V5 Map - Alharu Discussion

[Xio]

Oh wow it's been a while, time to finally get this show on the road!
Pinging all relevant members: @Andalusia Francien, @Bahiristan, @Fulgistan, @Kahnikstan, @Kertosono, @Kharai, @Rhava, @San Castellino, @Hemahat, @Rhand, @Esonice, and @Cashar.
Even if you were not pinged, feel free to also join in the thread - especially if you have ideas for lore or solutions!

As part of the v5 Eurth Map Update, I am trying to reach out to all of the continents of Eurth (Aurelia/Thalassa/Alharu/Argis/Marenesia/Europa) in attempt to bring together the members of each continent to decide on any continent-wide changes.
As far as I am aware, these are the current discussions / issues with the continent that need to be confirmed / discussed:
1) Climate (primarily the Paran desert)
2) Discussion on who inhabits the Paran specifically
3) Ancient empires timeline and territories
4) Odd migration patterns within Alharu (how/why our East Asian nations are on both ends of the continent divided by desert)
5) New Culture Map
6) Incentives to joining Alharu

My opinions and ideas, just to get the ball rolling:-
1) Currently Alharu isn't all that enticing towards new members as it's predominantly desert and generic tropical savannah (left), thus I have come up with a more climatically interesting Alharu, maintaining the Paran desert to the west for our sand-loving nations of Cashar/Rhand/Hemahat, but expanding the tropical rainforest and tropical monsoon climates as well as expanding our Mediterranean climate region. This is just a draft as the climates from pre-existing members haven't been super-imposed onto the new version yet, but I feel as though it's a good starting point.

         

4) The odd placement of cultures could perhaps be explained by the Paran going through phases of being a desert and being a massive savannah plateau allowing for certain groups to inhabit the Savannah (such as the Japonic) in the past and other groups inhabiting the desert in the present.

6) Alharu is a big continent, and just this next update 2 members of Alharu are being removed and 1 becoming an NPC. Clearly Alharu is falling behind on activity compared to the other continents (the Detroit of Eurth one might say ). A discussion on new incentives for members to come to Alharu, even with the member caps elsewhere, may be in order.

[Hemahat]

Honestly, the climate going from desert to savanna-ish through phases sounds like a very interesting way to implement (I think that's the right word) the migration of cultures. It is historically sound to, considering how climate refugees from the Sahara in the OTL caused migrations to the Nile and such. I approve of it.

Otherwise, I have no problems with the current suggested changes. Though it is kinda sad to see the America-shaped Paran desert gone.

Edited March 16, 2022 by Hemahat (see edit history)

[Hemahat]

Not entirely sure if this counts as grave digging, but since I am in the process of writing my nation's history, I wanted to bring up the Central Paranic nomads. 

Both me and @Rhand mention the existence of Central Paranic Nomads who migrated to the Southeast Alharu around 1900~ BCE. My original plan was actually not for them to be some form of Afro-Asiatic, but rather some other form of Nomadic culture (Turkic, Mongolian, maybe Navajo if we're feeling spicy), who integrated with local West Paranic People - who were either Afro-Asiatic already or became so through interactions with Ketek/other peoples.

Seeing how I was given a rather generous window of opportunity to mention this idea - I do not wish to impose upon my fellow Alharans. However, I still feel like this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

[Xio]

Okay... This was a bit of a bust. Time for something more... radical*
*Not actually radical I had to get a lot of permissions from different staff and members to do this, both groups overseeing, providing feedback, and generally being very cool dudes :).

So it's no surprise that Alharu has been experience a bit of a decline for the past year or so, going from 17 active members to less than 7. After talking to the Alharuns, staff, and generally taking note of people's discussion around Alharu there seems to be a commonality amongst them which helps explain why Alharu has few members:

Its a dull continent

Not in the sense that it's members are dull, but the geographic makeup of Alharu is perhaps the most boring out of all the continents. No offense meant to @Orioni (to be fair it's not just his fault, I carry some of the blame which we'll get to), when you make a lot of things you're bound to have a best and a worst, like in a race there's always someone who comes first and someone comes last. So what features of Alharu make it come last in the continental beauty pageant?

The four biggest issues of Alharu are:
- Its shape.
- The continent's distribution and density of key 'anchor features'.
- It's (perceived) climate.
- It's ethnicities.
Wow that last one sounds sus as f*ck, it'll make sense I promise I'm not racist,

Its shape:
All of Eurth's continents have a distinct shape. Argis is an elongated rectangle, Aurelia is a banana, Europa is a triangle, Marenesia is made up of claws and rectangles, etc.

