[quote=“lagi_webmaster”]I can’t wait to see the final map- it is looking great! All the little locations (are you going to have a legend?) pinpointed will be excellent.
Almost becoming a map worthy of Tolkien![/quote]
Thanks. I’m actually working on several maps for the site, and I’ve just about finished versions of the Zwei map and the small Saga map with added location names (and little screenshots, too).
I’m planning to leave the above map almost as it is - to simply show how the maps fit together - but I will be doing a fully annotated version of the largest map, which you can see in the background of that compilation.
On the larger maps, this region is in the north-west.
Briefly, the Empire originated in the area I’ve marked as its “homelands”. In Imperial Year 43 the Empire conquered (and expanded into) Teed, then in IY 45 it conquered the Li Vis nation state also. In IY 72 (the time of Panzer Dragoon Zwei) they finally managed to take over the Meccania Federation to the south, thus gaining control of all the lands between the barrier mountain ranges and the West Sea.
Whenever anyone refers to the “Empire” as a location, they mean this shielded region I’ve shown. Everything beyond that is considered the “Frontier”, and although the Empire has many outposts and colonies dotted throughout it they’ve never really managed to spread their main territory much further than this. (Due mainly to the much harsher climates to the east and to the south.)
From all the evidence I’ve been examining, it seems that these locations can’t realistically be anywhere else. The reasoning behind their placement is quite lengthy, though. I’m doing a full write-up of how I’ve located all this geographical stuff for the site, so I’ll explain all this there rather than clogging up the forums with it.
EDIT: I’ve swapped the background map for a better one, and also added on the Imperial border in red. This isn’t the exact location of the border (which is unknown), but it should give you the general idea.
Maybe the Ancients homeland was on the other side.They came to this place and used the Towers to create a similar ecosystem (assuming this island was a desert wasteland) and settled here.Or perhaps just some of them came here.
And the indians of this island didn’t like their presence and became stronger, wanting to overthrow the Ancien’ts power.
The Li Vis area is interesting, because that’s also where the Forest of Mutation of PD Orta is situated. Pandora’s Box does state that the deactivation of the Tower network caused drastic changes in the landscape and we don’t know just how much of a change this actually was. But I wonder if the lake to the west of Li Vis may be the same location as the “Forbidden Sea” on the official PDO wallpaper with the area in the background. There’s also a river originating from that “lake” (see PD 1 map) that flows towards the ocean. Perhaps this could be the same river that is also seen on the wallpaper?
I am also interested in knowing how the landscape was affected after PDS. The PDO in-game encyclopedia has a wealth of information on several of the geographics areas in the region, perhaps this would be of use in determining how the landscape was changed and also exactly where the “southern peoples” came from. If i recall correctly weren’t they from an island?
[quote=“sharky”]I bet even SEGA would be interested to see these maps maybe you should get in tutch with them.
would be very interesting![/quote]
Thanks, though I do believe the game’s creators were working from maps like these when they described all the locations in the games. Team Andromeda (and later Smilebit) seem to have had their world planned out very specifically, and all I’m doing is reconstructing it based on what evidence there is.
It’s actually the Sea of Ash from “The Fallen Ground” that runs through Li Vis, with the Forest of Mutation “spreading along the river that flows into the West Sea” (which is the ocean on the map). If you look at Li Vis, it’s actually a medium-sized desert, and it apparently encompasses both the Sea of Ash and the Wormriders’ desert. (Although I said otherwise earlier in this thread, ignore that, as that’s before I worked out where Li Vis was).
I entirely agree that there must have been major geographic changes from the Great Fall though, and also that the Empire probably resituated its lands accordingly (they seem to have a new Capital now, too).
I’ve speculated that the “Forbidden Sea” may be the sea of ruins at the end of Episode 5, which Orta reaches by going south from the Glacial Plains and which might also be the small PD1 Episode 1 “sea” on that map. Although both those places look very similar, there’s not any real evidence either way, however.
I’ve already been cross-referencing that encyclopedia with information in the previous games (which has helped me work out where those nation-states must lie), but it’s not really so helpful in deciding how things have changed. Yelico Valley could exist anywhere within the mountain ranges on the map, the Forest of Mutation (and its river) likely didn’t exist before the geological upheaval, and the Glacial Plains are apparently off to the north. (You can see the north coast on the Zwei map, and although it doesn’t look “icy”, it probably does contain the frozen regions now).
The Southern Peoples’ islands are one of the few things that cannot be on these maps, because that archipelago is off the Continent’s southern shore, and we know only the Continent’s north-west regions.
[quote=“GehnTheBerserker”]Maybe the Forbidden Sea as something to do with the Forbidden Zone?
Maybe the Forbidden Zone is situated in it.[/quote]
This is the first thing I considered Gehn, but - if that map is accurate- the Forbidden Sea is far too close to another coastline to be the Forbidden Zone; the Forbidden Zone was situated in the sea of Georgius, which is far inland.
We have North/ South References from Orta, but do we really have that reference from PD1- Saga? This map of PD2, for example, in it’s default printing, sould have south right off the coast. I’m not denying you are correct, I’m just wondering.
