Anticlere

I must have started this remastering of the city in the summer of 2006.  I started with drawings of a basic layout based loosely on the concept art from Oblivion and started fixing the problems.  Beyond that I kept increasing the size and span of the city to suit more realistic measurements and to allow for shipping in the river.

I left out the bridge across the main part of the river because there is no way you could make one tall enough that normal ships could sail underneath it. The Niben needed to be fairly wide for my model of the city because those large ships need room to pull in and out of the docks on a regular basis without giving each other much trouble. For getting across, there is a ferry system. To make the world seem more reasonable, it would be a cargo ferry that you could pay ten dollars to get you across there when they are ready to go. If you needed to get across there on your own time, you could rent/borrow/hire someone else with a small boat to take you across. In that gorge with all the walkways there are many small boats that are used to move smaller cargo around to lower level warehousing, but many of them are for people's personal uses as well. Someone there if you have a contact could take you across the city no problem. Or of course, levitate.

Now, as for the reason the two sides are designed differently, they were built by different folks at slightly different times. The island part had the castle go in first to protect the lower Niben, and a small village for the workers formed on the west bank. Realising the trade potential, businesses started developing the rest of the central island, and the shanty town on the west bank grew with workers but no large entity developed their housing or businesses. With the town growing in size, the count eventually reclaimed good parts of the upper island for government offices and diplomatic suites. This pushed many of the trade companies out, who went across the river and built a beautiful planned community that had the same setup on the docks with the walkways. The count agreed to wall their part of the city, so they built from the inside out to where that wall would be as they expanded. The count also decided to wall the west side of the city to protect the bridges onto the island, but he left some room for the folks who were already there. This caused all the buildings on the west side to be built up taller and taller as the population grew because everyone wanted to be inside the wall.

I could go on for quite a long time about everything to do with the city I suppose, as I know what goes on in each building and I wrap schemes around it all, but I'll leave most of the talking about that to questions.