Forum:Territory application/UL11a - Almetia

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	Territory ID and proposed name
	The Territory ID (from OpenGeofiction:Territories, e.g. AR123a) and proposed name of the country

UL11a - Almetia

	Physical geography
	An overview of climate, topography and landscape of the country. With the exception of Beginner territories, you should always create a sketch map to illustrate & explain your plans. You can add a link to this (hosted on imgBB, Postimages or similar, but not imgur.com)

Climate

Thanks to its latitude and location in the mid-west of Uletha, it straddles the border between temperate and boreal. Entirely surrounded by the Vinn Sea (inclusive of the Morcanol Bay), the north and west coasts have climates roughly comparable to the North Sea coasts at their latitude, corresponding to the west of Norway and north to east of Scotland, with their winters especially moderated by this, while having very high levels of rainfall. The inlands are far more boreal, have colder winters, moderate to high rainfall, and are far more likely to be hilly uplands. These climate zones are roughly half-half, though of course there's no clear cut-off. The southern lowlands are somewhat sheltered from colder conditions in a way that the northern lowlands are not. Due to the country's mixture of mild temperate, cool boreal, cold polar, southern continental and northern oceanic influences, a large portion of Almetia is on the boundary between at least two climate types; generally, the country is cool but temperate, with mild, changeable summers and cool to cold, very wet winters, with few extremes in weather.

Climates of Almetia

Köppen climate zone(s)	Regions
Cfb - Temperate oceanic	Southern coastal lowlands
Cfc - Boreal oceanic	Other lowlands along Morcanol Bay and (less so) the north-west, western Isle of Barna
Dfb - Temperate continental	Southern foothills, most of the north-to-north-eastern lowlands
Dfc - Boreal continental	Almost all other territory, minus highest hills
ET - Tundra	Roughly any peaks over 1000m (borderline, where July mean falls just below 10C)

Topography and landscape

There are a significant number of fairly gentle, relatively low areas of land, where the vast majority of people live, which typically gradually slope up away from the largest bays and rivers; altitude more steeply rises from the north coast than from Morcanol Bay. Almetia has a large number of pine forests in the south-east, mid-north and east, while the lowlands have largely been deforested and used either for agriculture, pasture, industry or resource extraction, or urban settlements. The highest uplands are around 1,000-1,400m high, though the average altitude of the country is itself relatively low, at roughly 120-150m above sea level. The country's plains are typically the drainage basins of its largest rivers.

Very rough heightmap

Edited:

[1] - Very rough heightmap with rivers and lakes

	Human geography
	A brief description of the territory demographics, economic development, land occupation, infrastructure and mapping style

Demographics

Almetia is a heavily industrialised, urbanised nation, particularly along its lowlands, though most of its uplands are far less densely populated, resembling the northern two-thirds of Wales in population density. It enjoys a level of HDI significantly above 0.900, a relatively low Gini rate and an economy roughly comparable per capita to those of Northwestern Europe. The majority of its inhabitants live in a belt of cities that roughly lie along the western lowlands and foothills, while a majority of the remainder live in a cluster of cities towards the north. There are ~24 million Edited: ~15-17 million Almetians, with the capital of Dungarven having a metro area of approximately 5 3 million people.

Economic development

Almetia is a high-income, social democratic, mixed market economy roughly based on the Nordic model. It collects significant revenue from its resource exports, especially natural gas and iron, however an increasing majority of its economic makeup is in services, such as finance. A notable share of its economy is industrial, and Almetia maintains a significant automotives sector with extensive subsidies, as well as energy production, transportation equipment, electronics and shipbuilding. Some of the eastern regions suffer from depopulation, and a few of the more old industrial regions where shipbuilding and coal/iron mining was prevalent have since suffered from some scale of deindustrialisation despite government efforts to prevent structural unemployment, while the capital region has substantially higher living standards (and costs) than the rest of the country. While there is an agricultural sector that the Almetian government subsidises heavily to keep afloat, it is insufficient to cater to the needs of the dense, urban country, especially thanks to Almetia's climate.

Infrastructure

Almetia has high-speed rail alongside its broad railway network, and more widely, a high relative use of public transportation. This infrastructure is of mixed to good quality, with some areas (especially around "new towns") of higher quality, while some rural or deprived regions, as well as left-behind pockets, suffer from inadequate private and public transportation.

Edited:

[2] - Equally rough guide of key urban areas (note: largest urban area in north is largest conurbation [/ group thereof] in the Settish north, largest urban area in mid-south [not the longer, thinner one further south] is the capital of Dungarven and its belt of cities & satellites - brown thick lines = fairly rough estimate of high-speed railway links, blue = very rough estimate of where motorways would be)

	History & culture
	A brief description of the intended culture and language

Present-day demographics

Almetia is a fundamentally Celtic (Gaelic) nation with very significant mixed North and West Germanic populations and influences to its north. The original languages of the country were Goidelic, which developed into Irish. Almetia is largely culturally liberal in line with most of Northwestern Europe.

