Illustrated Atlas v1

The world is composed as a continuous illustrated atlas, not as a background with individual tile images placed over it. Gameplay remains hex-based, but hexes are an invisible simulation grid rather than the visual unit of the map.

Illustration reference: Illustrated atlas concept (illustrated-atlas-concept-v1.png)

The concept image is a visual target, not a static game background.

Composition contract

Heroes remain at least eight hidden hexes apart. Each one owns a five-to-nine-hex scene: the Hero is the core, four to eight connectors form the entourage, and a shared irregular ground apron blends the composition into the climate field. Selection uses a ground ellipse instead of drawing a hex over the artwork.

Hero selection is semantic. Coastal art requires nearby water; mountain, desert, forest, wetland, arctic, and field-country scenes prefer assets whose ground plane and subject match that geography.

Avoid

• Close-up ground photography or foliage
• Background leaves, bushes, or trees comparable to settlement size
• Random Hero decals on otherwise empty terrain
• Coastal bases on inland landmarks
• Visible hex fills at normal play zoom
• Long semi-transparent Hero ghosts during zoom transitions
• Bright road or boundary lines

Image-generation prompts

Both assets were generated with the built-in image generation tool.

Concept target

Create an entirely new map-composition concept for a procedurally generated fantasy strategy game. The result must look like one continuous, hand-painted illustrated atlas at a single believable scale. Use a broad high-three-quarter top-down continent fragment with continuous grasslands, low woodland, fields, hills, wetlands, mountain foothills, and water. Base terrain is painterly macro-geography: fine canopy stippling, clustered treetops, field bands, low brush, contour ridges, reeds, and shoreline texture, all small enough to support towns and castles at believable scale. Compose three to five sparse regional Hero scenes. Each Hero has a soft inner entourage and outer transition made of much smaller houses, orchards, trees, walls, fields, paths, or rocks. Merge each scene with shared ground color, broad irregular footprint, matched ambient shadow, lighting, and edge details. Use one sun direction and one texture grain. No UI, text, hex outlines, giant foliage, hard alpha edges, repeated wallpaper, scattered icon confetti, roads, or blue boundary lines.

Neutral macro-terrain underpainting

Generate one square, edge-to-edge, large-area fantasy atlas terrain material viewed from a consistent high-three-quarter top-down/isometric viewpoint. It represents roughly twenty-four gameplay hexes and has no focal landmark. Include fine clustered treetop stippling, tiny low brush, subtle field bands, sparse orchard dots, shallow contour ridges, small rock groups, faint dry channels, and soft pigment variation. All recognizable elements must be extremely small. Use premium hand-painted fantasy strategy-map brushwork with neutral low-saturation olive, umber, and stone so the renderer can tint it per biome. Opposite edges should be visually compatible. No buildings, cities, castles, people, text, watermarks, hexagons, roads, rivers, large tree crowns, palms, giant leaves, hard seams, or object larger than one twenty-fourth of the image width.