[Targa]

Alot of those look really good as templates! It looks like you may need to tweak the 'shore cost', as a few of them have land province borders bleeding into the sea. Also (using the first pic as an example), I'd experiment with ruggedness between 1.4 - 1.7 or so...enough to eliminate the hundreds of tiny islands, as it would be very difficult to work with otherwise. But yeah....those are looking really good!

That's basically what I've been doing with DomMap. Running off a bunch of pics similar to those until I see a shape I like. Of course, yours are so much better to work with, since they can be way larger than 800x599, and have the corresponding .map files that work with Dom2. I haven't been playing with province numbers, since I've been doing the borders by hand. I've found that no matter what setting I used, DomMap would always end up giving me some province shapes I disliked. Although now that I think about it, since the capitals are what counts, the borders can be made "flexible".

Once I get a map I like the looks of, I copy the seed from the map file, paste it into a batch file, and adjust the other parameters to tweak it.
Here's my "base" switches:
-d 0 -pl 15 -nl 260 -tc 900 -sa 2 -ns 25 -ss 55 -wl 30 -ls 25 -r 1.7

Those get varied a bunch when I get a shape I like though.

The only thing that I see that would need to be modified (other than sprucing up the map with graphics) is that the map file generated by DomMap2 also has terrain info, doesn't it? For example, the pics at the bottom of that page, with the different colors on the land, are showing plains, mountains, etc... If you start with a "basic blank" (all brown) like the top ones, you'd have to add terrain info thru Dom2 map editor (not that that's a big deal).

[ February 02, 2004, 19:26: Message edited by: Targa ]