMap04Polit.gif

to
TheodinnesCities.gif

Now, our focus was individual nations, but even then typical national maps showed neighboring territory, if at a reduced fidelity or level of detail. How's that bear on a CWBP? Well, political units are one of the easiest conceptualized views of a world, and one of the most typically mapped. The first CWBP with its nice rectangular claim scheme was actually a lot like a modern atlas - just one complied from many disparate cartographers. If our simple goal is to build a fun fictional world, and make oodles of fun maps all the while, divvying up the world in mappable units is sensible. Plenty of regional maps show whatever nations happen to be within the defined sheet borders. Who's to say that's not the standard way of mapping on Cwmbip?

I find it invigorating to have a set of border constraints to match, but that's just me. I know some folks don't want their vision infringed upon. Well, sorry - it's a COOPERATIVE world, eh? :-) Maybe that makes me a filler-in-of-buffer-zones....

No matter what, as a CWBP participant I would not want to map an isolated nation with zero info shown on its neighbors - as though it were an island in the void (though again - maybe that's just how Cwmbippian cartographers roll <shrug> ). I probably wouldn't mind imagining some random rectangular chunk of the world as a regional map... but I would want to negotiate with neighbor squareholders as to what their subject matter would be like near my sheet edges. The buffer zone schemes don't leave very mappable slivers of world to work with later.

A later incarnation of Aurora began with scads of randomly-shaped territories, somewhat mimicking the way a real world set of political units might wind up after milennia of additions, subtractions, conquests, and falls of civilizations. We were free to imagine some of the wiggly borders as rivers, others as ridgetops, and still others as the random-looking land grant that was Duchess Portobelo's dowry. Mapping that still left us with neighbor-bits that initially weren't defined. Frustrating. In an ideal world, one might tackle that as an iterative process... but we invest so much time in our maps, it seems an insurmountable task to years later tweak things to match what turned out to be an Arabesque realm off to the east, not undifferentiated bare rock. Putting in placeholder labels at the edges is just... gauche. "Nation Thirty-Four" indeed. Hmph.

I like the thought of semirigid rectangles laid edge to edge, with initial claimants having carte :-) blanche control, and latecomers needing to figure out how to create a plausible match. Maybe islands each become one territory, regardless of whether they would fit a grid. If you assume the result after years of drawing is an atlas of Cwmbip, with each sheet's cartographer flat-out not *knowing* enough about neighboring lands, then like somebody else said - the edge matching becomes less important.

Alas - I ramble. Enough.

[Falconius]

If someone could map the hexes (with whatever other elements needed) to a globe they could all be roughly the same size though. Squares would be pretty warped, triangles the easiest but also pretty warped. Maybe even using blender somehow to get us a wireframe. I don't know, it's way beyond me. Which is why I'm still an advocate for hand drawn divisions rather than an arranged grid.

Issue I would see with hexes is just that folks are more likely to want to make nice traditional rectangular map sheets.

To me that seems to be an advantage as people would define their own edges of the maps within the hex instead of running right up to the edge. Those that fill in the follow up maps could then run their maps from a previous map edge.

[Ghostman]

If someone could map the hexes (with whatever other elements needed) to a globe they could all be roughly the same size though. Squares would be pretty warped, triangles the easiest but also pretty warped.

Is that actually possible? Hexes laid edge to edge will result in a flat plane, not the surface of a sphere, so I don't see how they could be used to map a globe without getting smaller and smaller toward the poles. They'll also inevitably be somewhat warped in shape but not nearly as badly as rectangles.

To truly have similar-sized tiles (of any shape) with minimal distortion when mapped on a globe we'd have to base the grid on a spherical polyhedron.

[Falconius]

It is not possible really with only hexes, but all the areas would be roughly the same size. When the mesh will be as fine as required for this purpose it becomes silly complicated. I think squares or hand drawn is what we should go with.