I've been playing around with a couple of tutorials I found on how to make maps - aimed at people running RPGs, but a lot of it carries over pretty well. Version 1.2 is here, and I'd be interested in any bug reports or artistic criticism. I'm not entirely happy with the farmlands, but it was the best I could manage - I may try and think of something else for the next one.

162 land provinces, plus two seas of 17-18 provinces, and various smaller areas of water. Suitable for 10-14 players. The bottom two corner provinces have increased chance of magic sites, as do the underwater provinces indicated by treasure chests. All starting provinces should have at least four adjacent provinces

Preview:

Wow nice. A new map maker. I applaud you.

looks great. you should post the number of provs/water provs though

Very nice!

Looks clean and clear and potentially well balanced, though it would need a few MP tests ideally.

Awesome first effort - I hope we will see more from you. You should definitely list the land/water count and suggested number of players.

I would also suggest fewer water provinces in future maps.

Wow, very nice! Thanks very much for posting it, it looks awesome.

How did you make it?

Hey, not bad at all! I like it!

Heh, thanks. Not bad for a first effort, although there are quite a few things I would do differently next time.

Quick copy paste from the description:

I'm not sure those numbers are quite right, but they seem similar to other maps of that size. I've pretty heavily restricted the starting sites, so you shouldn't get stuck on an edge or in a crappy mountain province with two neighbours, but that means it's unlikely to work well with higher numbers of players.

I got most of the ideas on how to make it from the Cartographers' Guild, plus a couple of my own experiments. The base is just a standard fractal coastline. I have the original photoshop file if anyone's interested in seeing behind the scenes, but I haven't uploaded it because it's 14MB zipped.

Wow, so did you draw the mountains and stuff on by hand?

Yes and no. All the terrain features are done by hand, but there's a huge amount of cheating going on to make Photoshop do all the hard work - without the clever stuff turned on the mountains are just scribbled lines. Check the link in to the cartographers' guild if you want to see how it's done. I'm a programmer not an artist, so I don't mind spending most of my time playing with filters and overlays. The forests and so on are all stolen from aerial photos and google maps.

Thats..... awesome

make moar plox! just a little smaller next time maybe. just a little bit

I'll chime in some thanks as well for a nice looking map. Very nice indeed. Especially impressive if it's your maiden creation.

Although it's probably worth mentioning that the maps that see the most use in MP games are wraparounds. So if your cartographers itch hasn't been scratched with making this map, then you'll have a long list of players wanting to pay you gratitude for any wraparounds you might make. Since good wraparound maps are so rare you can't even Wish for them :)


Eidt - Size wise I'd say anything between 120-200 provinces will see a lot of usage (providing it's not flooded with water)

I know people don't like dealing with a lot of water, but the biggest problem water nations tend to have is the way most maps DON'T have any decent size lakes. When all your provinces are within 2-3 provinces of an enemy its hard to get a good dominion pocket. Wraparound maps just compound the problem.

OK, so for the next one - wraparound (should be pretty easy, I think the terrain generator can do wraparound fractals) and a bit smaller. I also have some corrections to make to this one, so I'll post a v1.1 at some point.

I'd like to hear more about what sort of water works well - I've never played an underwater nation in MP, so I don't have that perspective. Is it the small lakes in the corners that are an issue here, or are the main areas too big as well? How much water is reasonable? Are water-free maps worth the effort, or does that rule out too many nations? I was hoping that the two separate starting areas might reduce the problem of one nation hoovering up all the underwater resources after the dom10 krakens fight it out. Or is that not a problem?

Basically the problem is that on 90% of maps the water nations are in constant danger of being domkilled. TBH its probably the most common death of any of them to a land nation. This is mostly because they can't get a real "heartland" to serve as a dominion bastion. This is where having a non-wraparound map with a lake in a corner or two is really useful.

Having too much water is just annoying sometimes, as it tends to constrict choices in expansion, fighting, etc. Plus it becomes a bit of an issue once one water nation takes control.

Basically, I would recommend enough water to support 2 or 3 water nations at around 12-15 provs each. Try to provide at least 1 or 2 fairly deep lakes to hoard dominion in (this is tougher w/wraparound), otherwise do what you want. Also try to minimize the number of deep sea provinces, in fact its probably fine if you just don't have any at all, this is because deep sea provs are nearly as worthless as swamps, which doesn't help water nations much at all.

Ah, I didn't know that about deep ocean. I assumed it was better, but obviously not. I also didn't realise that land nations couldn't draw resources from underwater provinces they own, so I added some more start restrictions.

New version here.

Fixed some odd connections, cleaned up the mountain passes to make it more obvious where you should be able to move, removed deep ocean.

How about an temporary link for this map too, until Wolfsbane is back.
(This one I do have on my harddisk, but I dont have online place for it.)