Many objects in this map. It must have taken quite a while to populate.
With this map it was the texturing that took long. I could never find the right feel for the landscape. This part of Morocco is not really desert-like at all, but much more like other southern Mediterranean regions in Spain or parts of France and I'm guessing also Sicily and Sardinia.
But the populating was not that difficult really because I've kept all towns and cities and hamlets and whatever from other maps done together with Ufflakke and Kapteeni. The populating took less than a month all told. Most was done by auto-popping (an hour or two work), the rest by copy/paste/select/rotate etc ... Once you have a number of basic village and town configurations, it becomes easy to add them together, take them apart and reassemble or add new objects. Also local North African architecture and inhabited areas are easy to simulate due to either a total lack of even the most basic kind of urban planning - houses and buildings seem to be scattered all over the place with no rhyme or reason, or else they sometimes seem to be strictly ordered in grids, perhaps in keeping with old Roman usage. And in the case of Spanish Morocco, many large towns had substantial European looking areas with government buildings, churches, wide avenues and ramblas, stately late 19th century style buildings, modest industrial works along with remnants of Medieval buildings. Especially in the case of fortifications. It's also interesting to remember that Spain possessed territory and enclaves in North Africa since 1484 and the 16th centuries - Mellillia, Ceuta, Penon Velez de la Gomera etc. These were for all intents and purposes southern European towns in look and feel. Many even had quite Spanish traditional looking bull fighting rings.
Also intriguing to do was the many fortifications and defensive towers built during the centuries. Melillia was to my surprise a veritable fortified area with many different types of military defenses - Foreign Legion looking forts right out of Beau Geste to medieval looking defensive towers or just large walled forts. There was no integration of defensive works into the landscape as was the custom in Europe at the time. In Morocco, these military positions were built to impress and hopefully awe the natives into submission by building high, crenelated walls. During the Rif Rebellion that didn't work out very well, as many of these forts and camps were overrun, captured and defenders killed ...
Anyway, the populating was fun to do. It's dense in certain areas, but the landscape as a whole is not as built up as in Western Europe. That is where populating cities becomes quite the task to do. There are simply so many cities and towns to do. North Africa is much easier to populate.
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Topic: Spanish Morocco Map - ready for download (Read 19892 times)
