Infrastructure Details

This post is part of a series describing the procedural distribution of infrastructure and facilities in a pseudo-medieval TTRPG setting. If the reader hasn't read the prior posts, may I suggest starting here and reading in advancing chronological order?

Having settled on how to distribute infrastructure points spreading from the notable population centers, the next step I'm taking (note that Alexis determines routes next, but I'm deferring that step for the moment) is to determine the specific facilities supported or provided by those. Following Alexis' method that requires determining whether each 6-mile hex is predominantly being cultivated or mined. Or is simply wild.

The hex type solves most of that question. Any type 8 hex is simply wild rather than exploited. Hexes of types 1 to 4 are highly developed and therefore classified as cultivated. It's only hexes of type 5, 6, and 7 which require more careful examination. The criteria for a mined hex is that those which "occur in mountains and other rocky places that are plainly non-arable are designated as mined." Since I'm making this determination automatically, I'll need to come up with a way to programmatically determine "plainly non-arable." In the case I'm working with here, the entire land is wet enough to be arable, but it's a question of soil quality and till-ability that I need to answer. I don't have soil quality data readily available and I think that examining contour lines to make a determination about the hilliness of the land might be an adequate criterion.

After settling on a definition for "too hilly to comfortably farm" of more than 30 10m contour lines occurring within the hex and an elevation difference of greater than 300m between the highest and the lowest, the program has produced what looks like a reasonable designation for the hexes between wild, cultivated, and mined.

At the same time, I've had the program calculate the "number of hammers," an indication of the facilities present in the hex when considered in conjunction with the hex type. This required, besides knowing whether the hex is predominantly cultivated or mined, whether a river of sufficient size passes through the hex, and whether any notable settlements are situated within the hex.

Likewise, I added the computation for the "number of coins," describing the level and types of commercial activity occurring in the hex, again taken in conjunction with the hex type. This calculation examines another type of hex exploitation type besides mining and cultivating: oasis. I've taken the liberty of ignoring this for the moment since that type of exploitation does not occur at all in the bit of land I'm working on at the moment. I've also forgone the coastal coin bonus for the moment.

Here's a section of the results. The large, red hex outlines are the 18-mile hexes. The six-mile hexes are labelled with Roman numerals indicating their type (except VIII is ignored), the number of hammers in the hex is indicated by the red number, coins by the yellow, and whether the hex is wild, cultivated, or mined by the white, green, or orange background, respectively. The contour lines and rivers are included for reference.

An overview of the entire island shows how few hexes are designated as predominantly mined and that these are all at the edges of civilized territory.

A note about my technique. The reader has no doubt noticed that the pictures of maps I include here vary in style and appearance. I'm able to show this geographic information in a variety of ways very easily because I'm working with a vector representation of the data. That is to say, these hexes are not stored as dots of colors in a Cartesian plane, but as geometry described in geodetic coordinates on Earth's oblate spheroid. The hex types, hammer counts, population, and so on are data associated with each settlement point, or each 18-mile hex, or each 6-mile hex and I can easily swap which bits of information are used to colorize, symbolize, and label these entities. It also makes it extremely easy for me to analyze and manipulate the information. Most of this manipulation I do in programs that I write in C# using shape file manipulation code that I have written for myself. For the drawing, however, and some of the data conversion tasks (like deriving contour lines from the USGS SRTM data) I use QGIS.

Still yet to do is adding in the coastal coin bonus calculation, calculating advanced facilities for settlements, listing the specific facilities, designating non-notable settlements, and describing the routes and roads.