Posts from The agony of creation.

I decided to draw a spiral.
But then it turned out that there are many spirals, with different parameters. So I decided to take the simplest case and make the distance between cities minimal - 30 cells. Then I got tired of these small maps and started varying the distance between cities - 40 cells, 120 cells, and their combinations.

Then I drew a spiral with a radius of 21 and a distance of 30 cells between cities. And then I realized that something needed to be changed. I got tired of going from the edge to the center.
I think I need to make a "two-pass" spiral, not a "one-pass" spiral. That is, not only go to the center, but also go back once.

The scheme for a "one-pass" spiral: 1-1-0.
The scheme for a "two-pass" spiral: 2-1-1.

The "two-pass" spiral has two ends. (Two rings. A nail in the middle.) The second end can be used to transition to the next spiral.

But how and where to place the first spiral on a square map? That's the problem! There are many options. Advise me what to do.

Added after 12 hours 5 minutes
I decided to start from the upper left corner, slightly indented for aesthetics. Then to the right and down. I thought about going to the right and up, but there the water starts, and the starting city can be placed adjacent to this water. It turns out to be aesthetically pleasing.

Spirals are drawn according to a scheme. The simplest scheme is 1-1-0. I drew a map of size "Medium" according to this scheme and found that the scheme is too narrow. But at least I drew it and found out. If you switch to the scheme 0-1-1-1, the disadvantage of this scheme is that all the spirals are predictable - that is, you can calculate and draw each spiral in advance, as it is periodic with a period of 4. And I want an element of surprise in mapmaking. Next, you can switch to schemes 0-1-1-1-1 or 0-1-2. These are loosely adjacent single-pass spirals. But for now, I don't want to spend time building huge single-pass maps of size "Medium". It's much more interesting to build three-pass maps, but they have different schemes, and there is more complexity. A two-pass spiral is described by the minimum scheme 2-1-1.

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