Hex Map Glossary: Scale (Part I)

A map’s scale is a key point to consider when creating a hex map, or any map for that matter.  Three driving factors behind that decision are:

• Are you creating a local area map, a country/region map, a map of an entire continent or a world map?
• What is the overall size of your world?
• How far can people travel in a day? How far can someone see?

Obviously, the scale of a world map will be dependent on the size of your world.  For reference, Earth’s circumference at the equator is a little under 25,000 miles.  So if you want a world the size of Earth, one should target an overall map size of about 25,000 miles across.  Naturally if you want a larger or smaller world, adjust this target number accordingly.  Keep your desired world size in mind for the rest of the article. But traveling and visibility/horizon distances are another factor to consider even when making a world map because of hex map templates that superimpose a hex map of a larger scale over a hex map of a smaller scale.  Therefore it is convenient to pick numbers that divide nicely when you make smaller maps and vice-versa.

Note: This may become a series of articles, so please post ideas for future hex map topics or corrections in the comments!

Basing the Scale on Visible Distances

On earth, a person can see about 2.9 miles away when all the terrain in the area is at about the same level. If the observer climbs a hill, he or she will obviously be able to see further.  If the planet is larger, the distance will increase (because the area will be flatter) and if the planet is smaller the distance will be reduced.  So if you want to have an earth-sized world, and you want a hex to represent how far one can see from the center of that hex, assuming flat terrain, you should pick six miles.

If you’re using the metric system, the distance a person can see is 4.7 km. Therefore, you may want a hex size of 5 km to represent that a person standing at the vertex of three hexes can see the full distance of each of those hexes.

Then when you drill down to a map representing a smaller area, you can find a hex template that has larger hexes superimposed over smaller hexes at a ratio to give one mile hexes.  While I didn’t find any with a 6-hex-to-1 ratio (expect one to be posted here soon), here are two examples with other ratios:

• 5-to-1: http://www.welshpiper.com/hex-based-campaign-design-part-1/
• 4-to-1: http://home.comcast.net/~thinlines/hexmaps/index.html

After seeing these, it should be fairly easy to make similar grids with other ratios.

Basing the Scale on Travel Distances

Many hikers and marathon trainers claim that they can fairly easily travel 18 miles a day, day after day.  So if you want a map to represent how far one can travel in a roughly straight line over easy-to-travel terrain, 18 miles may be a good pick.  But 36 miles may be a better choice because you could use the same 6-hex-to-1-hex map template mentioned above for 6-mile hexes and your map would simply represent how far someone could travel in two days over clear terrain.

If you chose a different scale for your smaller area map or if you chose a different size world, you may wish to tweak the scale somewhat, but you should avoid assuming a daily walking distance of greater than 20 miles.  Even if you believe people can move further than that in a day, keep in mind that rarely will the roads go straight from one location to the next and when traveling off the roads the travel will be more difficult.

Note that 18 miles is 28.9 kilometers.  So if you chose a map scale of 5 km previously, you could easily move up to a map scale of 25 km which is a little less than what people can travel in a day, but considering that things aren’t in straight lines, it would still make a good choice.

Continued…