Hey all, I'm back in business it looks like. Sorry for the delay.
a.sub wrote:sorry if this was suggested (i will be honest and say that i havent read all 17 pages) but why not put Dubai in there?
surely it should be a world city if not more so than some of the other in there
Dubai was actually one of the first cities I thought of when I had the map idea. I had this hairbrained scheme of including a small version of the skyline of each city, and I thought dubai would be great to include. Of course there is no room on the map for such fantasies. Dubai was removed because it was at the juncture of 3 continents, and it's alliance was somewhat ambiguous. Additionally, Dubai is a great tourist destination but still relatively small in population (I guess the same is true for Las Vegas). Dubai will certainly be a world city of the future, but I think Delhi is better established and fits better graphically.
Many of you seem to understand the gameplay I am trying to achieve. The map has been deemed okay in terms of copyright because all of my bonus regions and territory distributions are unique. You may now understand why I am reluctant to change connections, because I think the current version is quite balanced. There are many places where you CAN add connections, because the cities are close to one another. Those connections are left out for gameplay considerations, because to hold continents you need to have some bottlenecks and some regions which are easy to defend.
On that note, I decided to play with the XML and it wasn't too hard to create! I still just have the small version, but now I can show you images with numbers included.
Changes:
- I redrew all the continents, because I had some shadows/embossing that I had rasterized into the previous landmass. Hopefully this makes all the land appear more consistent at the edges. The change is subtle though, so I understand my work may have been for naught.
- The ocean gradient is now a bit darker on the outside
- New title, with just a skyline background and no globe. Still not satisfied but I think it's improving
V14
- Click image to enlarge.

V14 with numbers
- Click image to enlarge.
