Title: Modification of southern Dwilight sea zone shapes and borders
Summary: Re-drawing some of the sea zone polygons in order to grant port importance equivalent to how things used to be prior to the implementation of the new sea travel code, a greater balance of sea zone uses and size, and connections that would better simulate realistic naval travel (cutting down useless detours).
Details: Changes proposed:
- Moving the Pana Gulf / Sapphire Deep limit north, either maintaining the same region connections or plugging it to the Maeotis peninsula. Reason: Equilibrating sea zone sizes.
- Moving the Sapphire Deep / Sea of Silence limit south, from Raviel to Paisly. Reason: Allowing Port Raviel to connect directly with Paisly in a single sea zone, avoiding illogical detours and preserving historical importance of Port Raviel as a liaison to Paisly instead of forcing the role upon the townsland of Raviel.
- Moving the Gold Sea / Sea of Silence limit south, from the middle island to Mistight (or Lavendrow). Reason: Equilibrating sea zone size. No impact on Port Raviel to Golden Farrow travel times. Would make the limit respect the logic that limits ought to be on cities or between cities, and not next to them.
- Moving Ravielan Sea limits. Reason: Equilibrating sea zone sizes by enlarging the Sapphire Deep and shrinking the Sallowcape Drift.
- Moving the Sallowcape Drift / Shattered Shores limit south, from Sallowtown to Qubel Lighthouse. Reason: Respecting the logic that limits should be either on cities/strongholds or between them, and not next to them (this logic stems from the fact that cities and strongholds are the most likely destination and origin points, and such placement minimizes travel detours due to illogical zone travel and distance from zone centers. Following this logic helps minimize cases where one has to go south and then west before being able to travel to his northern destination, as one would have to do in this case to do Sallowtown-Mimer)
- Simplifying the Blossomer Sea / Shattered Shores limit. Reason: Equilibrating sea zone sizes to enlarge Blossomer Sea and shrink Shattered Shores
[li]Splitting up Shattered Shores into two zones. Reason: Cutting down excess back and forth for travel between Port Raviel and Port Nebel.
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Benefits: A better respect of the historical importance of ports as per the old sea lanes (making sure that a townsland like Raviel doesn't become a more strategic harbor point than a city like Port Raviel) and a shapes that allow overall more direct travel paths that reduce the odds of having to move in all kinds of directions before being able to travel towards one's destination.
Possible Exploits: No possible "exploits". Of course, some realms gain from this change, notably D'Hara (which I'm part of and won't attempt to hide), but imo this is just compensating for what would be most logical and for how things used to be, so it's not giving it an advantage, but rather fixing an unintended handicap along with making sea travel more intuitive and realistic.
If redrawing the polygons is a hassle, I think I could do it for you. I drew polygons for BT once for you guys, if it's the same format I could easily do the same for sea zones. It'd be insanely quicker too, much less precision and many less regions. The Sapphire Deep sea zone's the one I got the most beef with, but I guess my geographer education pushes me towards an obsession of optimizing land divisions in order to minimize distortions (where one splits up a territory into regions to minimize distortions was a big part of the things I used to do). If it's a different format, you could just let me know what format it is, and I can check if my software is compatible with it.
For reference: start of discussion was here:
Really feels weird to have to take a huge detour by sea to get to Paisly or Paisland from Port Raviel, when it was always just a short trip away. I don't understand why the sea zones there weren't made to emulate how travel used to be. Otherwise it'd force us to board from Raviel... which is utterly akward, when we've always left from PORT Raviel right next door. Just seems like that's the place we ought to be building actual ports, not Raviel...
Port Raviel/Paisly is the only short sea route that seems to have been turned into a two-zone trip that I can see. Everywhere else, sea zones respect established sea routes. To compare, Port Raviel/Golden Farrow was made a one-zone switch, but Golden Farrow is much farther and travel between the two was always a lot more limited.
Just seems to me that the zones should have been like this, to keep short sea routes as a one zone hop, and longer sea routes as a two zone hop.
