Halicz Duchy and Lwow, South and Around Halicz

 

Going to do the above area and the one above that, surrounding Halicz (pronounced Halich).  I'm on the edge on the Ruthenia sheet map's east side, so we'll be done with this sheet in a couple days.  Funny how fast they go.  In fact, a 6-mile map is only about 200 miles wide, edge to edge, so it's not surprising that doing 20 by 40 mile sections, we'll be flying across them when going straight east.  Progress is always slower north south, since it's done in 20 mile reaches instead of 40.  

In modern times, the hex on the left, 14 infrastructure, has a big city in it, Ivano-Frankivsk, but as it was founded in the 18th-19th centuries, it doesn't exist in my game world.  As a result, the area is somewhat sparse, compared with the heavy areas that were posted yesterday:

The river is the Dniester, the easterly course that we started yesterday.  As can be seen on the background, it's synched with the course of the Dneiper I mapped 15 years ago.  Whew.

Only the barest foothills remain, which makes the map look stark and less interesting.  Still, it's easier to map when I'm not proliferating hills and mountains into every corner.

Here's the next section to the north, undone:

Again, we can see the river to be filled in.  Just about everything on the northern edge of the work above had to be adjusted and altered, once I began comparing this with Google Earth.  Halicz moves west, the tributaries from the south get adjusted and the roads move.  The key is to see all work in a temporal fashion; what was done, even 45 minutes before, gets trashed the moment we have more information.

In any case, this completes the main parts of Halicz Duchy.  There are edges to complete, but the small area is effectively laid out.

Halicz itself is interesting.  I'll have to make a post this week explaining exactly how the settlement ended up in a 6-mile hex ... it's a deliberate quirk of the system that produces this result every once in awhile.  What's interesting is how Halicz as an entity has collapsed, aided by a combination of history, it's shrunken 20th century population and my map generation.

The town was once the dynastic seat of the powerful Volhynian realm in the 12th century, which challenged Kiyev, Lithuania and Poland for supremacy over the region.  Unfortunately, the town was devastated by the Mongols in 1241 and it never recovered.  My game setting takes place four centuries later, by which time Halicz is an ignored backwater under the control of the Kingdom of Poland; in the 20th century, this decline had continued so long that archeology became the region's chief claim to fame, as ancient buildings were uncovered in digs.  According to my population calculation that's applied to every settlement, my Halicz has a population of only 938, so that it's ceased being a town.

By the results that put it in a type-6 hex, the settlement has barely any services.  I like to imagine the place as essentially a ruin, with residents scraping out farms while transshipping local produce.  Even the roads linking Halicz to the outside are less than pristine.  Still, there are five routes out of the place, so it's not completely ineffectual ... but coming through the "village" would reveal it to be a wretched, broken-down dump, with collapsed buildings, dispersed hovels and an absence of local ambition.

Probably the duke of the province can hardly be found there.

Not much else to say, except that I love how the rivers slowly gather and become bigger, from tiny tributaries that wend their way into valleys.  Connecting the Dneister sources together was gratifying; there's still a section left to put together, but the main lower course has already been mapped.  Somewhere farther east, we'll encounter the Bug ... and before swinging back around to do southern Bulgaria, we'll touch on the outflow of the Dneiper, where the fighting's going on.  Should reach a lot of this in December, if I keep up this pace.