I am *remotely* planning a new strategy game of mine (I tend to never finish games, as such I shouldn't be taken too seriously). It will be based on the Roman empire (how original), and I've been inspired by EU2 and especially the province map. The game itself will be pretty dissimilar to EU2 in the end, but the thing that would make it stand out from most ugly amateur games would be the map (programmers simply cannot draw nice graphics).
In fact, I will use historical Roman provinces as the base for the provinces in the game, but here some issues arise. Due to the continued growth of the RE the province were reorganized several times, and the maps I do have show the confusion around this. In all five maps I have so far, there are certain areas that are the same, but many others differ a lot such as in Turkey and to some extent Romania and Gaul.
This leads to my request: I'd love to receive some links to some web based empire maps that you find particulary reliable. Also, you could send me scanned maps per email (ph@telia.com) because the library in my town sucks so I wouldn't be able to find anything there. I'll be very grateful to receive additional maps with accurate province borders (even for maps that can accurately portray provinces such as Moesia Inferior/Superior), since my current work for drawing provincial borders essentially has become a puzzle where I have to judge the reliability of about ten different sources. Additionally, while at it I wouldn't mind if you could recommend any hidden Internet links to sites that have somewhat reliable information about the provinces of the empire from the republic to the fall of the Western empire. This is only of secondary importance though as I have already Googled a tonne of sites for such data.
If you want an example on how I aim to do the map you can check Italy below (in accordance to the Roman imperial province Italia), and I do already got 50 other land territories done in addition to this provinces. When I draw the borders I simply draw them on a monochrome (2 bit) bitmap and then I have a special program which extracts province data and smoothen the borders. All of this is then saved in 8 bit bitmaps (or RLE compressed files), for which I can easily modify the palettes. The result is that I can then show the provinces in different colors, how much worth that will be. Note that I consider to add a color difference deeper inside the province too in addition the the difference already found in the borders:
In fact, I will use historical Roman provinces as the base for the provinces in the game, but here some issues arise. Due to the continued growth of the RE the province were reorganized several times, and the maps I do have show the confusion around this. In all five maps I have so far, there are certain areas that are the same, but many others differ a lot such as in Turkey and to some extent Romania and Gaul.
This leads to my request: I'd love to receive some links to some web based empire maps that you find particulary reliable. Also, you could send me scanned maps per email (ph@telia.com) because the library in my town sucks so I wouldn't be able to find anything there. I'll be very grateful to receive additional maps with accurate province borders (even for maps that can accurately portray provinces such as Moesia Inferior/Superior), since my current work for drawing provincial borders essentially has become a puzzle where I have to judge the reliability of about ten different sources. Additionally, while at it I wouldn't mind if you could recommend any hidden Internet links to sites that have somewhat reliable information about the provinces of the empire from the republic to the fall of the Western empire. This is only of secondary importance though as I have already Googled a tonne of sites for such data.
If you want an example on how I aim to do the map you can check Italy below (in accordance to the Roman imperial province Italia), and I do already got 50 other land territories done in addition to this provinces. When I draw the borders I simply draw them on a monochrome (2 bit) bitmap and then I have a special program which extracts province data and smoothen the borders. All of this is then saved in 8 bit bitmaps (or RLE compressed files), for which I can easily modify the palettes. The result is that I can then show the provinces in different colors, how much worth that will be. Note that I consider to add a color difference deeper inside the province too in addition the the difference already found in the borders:
