Years ago I stumbled across a Simcity 4 region map on simtropolis.com named Tamriel. I had no idea what it was about but I downloaded the region map anyways and built cities on that map. After filling every local city map in the region with at least something, I did a bit of digging and found that it was a region map of a continent in a popular series of games. If I'm not mistaken they are known collectively as the Elder Scrolls series.
Following that I went about searching for other maps of this fantasy continent and ended up with an impressive greyscale height map on a site named Nexusmod (sic). The creator of the map, according to my notes, went by the alias Transbot9 (if I'm not mistaken). I found that creation to be quite enthralling and after rendering it a few times for use in Simcity 4, set out on a project to modify the map to create reasonably interesting looking Simcity 4 region maps that scaled out to 1:1 depictions of the fictional continent.
That project went throught several phases; first, I found out that as the map was increased in scale, the topography became flatter and, second, the full blown 1:1 scale maps would require a lot of terraforming work to make them even quasi-realistic (in a Simcity 4 manner of things). In the end I chose to work with the original map cut up into 64 region maps which are 48km by 48km.
That all happened about six years ago. I set the game aside and came back to it last year. The first project I undertook was focused on filling up a region map based on the first Simcity 4 region I had created ten or so years ago. I have no recollection of what inspired me to take the four region maps I had created eight to ten years and insert them into one of my 48km by 40km region maps taken from the Tamriel project.
With that project I reached the stage where I had completed inserting the four region maps in the Tamriel section region map. Then, after realizing that I'd done as much terraforming of the region as I cared to do, I set about building some cities.
That led to my next project of organizing all the mods I had accumulated over the years. I separated the mods into two categories; those that had the Euro centric/North American appearance and those that had a Japanese look to them. That effort evolved into a project where I started with region with towns that have a medieval European look and then shifted to a Japanese late Edo period look. Eventually the towns were to transform into a mid to late Showa era look capped off by a migration to a mid/late Heisei era look which corresponded to EA's 2013 Simcity debacle and the ascendancy of Cities Skylines whereupon the number of new Japanese themed Simcity 4 mods dwindled.
There are a number of other twists and turns in the tale but I'm going to skip them and proceed with a look the region I decided to actually do some building of towns and cities on.
The base region in question is a section that sits on the border of Morrowind and Black Marsh, the mid-eastern coast of the fictional contient of Tamriel. At least those are the names given in a map I acquired somewhere online. Supposedly the names correspond to the so called fourth era of the game lore. One of the cities named in this region is Stormhold which more or less sits in the centre. That location name was what I chose as the name of the area to be featured in this post.
This first screen shot is one of the city being loaded by the game. The game is displaying a tongue in cheek message about measuring blue skies....
The area is a representation of a place where the residents of the region, whose hamlets are spread over the region, will send delegates at certain time intervals to meet and perform religious rites and trade goods. Those who are eligible to marry will also join those delegations to find partners.
This hamlet represents the settlement next to the landing site. The buildings are solely from a set of buildings, published by a team with the identifier Corriboom on Simtropolis, taken from a landmark, Longfellow Keep (sic), published by the developers of Simcity 4, Maxis. The Network Addon Mod (NAM) was employed to get the dirt roads and pathways.
The residents have a dry stone tower at the water's edge which serves as both a lookout and a marker. In the bottom right corner of the screen shot there is a sliver of the hamlet's refuse dump. The dry stone wall is basically a bit of eye candy I plopped down to mark the edge of the hamlet. That and the tower are from a muro secco set made by the user Simmer2 on Simtropolis.
This second hamlet is further away from the coast and sits next to the ruins of a castle/fort.
Proceeding further up the path, one reaches the heights of a mesa-like area. There on the edge sits the ruins of what may have been a watch tower. This is the first version of the hamlet....
This is the second version of the hamlet. The initial one was on a slope and the terraced look of the buildings resulted in some odd looking features. For example, houses with a big 2m drop from the front door to the path leading to the house. So I flattened the land a bit and rebuilt the hamlet....
Here are different perspective views of the tower....
The castle ruins shown so far are the works of a Simtropolis user who posted them under the name Underworld.
Going along the path further one comes upon this hamlet....
The end of the path leads to this hamlet which features an inn and a blacksmith's shop....
The model of Stonehenge serves as the centre of religious rites. The inn serves as the assembly hall to discuss trade and politics. It doubles as the centre for matchmaking and courting.
A view from a higher height of the upper hamlet....
It's nice to see that the sims (i.e.; simulated residents) are shown utilizing the whole length of the path connecting these hamlets....
The pink lines show that they are traversing the path as pedestrians which is expected as the route is made with NAM path tiles.
I don't know if they're visible in these screenshots but all vehicles are horsedrawn. Horseback riders have replaced motorcyclists found in the base Simcity 4 game. The substitute horse based traffic was created by a Simtropolis user using the tag justforfun.
