Replace The Map Reverse Color Scheme (Trying To Find The New Imperial Color Scheme)

[Christian Paul Maggos]

Hi Alternate Historical Fans,

I went on Alternate History Wiki, and checked out the maps sections, and I discovered that the older Revised Color Scheme for the mapping and coloring of Alternate Historical Maps. But due to gossips and rumors, I heard on some threads were saying that they wanted to replace the older Revised Color Scheme for coloring the world maps with the new much better "Imperial Color Scheme", which was supposed to replace it with an more accurate color scheme for each of all of the nations and countries of the entire world. So please help me out to get the "Imperial Color Scheme", so I can use it for my mapping and coloring of my own alternate historical maps to make it more accurate and more realistic than before, please? If you know about this concern about the mapping and coloring of alternate historical maps, please let me know by discussing in this thread.

Sincerely,
Chris Maggos

 

[Alex Richards]

Revised (RCS) is still the one we use on the basemaps.

The closest there is to 'every country used' is the TACOS scheme, but generally the idea of giving all countries colours is somewhat frowned upon as missing the point of having a colour scheme (it's far to many to remember).

And despite having been quite deeply involved in the whole RCS situation since just before the Civil War, I've not come across an Imperial Colour Scheme at all. You might be confusing this with the overhauls that we decided were needed to better portray Imperial/Feudal systems.

 

[Codae]

Revised (RCS) is still the one we use on the basemaps.

The closest there is to 'every country used' is the TACOS scheme, but generally the idea of giving all countries colours is somewhat frowned upon as missing the point of having a colour scheme (it's far to many to remember).

And despite having been quite deeply involved in the whole RCS situation since just before the Civil War, I've not come across an Imperial Colour Scheme at all. You might be confusing this with the overhauls that we decided were needed to better portray Imperial/Feudal systems.

It could also refer to the palette that Iori uses.

 

[Alex Richards]

It could also refer to the palette that Iori uses.

He tends to call that one GCS, though others have archaically called it ICS.

 

[January First-of-May]

What are the differences in the colour schemes, anyway?
I know it involved Russia being green/gold/red (the infamous 183-181 poll - I think I voted for gold by the way), and respective colour changes for neighboring countries of similar shades (such as China), but I don't even remember a list of such "neighboring countries" - much less any other differences that might've occurred since...

...Now that I think of it, I've probably lost it around (or maybe just after) the end of the Greenshevik War; so if you care enough to explain me what happened after that I would be very interested. As I understand it, what's happening is something similar to the Sandbox Republics and similar entities of 2011 (so many splinter entities, major and minor, happened over that period, that I've lost count sometime around early September); still, any explanation of at least the major ones would be really good. (I wanted to put a smiley here, but couldn't think of I worthy one... basically, I'm really starting to sound like a grumpy old guy in that post. Which I'm certainly not, I'm only twenty-one years old darn it!)

 

[Alex Richards]

Well, it went through a period like the Sandbox Republics, but has essentially settled down.

To summarise:

Thande's original UCS had become a mess by around 2010/11. Colour decay meant everyone was using slightly different shades, and a lot of colours had been added in with no consistency for selection, including one for Mali which was pretty much universally used as a case of 'Europeans feeling guilty that Ethiopia's the only Black African state with a colour'. Around the same time, the basemap was undergoing it's massive improvements and transition to the globed format, and Thande decided it was an exellent oppurtunity to sort out the UCS at the same time. Initially, the idea was just to use the RGB codes to prevent colour decay, and have a general conference to sort out what should be added/removed.

This led to lots of people suggesting alterations based on other means of reasoning from the original UCS, Green/Gold Russia is the most well known (mainly because the justification of wanting to use the same reasoning for colours as France, Britain etc. was both good enough and support widespread enough for Thande to consider the Poll (originally meant to be Poll 1, but, well...)), but there were all sorts involving people such as Susano wanting to bring more of the German tradition in and so forth.

As a result, there were lots of splinter groups, the ACS, ANUCS, all sorts. Thande offered the Green/Gold compromise and some of the things which had been agreed (such as seperate colours for Bavaria, Savoy etc.) in the TCS, I was gradually expanding that to the TCS+ with what I was needing to add to accurately map medieval Europe, and Iori was just continuing his thing with the GCS (sometimes called ICS) which he'd been using long before the conference started. Several of the alternative Colour Schemes ended up banding together as the TACOS scheme, which unlike the rest didn't change the colours for France or the US or such like. It was basically the only scheme to actually survive without any official backing from the basemappers.

Meanwhile at somepoint Thande and myself came to the conclusion that there really wasn't any point trying to cater to both the intense specificity of the basemaps and the generality of the many permutations scheme that TACOS attempts to fill with the same key. As such, a few colours were dropped/repurposed from the TCS+ and, at his suggestion, I formally renamed it the RCS (I prefer to think of it as the Revised Colour Scheme, but others were already calling it the ARCS or Richardean, hence the dual titling). RCS became the general standard for the basemaps, though Iori still does his own thing requiring a bit of converting now and again.

Since the start, there's been a fair amount of revision (we're on vs. 3 of the key now), but essentially the same ethos has prevailed. New colours have been added (though we very rarely do that now), and thanks to Wolf Brother things have virtually moved full circle-> his in depth demonstration of the unmapped complexity of the African states in the 19th Century finally gave the justification required to actually include some more colours there. We've got 8 now.

For differences, the main one is that RCS tends to go for a case of 'what do we need to map world history' and works from there with trying to get neighbouring countries to be distinct and overall different colours. TACOS works from 'what might you need in AH' and works from there, generally we on the basemaps have stopped caring about people using that scheme (apart from if they use it on the basemap thread that is), though there's still some pretty strong opinions on how useful certain colours are.