The problem here is that Alharu is a circle. It's not a perfect circle there are a lot of bits and bobs surrounding the circle (we'll get to that later) but it's base shape is a circle. Now this on its own isn't an issue, but one of the defining features of a circle is that it has the smallest perimeter-to-area ratio of any 2 dimensional shapes.

When members look to having their nation on the map, having a coastline is almost always a requirement. When your continent has very little surface area for it's massive interior it becomes increasingly more difficult to populate the continent's interior. Argis has no problem populating it's interior because it has such a large coastline, if it was completely filled with nations it would most likely only have a couple double-landlocked nations and perhaps 1 triple-landlocked nation. With Alharu you'd need quadruple-landlocked or even quintuple-landlocked, sextuple-landlocked, to reach its centre despite being comparable in size to the other continents. This made traversing Alharu in-RP incredibly difficult even when it was more populated.

Its 'anchor features':
Anchor features are what I like to call the geographic features of a continent which attract members to them. Everybody like to makes a nation with cool coastlines or placement so members tend to be attracted to anchor features allowing for new pockets of members to be 'anchored' to on the map. many of our oldest and most active members are found upon these anchor features or are planning to expand into them. Anchor features can be interestingly shaped islands, peninsulas or bays, large lakes, isthmuses and straits, anything distinguishable on the map as 'unique'. It's no coincidence that Alharu's biggest pocket of activity is at the site of numerous islands, bays, and peninsulas.

In Alharu, these unique features are distributed awkwardly and are few and far between. Most of Alharu's anchor features are large, like Mesothalassa, or can also be found on other continents like it's modestly sized Chenshas lake (similar in scale to Argis' singular lakes and nowhere as complex as Argis' lake networks) or island chains (small compared to Aurelia's and Europa's).

It's climate:
Okay this one is almost entirely on me. When you think of Alharu you think 'big desert', and most people consider big deserts to be boring so few people recommend Alharu to new members. And to be frank I played a big role in the desertification of the continent with the first geographical alterations to Alharu, expanding the Paran to it's outrageous size it is in the modern day:

Who's dumb idea was it to be put realism before fun and kill an entire continent? Oh wait...

Roughly half of the continent is dry steppe and desert, with its temperate and tropical climates an entire Yellow Empire apart. This only worsens the issue of connectivity for the continent as it discourages lore-building with other Alharuns weakening it's continental identity but exasperates the ideas of isolation and separation its members feel from the rest of Eurth. Alharu does have a couple interesting features like rainforest or Mediterranean, but they're pretty cut up by NPCs and members already leaving only scraps left for newcomers.

Its ethnicities:
Alharu, in a way, was sort of destined to fail as soon as Europa was fixed. It was the trash bin continent designed for an era of Eurth that has long passed when Europa was a morgue museum of NPCs and there was no place for !Asian nations to go. Now Alharu and Europa have been awkwardly sharing ethnic and linguistic groups resulting in the already small share of !Asian nations on Eurth being divided between Alharu and Europa, however where Europa has other groups to fall back on (Like the Indo-Iranians, Greco-Romance, Subsaharan Africans, etc.) Alharu is forced to share it's groups with other continents, like Amerindian. This leaves Alharu with a very confused and weak continental identity, it doesn't have the European battlefields of Argis, or the the eternal conflicts of Aurelia between colonisers and colonised, or Marenesia's chill vibes. It's the trashbin continent where not even the miscellaneous go because they either go to Europa or Aurelia.

So Mr Wise Guy what's your solution to fixing all of this?

Joking, partially. I can't do all of this myself as I do not speak for the Alharuns and it's not up to me to make those calls. However, I have been working with the Alharuns on the first two points - its shape and anchor features.

Behold, Alharu 3.0:

Like all things I post, this isn't the final product. Below is a more comprehensive map:

Red represents land that is being removed, and green represents land being added. The most obvious changes to the continent are the addition of these elongated river networks leading out of an enlarged Chenshas lake, and the complete severing of the Ketek peninsula from the mainland. The idea of this map was to increase the connectivity of the continent and increase its perimeter to area ratio whilst maintaining its defining circular shape.

