There are alot of wierd ways to show a globe as a flat map.
http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapPr...C/cartTOC.html
These can be used in this game if you are serious about it. Keep in mind that the
image is the .tga file. This can look like anything, and has nothing to do with what provinces are actually "neighbors". The neighbors are defined by #neighor lines in the
text .map file.
Things on the image file are often there as just visual aids to the players so they can understand what the .map file has already set. Such as what is water, land, mountains, extra thick borders for un-crossable. Nothing says the image has to have those at all. The .tga is an artistic view of the settings in the .map file.
So if you do your world as a sinusoidal or a homolosine map then make the #neighbor commands right you can create a realistic fantasy world. The neat thing about that, is you could have easily get a spinning globe of your map to display on a web page.
Personally Id recommend something like this till I see better. Realistic enough, but not too hard to make.
http://www.odt.org/Pictures/vansant.jpg
http://www.cnr.colostate.edu/class_i.../robinson.html
But the simplest would be to create a big maps with a few polar areas across the top and bottom. The topmost would stretch all across the top and connect to 5 or 6 long provinces which connect down to 4 or 5 for each of them. Although they would appear extra long on the .tga the .map can still declare them to be small (no extra wealth for size), and it would properly reflect a world globe.
[ December 29, 2003, 17:23: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]