Aslington is easily one of the more well-known parts of Vodeo. Embassies jostle for space among all manner of stores, apartments, and Adelaidean-era houses. Latinian ex-pats wave at their Myrcian neighbours, while the local Mauroi population sit in front of the YemYem! and scream at passers-by. And to top it all off, there sits Parliament upon the riverbank, anchoring the Dominion and providing somewhere for politicians to blow off some steam at each other.

But all is not perfect in Aslington. The suburb wasn’t designed with angles in mind, and as a result, the grid is lopsided and doesn’t form nice angles. It might sound like a minor thing, but it means that buildings (a lot of which are just too small) don’t easily align to the streets, and that just annoys me. I’ve tried to tinker with it in the past, but there’s only so much I can do given the number of buildings that have locked the streets in place. So, I’m planning to tear it down and start again. Here’s what I’m thinking:

… See full entry

There’s disquiet in Saviso at the moment. The city is due to host the New Ingerish cricket team soon, and they’ve nowhere to play! A city of nearly five million, and the Saviso Cricket Ground is nowhere to be seen! After consulting with cartographers over rum, the St Austellian government realised there’s nobody in Vodeo who can build a stadium, and that foreign expertise should be sought.

I’m quite pleased with how Saviso is coming along, it seems to be keeping up pretty well with its more well-established foreign counterparts. And yet for the life of me, I just can’t build a stadium. I’ve tried to design one myself, but I’m never satisfied with the shape or scale. So I’m turning it over to the community - who thinks they can build a worthy stadium for Saviso? I’m intending on it being something like the the Melbourne Cricket Ground, with plenty of capacity and lots of room for rugby and football in the off-season.

As usual, there’s a crate of Port Adelaide rum in it to sweeten the deal.

Ah, Saviso, the queen city of Tarephia! She is a beautiful metropolis, made what she is by a combination of 19th century industry, 20th century finance, and 21st century air conditioning. Like any city of its size, Saviso is served by a network of motorways (at present, the M1, M7, M72, M73, M75, M76, M77, and M78) that have done it proud. But there’s a problem.

I’ve been unhappy with the layout of the motorway system for some time now, and I’ve not quite been able to figure out what to do about it, so I’m turning it over to you guys. What do you think needs to be done to make the motorway system better? I’ve got a few ideas/observations:

• The Baltic Hills Motorway from Cranks Bay to Auchi is almost completely straight, which doesn’t seem right somehow. The M1 has to run east of the city centre, but is there a more logical path?
• The Saviso Harbour Bridge has to stay where it is, but the M1 approaches on either side can be realigned.
• The Arundel (M72), Wririas (M75), Port Saviso (M76), and Whitehead (M77) Motorways need to be completely redone. Three things to bear in mind: the M72 runs through some hilly terrain, the M77 is the main access road to the airport, and the southernmost section of the Port Saviso Motorway is mislabelled as the M78 (it’s really the M76).
• The M73 and M78 are both fine for now, no need for changes there.

I know some people say to map suburbs first and then add motorways, but to me it makes more sense to build them first so I know roughly what shape my cities will look like. Given I’m pretty certain on how big I want Saviso to be, I want to get the motorways re-organised before I map more suburbs. If one or two of them vanish in the re-do, so be it.

So go for gold, folks. I’d love to hear your suggestions for a more logical motorway network for a city that deserves only the best.

Par

I might as well kick off my diary with a topic that interests me - highway shields.

I’d like to add pictures of them into my road articles because they look so much nicer than basic text, but this would require quite a few shields. I don’t plan on adding them all (since all ten of Vodeo’s provinces have their own highways as well as the national M/A/B/C roads), but just the main M/A/B/C highways and important provincial highways. Is this allowed, or do bandwidth constraints mean we have to keep them to a minimum? Obviously I don’t mean full 1000px pictures, but just small 25 or 50-pixel ones. I notice that Gobrassanya has quite a few, which is why I’d like to add some of my own in.

tl;dr Par wants to add pictures with numbers in them, is it allowed?