by Samus on Sat Mar 24, 2007 1:56 am
Well, here goes.....
One of the biggest things that concerns me is how cluttered this map is and it's the large version. How is this going to look when you try to shrink it down to 600px wide?
You need to get rid of some of these useless objects cluttering up tight parts of your map. Look at Limpopo, why do you have a river running into the middle of it? You don't have space for that and it serves no purpose, it needs to be shortened. I would say the same for Kariba and Skeleton Coast. The rivers around Lourenco Marques are very confusing, I don't even know what that borders.
Is Swaziland divided from its own region? How does that work? And why?
Kroonstad and all that crap around it needs some serious love, it's way too cluttered. It reminds me of a really messy bedroom where you can't even see the floor. There's like a half-assed mountain range between Kroonstad and Basutu, do they connect with each other or not?
Why do you have 2 different types of mountains?
The silver border you have around the regions makes it look impassable. Just leave it black like the normal borders, the different colors will sufficiently identify the regions.
I count 39 territories. This is a bad number. If it was 40, that would be 10 per person in 4 player games. 42 would be playable by 6 players at 7 each (barely). However, since it's already feeling very "cluttered," I would recommend reducing it to 36 territories, which is 9 each in a 4 person game.
Start with De Aar, it's way too small and confusing. Merge Kroonstad and Fischer's Farm into one territory, and merge that territory into the East Kingdoms region. 9 is too many regions for a map this small anyway. Get rid of all the jungle and mountains within the region, you don't have space for them. Merge something else in Portuguese East. This should bring that region down to 5 territories, and your total down to 36.
Move the port in Madagascar to Bara so that region now has 2 borders. Also, each port symbol should touch the the corresponding territory just a little.
Let's see how that looks and we can talk bonuses.