Captain Obvious: Make sure your reference maps are aligned properly before trying to recreate a city

[muuttolintu 43]

A few days, I rebooted an old attempt to recreate the Tampere, Finland region in SC4, using a map I generated on terrain.party last year and Google Maps as a reference tool, and started to wonder why some things weren't aligning correctly. Took me a full day to figure out what was going wrong:

^ The above is from the aforementioned terrain.party- map generated about a year ago. Note the points circled in red, which I had assumed to be in a perfectly straight, east-west horizontal line...

^ ...and this is what confirmed my suspicions when I went back to trace the same points in Google Maps today. I'm not 100% sure exactly what caused this discrepancy, but I have a strong feeling it has to do with Google Maps' abandonment of the Mercator projection, which IIRC happened some time after I generated the terrain.party map. Fortunately I noticed this already in the relatively early stages of the project, so "only" a day or two's worth of work had gone to waste. So this is basically a PSA to make sure your references line up before you start, especially if you're using a map from some time ago.

[CorinaMarie 29,772]

8 minutes ago, muuttolintu said:

So this is basically a PSA to make sure your references line up before you start, especially if you're using a map from some time ago.

Thanks for the Public Service Announcement Captain Obvious @muuttolintu. It'll be useful for peeps who recreate real world maps.

(Fortunately, I play my own random, full region, generated maps and they don't have to match anything at all.)