New Map - Europa Imperialis (WIP)

[lucaluca]

Thanks for the feedback, guys I've looked into the EB map, looks like they've also decided to go for the "split Oxus" route but the river passes through further north. I think I'll go with that idea, as I've now seen it repeated on a few maps. Here is what I have now, with the river map overlaid and some key provinces labelled. I'm MUCH more satisfied with this one, now I'm just considering adding more steppe provinces to provide some barbarian harassment to the Seleucids' northern border.



And, while I was at it, I decided to revisit the Indus region and added a few cities that are mentioned in Alexander's campaigns. Still some work to do, but the India zone is more or less ready.

Nice!

One thing, Alexandria Oxiana is in the wrong position It should be on the east of Bactra, south of the Oxus. Ai Khanoum is in the south shore. Also Bactria could use tow more provinces, i.e. splitting Bactra and the one south of it, main cities were Aornos and Drapsaca. Remember Bactria was very powerful and the heart of the Bactrian Kingdom, who survived even when they lost Sogdiana to the Tocharians

[Cheexsta]

*Runs off to check maps.*

One thing, Alexandria Oxiana is in the wrong position It should be on the east of Bactra, south of the Oxus. Ai Khanoum is in the south shore.

Right you are, I'll expand the province a little south-eastwards so it will encompass the city properly. I do have one map that places Oxiana almost directly north of Baktra, though, but my other maps seem to disagree with it.

Also Bactria could use tow more provinces, i.e. splitting Bactra and the one south of it, main cities were Aornos and Drapsaca. Remember Bactria was very powerful and the heart of the Bactrian Kingdom, who survived even when they lost Sogdiana to the Tocharians

Good point, I'll add those as well.

[vanin]

Looking really good, impressive! Now comes the fun work of finding out who lived where, their names, birth and death dates and how competent they were...

[giansideros]

I haven't managed to go through the entire thread, but I commend the creators of this, when I got EU:Rome, I was disappointed at the exclusion of a lot of the Eastern Hellenistic worlds, in particular Bactria and the Indo-Greek Kingdoms (I was looking forward to playing as Buddhist Greeks!), not to mention the Indian Kingdoms.

Also apparently the Romans under Augustus made an expedition to Yemen which this map can take into account for, makes me very happy I can now do this in my game.

Also glad that Ethiopa is there too as well as much of central Asia.

[Cheexsta]

Thanks to both of you

Looking really good, impressive! Now comes the fun work of finding out who lived where, their names, birth and death dates and how competent they were...

No, now comes the fun part of verifying every single province, localising names and adding positions. As I go I'll be adding some basic history (i.e. 474 start), then finally characters can be re-added.

I started a few days ago on Iberia and managed to get through the whole peninsula within a few hours of re-checking my maps. There's a bit of copy/paste going on in the history files, but hopefully that will be excused because there are over 700 land provinces now...

[Cheexsta]

Wee, progress! I've finished adding vanilla tribes (and all the text positions, etc) to Gaul and Iberia



I've made a few small positions changes since that picture and want to fix up one little border (make Mastia smaller and Contestani bigger - the former was actually part of the latter's territory), but I'm pretty happy with it.

Might also do Germania tonight - there aren't many vanilla tribes there, so it shouldn't be too much hard work.

[Parzival2211]

Now only discovered this. Looks amazing. Keep up the great work!

[Woody Man]

Nice! Glad to see this coming along!

[Cheexsta]

Thanks guys

I received a request from a fellow modder to release what we've got so far so he could use it for his own mod, so I thought - why not? Here's the current work-in-progress map, pre-Alpha stage.

http://www.gamefront.com/files/21655...M_5-5-2012.zip

To install, simply unzip to your Rome folder and allow any overwrites. I suggest you do this over a fresh copy of the game.

To uninstall or play vanilla or any other mod, you need to go into your '.\gfx\FX' folder and delete the following files:
- river.fx
- terrain_2_0.fx
- water.fx

And rename the corresponding .bak files to remove the .bak part. You'll also have to delete the map cache in '.\map\cache' (delete all files, but keep the province_textures folder intact).

