I'm wondering if anyone has calculated the general size of the Imperial City. For instance, how many meters in diameter is the main circle? How tall is the center tower?

Neither Google, nor the search function on these forums came up with anything.

It probably depends on whether you're talking about the in game measurements or actual measurements(as in the book, The Infernal City). The scale of the two are radically different. You can have your character run from one end of Cyrodiil to the other in about 20 mins to a half hour, I'm guessing, but it would take at least several days in actual world scale.

Imperial City? I think one of the descriptive references mentions how long it would take to traverse it's diameter, but I can't remember what it was. You could try looking it up on the Imperial Library website or the UESP wiki.

Good hunting, +Petrose

I have looked it up on both, nothing.
I cannot find any references to the size of the Imperial City.

I've looked through twenty odd articles on the usep, only found reference to the IC being founded on seven islands, so I would guess in lore its about the size of NY??

Your mileage may vary, but in my game, the distance from the center of the Imperial City to any of the cities (except Kvatch, Anvil, Leyawiin) is roughly 25 miles. Therefore, we paint the diameter of the Imperial City at about 5 miles across. That's what I use and it works well for me. Depending on your own speed and the time scale you use, your conclusion might be different.

As far as some official distance, it depends on the source you use. They vary quite a bit. That's why I use my own.

Let's see... What would be a good way to measure it...

How about bowshots? :wink_smile:

In game, I don't know.

In lore, I still don't know, but I would guess the Imperial City is equivalent to Rome in the Classical Era.

Maybe there is a way to check it... i saw some video of a guy using spells, items, etc... jumping off that high cliff (Dive Rock? not sure) crossing the IC and landing on water of Rumare bay i think.

Isnt there some formula for jumping that deals with distances / heights?

White Gold Tower's at least 500+ Feet tall

Specifically, what I need is the diameter of the Imperial City in meters, in-game measurement, not lore.

The Oblivion Construction Set tells us that each exterior cell is 4096 units by 4096 units or 192 feet by 192 feet or 58.5 meters by 58.5 meters. The Imperial City is slightly less than six cells across. 192 x 6 = 1152. 1 mile = 5,280 feet, which means that the Imperial City is approximately one-fifth of a mile, or 351 meters in diameter.

Cyrodiil - in game, not in lore, is approximately 3 miles long, measuring from the mouth of the Niben to the invisible border north of Cloud Ruler Temple, and approximately four miles wide, measuring from Anvil to the invisible border near Sundercliff Watch. Which mean the playble area of Cyrodiil is approximately 12 square miles.

thx for the hard work, Pseron Wyrd.

that is actually a small area, yesn′t ?

Yes, it would mean that the entirety of Cyrodiil is about one-third the size of Manhattan Island.

Then it is time to calculate the cost for an adventure park. Who needs Disneyworld when there is Cyrodiil to visit!

i mean - im not saying its better to have300 sq miles of deserts, swamps and stuff for show that add nothing to it, except some ocasional curious life forms.... I havent found many boring areas in oblivion, even unmodded (i do not like Oblivion gates and i am sure will never do the shivering isles, these are too disturbing for me).

Wow, thanks. That is the best answer I have been given so far. If you don't mind further work on this. I would kinda like a screenshot of the exterior cells. Another person I have ween talking with on IRC has mentioned the construction set a few times.
Not that it's required, 350 meters is the most definitive answer I have gotten so far, and I will go with it if I need to.

Of course it had to be scaled down immensely for the game's sake but I imagine in realistic terms it would have been as great a city as Rome or Constantinople in their golden age, hundreds of thousands of people and countless great monuments. Get from one side to the other could take countless hours, maybe days.

Unfortunately neither the construction set nor the game itself displays the architecture of the entire Imperial City at once. However, here is a screenshot of the http://morrowind4kids.com/pseronwyrd/Screenshots/ImperialCity.jpg with cell borders enabled (dotted yellow lines). Talos Plaza is visible on the left, the Temple can be seen in the center and the ghostly outline of the arena and the east wall of the Imperial City is visible on the ground to the right.

Here is what the same scene http://morrowind4kids.com/pseronwyrd/Screenshots/ImperialCity2.jpg with cell borders enabled.

The events of the game take place over 1-2 years of game time, and nobody wants to take that much real time to play through them. So game time is scaled by a factor of 30. If you want the characters to walk at a reasonable pace, then you need to scale the map the same amount, so it takes as long in game time to reach the next city as it would unscaled. So x and y axes are scaled by 30 too. Then you have the problem that the cities are too small for their populations, so you scale those, as well as the number of buildings, and you have the representative cities you see in the game. The z axis stays unscaled, to keep the buildings looking right, so the White Gold Tower is its real height, but would probably be a bit less slender in reality.

A real IC would have 30 x 30 = 900 times the number of people and buildings in it, and be about 6 miles across. Most of those people would have no connection to the events in the game, but only the ones who do find space in the game's IC. The other cities are proportionate in their sizes, again assume each one has 900 times the people and is 30 times wider than the scaled version. The smaller villages and towns probably don't scale so well as the number of inhabitants can't go into fractions of a person, so you'd have towns and villages with a few dozen to a few hundred inhabitants, again mostly unconnected to the story's events. Caves, Mines, Forts and Ruins would be further apart and contain dozens of enemies, instead of the handful you find, but it would take you the same number of real hours to clean them out as you spend game hours to do so, so again the scaling is reasonable.

Those screenshots make it look like 4 filled cells, and 2 half-filled cells, coming out to 5, not 6.
That comes out to 293 meters.

I would like to make sure I get this spot-on, so if you have any reason to refute this, please tell me.

I'm curious as to why you wish to know this so precisely. I won't take it amiss if you tell me to mind my own business

That adds up to 6 doesn't it? Interpret the evidence however you want.

Oh, and by the way. You're welcome. :thumbsdown: :meh:

4 + 1/2 + 1/2 = 5



I'm trying to draw out exact plans for the entire city on graph paper.
If I can manage to do that, I'm going to try building this at 1:1 scale in Minecraft.

Your gonna try to build the Imperial City in Minecraft? If you succeed you will be my favorite person ever.