Nyatria

Okay, if you're not into maps and demographics, get ready to be bored.

An element of my mapmaking requires that I create the infrastructure that's assigned to each hex.  I've shown how this is done previously, here and here, so I'm not going to do it again here.  But I am going to talk about a step I've added.  [Sorry if this feels like I'm rewriting a post]

The area to be calculated is Nyatria Principality, a medieval province of western modern Slovakia.  Here's the map with 20-mile hexes that I made long ago:

Pozsany is the old name for the modern city of Bratislava, for reference.  Nyatria is very heavily populated, 668K people, making it very heavily infrastructured.  It shares hexes with Budapest Sanjak (under Ottoman occupation in my game world), which is also heavily populated (531K).  The three notes at the bottom, 172, 253 and 465, describes the infrastructure of those hexes as calculated from the south side of the Danube, under Budapest authority.

Briefly, infrastructure is calculated by determining a base infrastructure number for each settlement (Pozsany, Komorom, Nyatria, etc.) and then halving that number as we move outwards for each hex.  For example, if the base infrastructure number equals 64, then one hex away it would be 32, two hexes away it would be 16 and so on.  Thus the numbers drop very quickly.  Think of it as each hex dividing the number to the power of 2.

There are numerous changes in elevation throughout the principality above, with each change of 400 ft. adding +1 to the exponent described.  If the adjacent hex is more than 400 ft. above or below the first one, then the number is divided by 4 (2 to the 2nd power, not the 1st).  It gets fairly complicated to sort this out, comparing each hex to the one adjacent ... especially if the province happens to be very up and down, like Nyatria.  Thus, I spend a little time and add some symbols, thusly:

Yes, it still looks complicated, but I'm quite used to this.  If no black line exists, the difference is x2(1), or 2 to the 1st power.  A double line indicates x2(2) ... and where a number exists, that indicates the exponent.  Thus, as I start calculating the various hexes, I can quickly see how much change each hex crossing produces.

I've added the amount of infrastructure that each settlement hex produces as well.  Pozsany has a base of 1348, Komorom & Guta of 230, Nyatria & Galgoc of 333 and so on.  Here's what it starts to look like as I distribute the infrastructure across the map:

As can be seen, it gets very cluttered, very quickly,  Here I've only calculated out four settlements.  What I usually do is that once I collect five totals in a given hex, I condense those totals before moving onto the next distribution.

Those who know me have seen this before, so I won't waste any more time.  I've finished Nyatria, which was affecting the edge of a map I'd been creating for tomorrow's post on my new mapmaking wiki, so now I can put down this sort of calculation and go back to designing 6-mile hexes.

Here's Nyatria, finished.  There are two hexes that need the adjacent territories done before a final infrastructure can be known.

It all looks so simple, doesn't it?