I can't guarantee that you'll be able to play any games with the factions currently implemented, but at least you'll be able to get in and have a closer look at the map yourselves.

Modders are free to use this project as they wish (or even help me finish ).

[Wave]

Now THAT'S one great gift for the whole Rome community! Thank you Cheexsta! Is the map basically playable now but all country-related things need to be done? Because that shouldn't be much of a problem

[Cheexsta]

Cheers, Wave

It's not playable at all: most provinces have no localisation, history or positions, and I haven't even started work on sea provinces yet. But the core structure is there, should any modder want to pick it up and run with it for their own purposes

[Qorten]

I only just discovered this and it looks really promising. I hope you manage to finish it before Paradox releases Rome 2!

[luitzen]

I'm no specialist on this, but the Low Lands seem a little too 2000 for EU:Rome. The island chain did not exist during Roman times and should be more similar to the Rhine/Scheldt delta you use in the map. In roman times, the river IJssel departs from the Rhine somewhere north of Nijmegen and then feeds the lake Vlies (Flevo in Latin). Then the majority of the water is drained by the Fli to the north where it creates a landscape of swamps with lots of islands. Depending on the weather and the tides, an area as wide as 50 km might be flooded by water. Where the present day islands are, there were some higher laying grounds back then which would rarely be flooded. This line of islands and shores was longer than the North Sea shore of the current day Frisian Islands and North Holland combined. The majority of the water would flow around these higher laying ground feed the North Sea, which was probably known as Mare Frisicum or Mare Germanicum among Romans.

There was probably also a branch going westwards which has now become the Amstel, the river flowing through the city of Amsterdam. The landscape was very dynamic, but the huge area's of water were only created in the middle ages after a number of heavy floods.

I think the area could best be represented by a lake (Lake Flevo) north of the Rhine, a river flowing from the Rhine to that lake and a two rivers draining that lake, one going westwards, the other northwards. You can find some interesting maps here: http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAn...01300-1399.htm (one map says it describes the situation in 100AD) and here http://bin.ilsemedia.nl/m/m1fyvu2wd64n_3.jpg.

[Cheexsta]

Thanks luitzen, that's exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for I heavily modified the Zuiderzee compared to the satellite images using those exact pictures as a reference, but I might not have done enough. I'll look at it when I next get a chance to work on the map.

Thanks again

[lucaluca]

I only just discovered this and it looks really promising. I hope you manage to finish it before Paradox releases Rome 2!

Does this mean:

1. Will there be a Rome 2 soon?
2. Will it include Asia and India?

[luitzen]

Now I also found this page (http://www.atem.nl/CIV/NED/NH001.HTM) and I'll translate it for you to clear things up. The name of certain places are given and you could map it to present day maps.

Northwest Netherlands in the early Middle Ages

The landscape of our region at the start of our calendar era was very different from today, but reliable maps on which important historical events can be marked which preceded the last 500 years scarce.

The schematic map inserted here gives us an impression of how our region would have looked like in times of Karel de Grote (Charlemagne). This landscape has probably only changed after the eleventh century, through the breach between the North Sea and the South Sea, causing the separation of Frisia and Holland.

On the map the following places, among others, are indicated: 1. Dockinga (Dokkum), 2. Groninga (Groningen), 3. Stauria (Starum/Stavoren), 4. Urck (Urk, in the present day northeast polder), 5. Alcmaria (Alkmaar), 6. Haarlhem (Haarlem), 7. Litte (?), 8. Bracola (?), 9. Trajectum Vetus (Utrecht), 10. Daventria (Deventer).

It is hard to tell how reliable the image provided by this map is. Accurate land surveying was non-existent during these times. The landscape must have partially consisted of marshy, difficult to access, bog forests and the data could be from various sources.

