The area of Grand Louisiade / Nouvelle-Montréal on western Commonia was rather approximate so far, but as I am mapping hills and landuse all around to get at ease with geofiction mapping, things start to get fixed together... and look better !
(EDIT: I also mapped some new towns, like Testville-sur-Mer or Quatre-Rivières and all the landscapes around, and added some details to Grande Louisiade)
I tried several ways of mapping hills to see what is looks like when rendered. Also I tried not to clear or displace too much of the already existing elements, and not to steal too much land around the already existing villages other contributors had created, except for Grand Louisiade where I added some neighborhoods to make this blank metropolis area look better. Finally I tried to stick to the current theme of this area, which has:
1) tropical climate 2) naming conventions that reminds of Québec / Canada on some other famous planet ;-)
So let's start with the inland of our Commonian Canucks territory, northwest of Quatre-Rivières, we have here something that looks like a semi-arid lower hills landscape, having forests only on the side of rivers.
Then a bit further south: Monts-du-Chauve is a big natural barrier between Nouvelle-Montréal and Quatre-Rivières, and as you climb up the round hills, the forest gets scarce. Tunnels were already in place on the highway in this area so I just added some mountains on top of it. Does not render really well in my opinion, too unrealistic.
We can see a big isolated mountain range as we look towards north : Evergreen Mountain, south of Collines Limitrophes hill area. This one is full of forests and almost looks like an inactive volcano.
The final one is the range of Rochers Percés, west of New Montréal near the shore, with wide bottoms of valleys where rivers flow in the middle of large gravel areas, and lateral torrents making the terrain too unstable for trees to grow around. For the mountains I tried to reproduce (not copy, don't worry) how it was mapped in some European mountains: fields at the bottom then grassland, then forests on the whole slope, and on the summit scrub, then some mix of meadow and blank areas, then heath, and some bare rock for the occasional cliffs. Might be more accurate for a temperate climate than a tropical one, but these mountains are the ones that look best in my opinion. I am particularly proud of the ones I put around the Vertbourne lake ; the colors used, and the level of detail they have etc. I actually made this at last, and after I read the wiki page "making realistic countries".
I want to improve even more my mountain mapping before requesting some land so if you have some existing examples of cool mountains, wheter on OGF or OSM, that I can study to understand how it's done, please share the coordinates.
SwissCrusader