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Val di Cier

Good day dear reader,

NOTE: The map was given BonBonB's Seal of Approval. Now, I do not have the Seal itself to put it into thumbnail, but you can watch the video and see for yourself.

welcome to description of my map Val di Cier, inspired by middle Norway and Dolomites in Italy. I provided boldened paragraph titles for your navigation convenience as I tend to write walls of text. Apologies upfront. Map is created for my potato year 2009 GPU (Yes that old!) so that I am able to run at least medium details with full shadows and other GPU intensive stuff on nice framerate.

Map description
Val di Cier is a temperate map using Aiguille Verte and Realistic LUT V1.2. It is basically one long and wide valley with custom build hydroelectric dam that provides over 2,500 MW of energy. Large forests in whole valley, together with small elevations across the valley and white peaks ( sand used as snow ) surrounding it with quiete a few rivers create mountaineous feel, while still providing plenty of space for building a city. Forests ( alltogether over 230 000 trees ) consists of leafy trees at the bottom of the valleys and transition to pine trees in upper elevations.

Hydroelectric dam
On this map, there is custom build hydroelectric dam. Lot of quays, trial and errors and of course time was put into creating it. It uses Doel Nuclear Power Plant power source. To avoid malfunction, several precautions were made.
First, power is going via two power lines to starting location in case you use dynamic weather (read lightnings).
Second, Doel requires some services to operate at maximum. Therefore I included water pumps, water sewage, incineration plant, police and fire service near/inside of the hydrodam structure ( both water pumps and sewage reach out to starting location as well via pipes ).
Lastly, I included few extra lights to shine on the hydrodam during night.

River system
All rivers on the map that flow inside 25 tiles have only SINGLE water source spawn. That includes the hydro dam! Strength of rivers is result of combined strength of all those small streams originating in the mountains ranges/lakes just like it in my opinion should be. That means, that you can alter their flow and there will be no extra supportive water spawn/sucker somewhere down the river/stream to annoy you. It also means, that if you drain a river/stream, it will be gone untill you stop draining it.

During map creation, I decided that I do not want many rocks, water friendly or not in the map as they would obscure too much of river bank building space. That said, there is also not that much river bank foliage as there could be, but ore is used instead for this purpose. Although both oil and ore resources are used as painted decorations, they are meant to be mined and used. However, to access most of them means some landscaping, so one gets most of them via some effort.

Connections and alike
Multiple highway connections (3/4), plane connections (4/4), rail connections (4/4 with double rail from one side), shipping routes (2/4) spread across the map means that no matter where you go, there will always be some extra route to get your citizens and cargo in and out of your city.
All intersections are custom created by me. Each roundabout is beautified differently. Toll both roads on the map are in front of each long tunnel and highway entrance/exit with exactly 16 space length. In other words, delete them and put there actual toll booths to get some money, but remember, that those areas are not connected to power or water pipes so you have to connect them as well.

Mod suggestions/recommendations
Relight and Ultimate Eyecandy, whose settings, I used while creating the map, are in the screenshots.
I have not looked on workshop for nearly half a year and to my suprise, one of modding gods ( hail TPB ) has released new version of Theme Mixer 2, I played with it a bit and have uploaded my Val di Cier Theme Mixer 2 settings.
Sun Shafts
Shadow Strength Adjuster
Ultimate Level of Detail
Adaptive Prop Visibility Distance
Tree LOD fix
Clouds & Fog Toggler
No Radioactive Desert And More!
Prop Precision
Prop & Tree Anarchy
81 Tiles (Fixed for 1.2+)

Important for 81Tiles mod users.
Hydro dam was created in live game for convenience and whole save game was converted into map editor. I forgot that I have 81Tiles mod active during the dam creation and thus, the converted save already contains informations of all tiles unlocked. So far no problem. However, it also means, that the very first load of the map with the mod will unlock all tiles automatically, but will NOT set the terrain to its correct heights and elevations. So you have to save the map, restart the game and load that save and then the terrain will settle down correctly. Thank you for understanding.

Update 19th December 2019
- fixed train line in the mountain that had sudden spike for god knows why
- added soft landslide to "no river" in upper valley to make it more believable that there was originally flow of river
- remade thumbnail, hopefully now it works properly for everyone
- other minor stuff that probably only I have noticed

Lastly It took quiete an effort to reduce waving and bend the river system to my will and I am proud of the result.

Comments, suggestions and constructive criticism is always welcome.

Enjoy the map :-)

Best regards,
Alianka