Historical synopsis

Almetian written history begins with Goidelic kingdoms around the present-day Almetia, including the Ámada kingdom at the time, in the Bann Valley (now the most populated area of the country). The Ámada kingdom declined into the second half of the first millennium CE, beginning the Almetian Dark Ages, beginning an era of raids from other populations; Welsh settlers from the south, Old Ingrean settlers from the north-west, and Old Norse settlers from the north-east. The maintenance of Ámada's stability internally, and the distance of inland kingdoms from settlers, prevented a wipeout of Goidelic Almetia; however, the north-west and north were conquered, with a number of kingdoms being replaced in the north.

By the Viking age's end Almetia had more or less stabilised into a region of codependent kingdoms with fledgling mercantile trade. Centuries of disconnection with their homelands had forced Ingro-Norse settlements to adopt a collective identity, furthered by the constant threat of pushback from the now-unified Goidelic south. This identity was "Sæhtisc", or what is now Settish, either from the Old Settish for "reconcile/peace/calm," or "seat/home." By this point the Germanic kingdoms spoke something close to a dialectal continuum of what would become Settish. The stabilisation of the larger Ámada, with its robust trade connections with the rest of Western Uletha, reversed the trend in favour of the Ámadans, leading Settland to lose territory.

The marriage of Ámada's Rí (King), Suibne mac Diarmat (Sweyn Darmotson) to the daughter of Oswald IV of Settland, Algyth, unified the royal houses of Settland and Ámada in the 14th century. This coincided with its first proto-democratic institutions, and the two kingdoms were governed as one from then. Rí Áedmond II unified the two kingdoms into "Aulmet", later being Latinised into Almetia (though still pronounced "AW-mees-ia"). The early modern era saw the Almetian "Avreyance" (derived from "Athbhreith", lit. rebirth/renaissance) in which the country experienced a cultural, economic and social development, while it developed its own form of Protestantism (Amendism).

Almetia industrialised early and rapidly, and began to diversify from the textile industry that predominated the regions downstream of sheep farms in the foothills of the north and west into iron production, steam power, machinery, concrete production, glaziery, transportation, chemicals and medicine, as well as other forms of mining. The socioeconomic effects of these changes were rapid - Almetia developed an urban population, and transitioned to capitalism. Almetia underwent a population explosion - rising from 1.5 million in 1750 to 6 million in 1900, causing overcrowding and a moderate decrease in living standards despite the unprecedented size of the industrialising economy; this caused 19th century Almetia to often be host to social and economic unrest.

Modern Almetia underwent a protracted, polarised period of labour unrest in the first quarter of the 20th century, leading to the Great Compromise, in which the welfare state was established, and workers gained a number of concessions from employers in exchange for not continuing to pursue revolution. It then underwent a frought cultural liberalisation during the mid-century, particularly the 1950s and 1960s, while new towns were built throughout the 20th century to accommodate the growing population. Almetia began to construct its high-speed railway infrastructure in the early 1990s. [Further modern information will come in time with co-operation with the region - and I'm typing a bit much!]

Cultural and linguistic groups

The bulk of the country is derived from the Goidelic kingdoms and speaks Irish (known as Aumish), including the capital of Dungarven. The northern third (both roughly geographically and demographically) of the country speaks Settish (a conlang based on vocabulary and grammar from Old Norse and Old English.)

	Past mapping
	To support your request provide links to areas of OGF mapping which showcase your mapping skill. Mapping relevant to the requested theme & geography is especially useful.
	The {{coord}}, {{node}}, {{relation}} or {{scalehelper}} templates can optionally be used to link to the OGF map - they result in nicely formatted links. Or you can paste in a URL.

I've been away for several years, so while I've been active for the past week or two in my ongoing projects, there is limited history that I can draw from beyond those that is near the standard of what I would hope to be able to map:

[3] - Possibly the most intact project I can find from pre-2022?

[4] - Urban, Whitstock. This is roughly the style I would emulate in mapping out (the centres of) Almetian cities.

[5] - Rural/village, Westerland.

	Username & date
	Sign and date the application by typing four tildes (~~~~) without spaces or "nowiki" tags.

Alsatian (talk) 02:32, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

EDITED: Alsatian (talk) 01:52, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

	Discussion
	Discussion for clarification & decision

• Dear, Alsatian. This application looks good with all the details you've written, your provided mapping looks good, I am also familiar with your experience from the past. Two things I'd like you to do before I finalize this application.
  1: If you don't mind providing a sketch with the placement of rivers and lakes, cities, major infrastructure alongside the heightmap sketch you have;
  2: Lowering the population of the country, 24 million sounds like a lot (with the territory size of about 100 thousand square kilometers, that puts the density at 240 inhab./km2 which is a lot for this region and latitude).
  I am very glad to see you are back into mapping! ⸺ Bixelkoven (talk) (West Uletha Admin) 18:43, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
  • Loaded the sketches and rough updated populations, hope they're up to code. Thanks again, and great to be back! Alsatian (talk) 01:52, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

	Territory application approved
	Requests have been met. Approved. ⸺ Bixelkoven (talk) (West Uletha Admin) 19:10, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
	Please tell me if you wish to have us move the existing mapping out of the territory.