I've almost finished two maps, and the one that is already public was mostly appreciated. So I go on doing maps, and doing the kind that almost everybody love - a big map! The plan is to get slightly more than 1000 territories. This will be a lot of work :)
I was thinking about making Real-Life World, but comparing to Real-Life Europe I'd have to merge territories together, otherwise they would shrink and become too small. And also - The world is in 70% covered by water, which makes a lot of space wasted.
So finally I decided on making fantasy map, based on a world I've once created, mostly covered by land.
But it would be disappointing if it wouldn't be played... I've seen that apart from Middle-Earth fantasy maps are rarely used. What do you think about it?

At the point, it looks like that, with one minor region, and 42 territories. It wouldn't be mine if it didn't have something nice - look at the mountains... but not too close though - I'm not the best drawer :(
http://warlight.net/SinglePlayer.aspx?PreviewMap=9161

Looks awesome. I hope you can make it happen, because I put a lot of thought into doing something similar and didn't get very far. You certainly will have a lot of work to do, especially if you're going to average a bonus for every 4 territories. :-)

A few suggestions I have:

-Make sure your map is centered in it's final position on the SVG before you do much work on WL... The centerpoints won't follow the territories and resetting all of them is really annoying.
-You might want to leave the artistic mountains and rivers and things like that until later. It's possible with big maps that the file size can get to be too big, so I'd hate for you to do a lot of work only to not be able to use it.

A few questions too, just out of curiosity. What system do you use to decide the bonus values? Also, how do you plan on naming 1000+ terr's? You're nuts.

Good luck and good job though! What was your first map?

Random quickly created names that are fantasy-sounding, like those 42 already existing. I don't have any system yet, but I guess it will be number of territories -1 for little territories, and three fourths of number of the territories for big ones. Also -1 if territory is wasteland or jungle or something like that, and -1 if territory has little connections so it's easy to defend.

The problem with such big maps (like big US) is that they're hard to keep track of and realize what bonuses are where and who could be where. For this reason, I feel that the bigger the map is, the more "regular" you should try to make the territories, meaning that when the territories are relatively all the same size/shape, they're easier to keep track of. I love the fantasy maps and I think a big one is something that could be potentially cool. This is just a suggestion I'd give you in order to make the map more playable.

p.s. I'd be down for testing when you're ready :D

Balance, balance balance. If you're going purely for play ability that's what you need to focus on :). And by that all I really mean is: Try and make every region of your map worth a similar amount and possibly use the X-1 formula to determine bonus rewards. Oh and super bonuses are always great too, as long as they aren't ones like in Drakemores world, which are impossible to grab without having COMPLETE map dominance.

I give you luck, it is hard building big maps, my biggest took me a good month and a half to make and its only 409 territores. If theres nothing harder then building a massive map then its building a massive fantasy map. Goo Luck

400 territories and six weeks? My first map had 360 and it took only a month (and isn't an aesthetic disaster) and my most recent was 320 and might have taken two weeks

I'm rather fast worker. I've done Real-Life Europe, about 350 territories, where I had a lot of work searching source data (needed for real-life bonuses and accurate territory names) in 2 days. But correcting mistakes and playing test games took about a week more before it became public :)
Sadly, i don't have that much time now. But I guess I will finish in about 2 weeks.

Got about 250 territories today, with names, connections and all the stuff except bonus links. The map is starting to show something.

It would seem that the map will be more than 1000 for sure. But I guess that not too much, because the closer to the edges, the bigger the territories are, and I've started from the center.

I hope it's "the bigger, the better", right? :)

The main recommendation I have is in regards to bonus borders... they are currently overlapping when they should be adjacent. That way it is clearer where one bonus ends and the other begins.

I'll keep that in mind while doing final, aesthetic corrections. Today I hit about 450 territories and about 1/3 of the map is finished.

Reached 600 territories. I'm looking forward to that big Europe map, but it seems I'm 7 times faster than its author in drawing, when you take amount of territories as a measure :)

Just reached 1000 and the map is getting close to it's final view :)

Looks great so far :).

Is there any more coming to this map? Did you abandon it?