Despite making the continent more circular, with the removal of the Ketek peninsula from the mainland, the new super-channel that snakes between the new Cashari Island (named by the Alharuns) and the mainland allows for a deeper penetrating into Alharu's interior on the western side, along with the addition of numerous peninsulas and bays of unique shapes based off a flooded Eurth concept map made by Orioni. I recommend calling the new channel the Hei Sea, after Heiheguo who helped greatly in the past with cartography. It would be a perfect location for those wanting to make ex-colonies of Argis/Europa nations similar to Porto Greco or San Castellino and/or thalassocratic native states which straddle the new coastlines. The new river systems and lakes also help with connectivity, taking central Argis' lake networks and the lakes of the African rift valley (which is geologically & tectonically similar to these parts of Alharu) and amplifying them greatly. Now landlocked states in eastern Alharu can use these rivers and lakes to trade with the outside wurld as substitutes for neighbours.

These submerged lands also give way to many more anchor features which oppose the mostly flat coastline of contemporary Alharu. The new islands also aid in that department as the new islands have been handcrafted specifically to be attractive to mercantile nations and/or city states as they bottleneck supply chains, which also helps incite conflicts in-RP.

It will be a while before these new changes come about as the topography will need to be entirely redone to match these new rivers/lakes/coastlines and climate reworked to be more nation-friendly so if you have any ideas and/or critique (even if you're not an Alharun) feel free to add it below .

These are not the only features to come to Alharu in the future, there are only incentive ideas down the line (such as specially crafted super-sized pockets of X materials in the interior of the continent for those adventurous and imperialist enough to go exploring) and the remoulding of Alharu's identity to have a more concise picture of which ethnicities, languages, and religions exist on the continent. So stay tuned!


Cartographer, out.

[Hemahat]

Full approval from my end geographically and geometrically speaking.

When it comes to ethnicity, I am fully willing to adjust my (currently unfinished) history if need be, for the record. Here's to Alharu (hopefully) becoming more than the sand dumpster!

Edited July 13, 2022 by Hemahat
Posted Early (see edit history)

[Kertosono]

I wholeheartedly agree with the proposed changes, makes it more vibrant!

[Zaxar]

Just putting this here in case it's needed (doubt it will be as the rework seems amazing) but if you ever need a generic/boring filler nation to help fill the player void which is currently Alharu, then I'd be more than happy to use my experience with !nativeamerican nations to manage an NPC in the continent. Obviously this would be totally unaffiliated with Zaxar (unless lore requires an Aurelian colonizer ) but I could make a basic wiki/lore with diplomatic rp posts as required to keep Alharuns engaged until they have more human neighbors.

Again this is just a spontaneous idea that came to me but if you (staff or alharuns) ever decide you'd like me there then you know how to reach me...

[Xio]

Okay! After 2 months, the new Alharu is ready to be revealed! Some small changes were made to the initial draft, along with changes to topography, which will be explained below.
I present to you, Alharu v5 in all its fractured glory!:

For the rest of the v5.13 map drafts, Alharu may continue to see subtle tweaks as critique and ideas come in from islander Alharuns and the other members of the community, but all the planned big picture ideas have now been implemented onto the continent!

The main changes between the first draft and this draft are that a lot of the river systems have been altered to fit the new topography, with them being spreado ut more around the coastlines and a lot more smaller rivers added flowing into the lakes themselves. In the Hei Sea an entire extra island chain has been added, made up lots of small islands Carribbean style to add more to the Hei Sea region beyond just a narrow seaway. Similar was done to the Ygros Sea coastline, where the abnormally long isthmus had a chunk cut off from the mainland creating a long, thin island.

Topography wise the Alharu rift valley east of the Chenshas Lake has been grown significantly from a couple mountain ranges to being consolidated into a couple large plateaus. There are also now significant low-lying regions close to sea level across the western and northern coasts, which were missing from a lot of Eurth and helps further distinguish the continent from the others.

(Draft 5.13.1.1, changes may occur between posting this map and the official 5.13.1 draft release)

From a planetary perspective, the continent does certainly stand out more with its enormous lakes and lower down topography. A climate map won't be released for a bit, as it'll be packaged alongside a global climate update in the near future (we'll finally be providing an alternative to the Koppen Climate Classification). This is also likely not the last time I'll be posting on this thread as there are several other ideas I have instore for Alharu and its members to keep the ball rolling. Until then, though, enjoy the new Alharu!

However, we're not done just yet. As I stated above for map drafts v5.13 (the map drafts for the end-of-November map update) Alharu is open to everyone (who are not candidates) for ideas. Anyone is free to submit topography/landform ideas in this thread and if the Alharuns like them and the staff approve they'll be added to the map. Think you know what'll be a good place to add some islands on the continent? Or a better design for a river system? Reply below!

This is a very rare opportunity for the wurld map to receive a significant long-lasting update, so don't waste it. You may be responsible for a new member's geographic foundations or someone's future expansion plans!

 

Edited October 7, 2022 by Xio
Format errors (see edit history)