We have North/ South References from Orta, but do we really have that reference from PD1- Saga? This map of PD2, for example, in it’s default printing, sould have south right off the coast. I’m not denying you are correct, I’m just wondering.
The Southern peoples homelands must be more south of that map as lance suggest, as the their homeland is described as “The archipelago state,” that is a grouping/chain of islands which clearly are not on this map.
At first i thought the upheaveal of the land after PDS possibly created the islands, but further investegation in the southern peoples section says: “The archipelago state had long lost
contact with the Continent” which obvisouly shows the southerners were at one time in contact with the empire, or at least other states on the continent and more importantly that their islands existed before the upheaval.
A few questions i have about this issue are: if the southern peoples are farther south then what we have maps of then could that suggest that the extent of the empire was further south then we believe? As at one time there was contact between island and continent.
Another important thing to consider is what kind of scale are we looking at - perhaps the southern islands are off the map, but perhaps the distance say from the Old Capital to the Islands is only a short distance, 50 miles or so? Conceivably the empires airships could travel there in a day or so.
We have North/ South References from Orta, but do we really have that reference from PD1- Saga? This map of PD2, for example, in it’s default printing, sould have south right off the coast. I’m not denying you are correct, I’m just wondering.[/quote]
Despite how it was originally printed, that map only aligns with the “north” of the other four maps (and the Panzer Dragoon Saga in-game map) after it has been rotated 90 degrees clockwise. As I’ve shown on the compilation map above - and as I’ll be illustrating with details for this maps section - that PD2 map is undoubtedly the north of the largest map (the one that shows the routes for the Saturn games).
There are a surprising amount of compass directions thrown into the dialogue in Saga that confirm “up” on the in-game map as being North. Consequently, this confirms North on the small Saga map, the large routes-map and the PD1 map - and it is “up” on all of them as well. As the PD2 map is just a part of the large “routes” map, I’m willing to believe that it was just vertically aligned within the guidebook, rather than having its correct horizontal alignment.
I’ve managed to confirm PDO as taking place in roughly the same physical region as PD1 and PD2, but after the geological upheaval of the Great Fall. (The confirming link is the region called Li Vis). As PDO states that those regions are in the northwest of the Continent, what we see on the largest map is really the northwest plus the more central regions of the Continent (where Saga takes place).
Straightforward reasoning also states that, as we can’t see either the eastern or southern coastlines on these maps, it probably is the northwest area.
There is a lot of evidence and cross-referencing behind all this, and I’m writing a page for the maps section that’ll discuss the geographical quotes and explain why things have to be where they are. I’ll be going over all this in much more detail there.
BTW I was wondering, did that map take up an entire page in the guidebook? If so, I’d suspect that Team Andromeda simply rotated it from a horizontal alignment to a vertical alignment in order to fit it all on.
It seems that the Empire has colonies all over the Continent, and the way PDO’s encyclopedia describes the merger with the Southern Peoples it makes them sound as if the became one of these colonies, and that their troops relocated to the Empire. (Rather than that the islands literally merged with the Empire’s main territory.)
It’s probable that those islands have been colonised and taken over by the Empire, but the Empire’s main territory can’t really extend much further south than what I’ve shown on the above illustration. If it did, quite a few bits of info would be contradicted.
Another important thing to consider is what kind of scale are we looking at - perhaps the southern islands are off the map, but perhaps the distance say from the Old Capital to the Islands is only a short distance, 50 miles or so? Conceivably the empires airships could travel there in a day or so.
I’d speculate that the map is on a much more massive scale than that, and I’m currently trying to get evidence together to get some idea of the distances involved.
Off the top of my head, it took Grig Orig and the Imperial fleet quite a long time to travel from the Empire to where PD Saga takes place, so I’d expect it would take even longer to reach the southern islands. As it seems that the Empire came into contact with them through gradual colonisation, though, it wouldn’t be so important how fast they could get between those islands and the Imperial homeland.
I was thinking the map was on a quite larger scale then what i had guessed.
I don’t believe the southern peoples were colonized by the empire, the PDO text does state the Southern peoples as being an island state, rather then an island colony. I would guess if anything there were Imperial colonies in the south that the Southern Peoples had great influence over due to them being so far from the heart of the empire. I would say the Souther peoples influence over local imperial colonies was one reason for the Southern peoples rise to power within the empire, that is to say it was logical to use the Southern peoples who had previous contact with the the empire to bolster imperial troops.
Another Question - if the Southern peoples played such a prominent role in the expansion of the new empire does this mean the Islands of the Southern peoples are under imperial rule or are they still a distinct state? I’m guessing the empire are and the southerners are stll two distinct nations.
Sorry, bad choice of words on my part - I didn’t mean to say that they’d been colonised literally, because as you say they do still seem to be their own state and it doesn’t seem thay were invaded by the Empire. What I intended to say was that the Empire had probably discovered them while it was spreading its own colonies south through the Frontier, and that it had culturally and politically merged with this southern island nation on some level. It does sound more like a beneficial merger than an invasion/colonisation, from what I can remember anyway.
As the southern islands can’t realistically be on the maps, I haven’t really gone over the info regarding them yet. When I do, I’ll get back to you with my ideas.