The big lake between the bog area and the higher grounds must have originated long before our calendar era. Roman writers mention it as Flevo or Flevum and in chronicles of the early middle ages the names Almari and Almeri appear. The name Zuiderzee (South Sea) probably became fashionable only after the breach from the Marsdiep (the Marsdiep is the area between the island of Texel -pronunciation: Tessel- and North Holland).

The Isala Nova (the south to north flowing river on the right side of the map) probably originated in Roman times as a connection dug between the Rhine and the Old IJssel. The Roman Pomponius Mela mentions that the Rhine split up in a left branch (wherein the present day Old Rhine can be recognized, on the bottom left side of the map, for a long time the northern border of the Roman Empire), and that another branch broadened itself to a lake called Flevo, enclosing an island with the same name, and afterwards flowing to the sea like a normal river. In this the river on the map can be recognized. The in Roman sources mentioned name Fli for the mouth continues to live on in the [i]Vliestroom[i] (Vlie Stream) between Vlieland and Terschelling.

The Isle Texela Pagus at the west side of the river was known in the Frankish time as a country that consisted of a big part of the present day North Holland. The deep-tide races at De Koog and between Eierland and Vlieland did not exist during the time of Charlemagne (742-814) and the areas in grey, eastern of the islands probably have been flooded during the ninth or tenth century. The draining river marked as Hisla Frisius might have led to the see before Roman Times. The Marsdiep and Texelstroom might have orginated somewhere halfway the eighth century. The breach from the Marsdiep to the South Sea has probably been created during the big storm surges of the twelfth century.

The map mentions at the east of the Fli Vistra and Astraga in which the Frisian lands of Westergo and Oostergo can be recognized. The sea entered deep into the Frisian lands at the Bornediep (Burdipe - presently known as Boorne or Boarn in Frisian) between Wistrachia (Terschelling) and Austrachia (Ameland) as the Borneda Sinus, the Middle Sea between Bolsward and Leeuwarden, which only disappeared during the the 13th and 14th century because of silting and poldering. From the east, the Middle Sea was fed by a river called Fluvius Born seu Bordena of which a Merovingian chronicle by Fredegarius describes how a large army of Charles Martel defeated and subjugated the Frisians under Duke Bubo in 734.

During the times represented by this map, there was no 'Holland'. The entire western coastal area, from Vlie to Zwin (an inlet at Brugge in Belgium) was inhabited by Frisians. The coastal area Khinemaria west of Waterlandia would become the homeland of the new duchy which would develop during the centuries after that to the important political factor Holland. The breach of the sea from Vistraga and Texela cut-off the West Frisians from the Frisian homeland which caused Western Frisia to form a natural entity with Holland. The South Sea saw the development of extensive marine trade that sailed to the Oostzee (East Sea - Baltic Sea) and later from the West Frisian trading centers into Easter Asia.

The breach of the sea through the old bog areas probably has not only wiped out entire communities, but possibly has also stimulated opportunities for new developments.

PS Also note how all the major seas in most languages are named after the geography in respect to the Frisians. The Frisians were well known seamen which was an important reason for the Romans to call the North Sea Mare Frisicum. The sea south of their lands was called the South Sea (Zuiderzee), the sea north of their lands was called North Sea (Noordzee), the sea east of their lands was called East Sea (Oostzee, even the Fins call it that way, even though the sea is west of them) and the sea which split their lands in half was called the Middle Sea (Middelzee, the present day municipality of 't Bildt is located at where the mouth of the sea used to be).

PPS when you realize that the entire coastal area between the Saxons and the Angeln up to the place where they crossed the English Channel in order to invade England was inhabited by Frisians and because of the proficient seamanship of the Frisians, it is easy to understand why English and Frisian are so similar. It is even possible that, albeit on a smaller scale, the Frisians took part in the invasion of Britain.

[luitzen]

In short: I think the lake should be much smaller and have at least one river, the Fli connecting it to the North Sea.

[Cheexsta]

Many thanks, luitzen I'll make those changes in the next update, thankfully that sort of thing is easily fixed.

[Lordyu]

any update?

[OberGeneral]

Cheexsta. Are you still working on this?