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Message: <blockquote data-quote="InkwellIdeas" data-source="post: 5898782" data-attributes="member: 26988">I'm a little torn on the approach which feeds into this.  I'm leaning to having a large number of city/village templates that have the roads designated as main thoroughfares vs. sidestreets.  When the generator runs, it picks a template and randomly picks which sidestreets to use (somewhat based on population.)  The city walls, rivers, and harbors/coasts (if any) would be added/placed randomly and would impact the city's design to further give a random look.  The buildings in the template would be used to place buildings in the final city of a similar, but not the same type.  (Subject to also some randomness to determine if that spot has a building at all, which is also subject to population.)  So if the template has 300 houses, maybe for a town 200 are used.  And if you run it again for the same population, 200 different ones are used (as well as some different sidestreets).  For businesses, maybe you have 25 shops, blacksmiths, etc. on the template. In the final city, what was a shop on the template may be a blacksmith.  Or maybe you have 5 possible temple or theatre spots.  In the final city, maybe 3 spots actually have temples/theatres and they may have different shapes/looks than what was in the template.  Also the template might get rotated to further make the cities look different.So in this scenario, you'd be able to make your own templates to customize things and pick a specific one when creating the map.On the other hand, I could go completely dynamic/random (I've got a basic version of one at <a href="http://www.inkwellideas.com/roleplaying_tools/random_city/v2.jsp" target="_blank">Random City Map Generator v2</a> (warning:jsp page with an applet)) so I could improve that algorithm.  Yes, you would be able to set a number of properties that feed into the algorithm  (more than just the few that are in that generator.)But I think that the randomized templates approach makes more sense.  Too often the completely random approach creates cities that have bad layouts.I could see having a reward where for a $200-$500 will let you spec out one of the icon sets.  So if you really want a steampunk map items icon pack, you can get us to do it.  You can also give a bullet point description for what each icon should be.  (Steampunk is an icon pack we'll probably only do if we add a reward like this of if we are going for our 6th stretch goal or something like that .)</blockquote>

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