Parkes Hollow Under Construction

I have started work on the Parkes Hollow map. It is a fictional map representing a valley between northeast of Blues Gap and northeast of Cacapon Bridge.   It uses another map as its base, so it is not the actual topography for the area. The road going through Parkes Hollow connects the Northwest Turnpike to the Cacapon and North Branch Turnpike.

I am using a different method of putting this map together. Because I am using a proxy map for the base, I don't start with the long process of drawing topographic lines and then building up the topography from a USGS map.  What I am doing differently, even from other maps built from previous maps, is starting with the terrain map (which paints the creeks and rivers that appear on the map), placing the objects (houses and buildings) and making some minor changes to height levels. Then I will finish up with the tga map, that identifies the types of trees, grasses, rocks, etc. that will appear and where. 

So my current version, coded in colors, looks like this:

The large, bright blue patches will be stubble, like wheat stubble. The large green patches will be corn stubble.  The yellow, red and blue line working from north to south will be a creek with a brushy creek bed and banks. The roads are visible and you can get an idea of where they homesteads are located. The woods have not been added yet, and I will probably only add them when I get to the tga map (BOW_Parkes_Hollow.tga) stage.

By this weekend, the final map should look pretty much like the rest of the maps in the series.

I doubt that the map will get much (if any) action in the coming simulation, but I may run a DYOD (design your own division) type simulation using the campaign theatre at a later date and Parkes Hollow could be more prominent in that sim.