This is a very accurate map of North America. Plains, hills, forests, etc. are all where they should be, and I even placed resources to correspond with the real world. You'll find coal in the Appalachians, iron around Lake Superior and aluminum in Jamaica.

This is only version 1.0, however, and there are a few problems. The rivers are pretty close, but they certainly aren't perfect, and I was unable to find accurate maps of spices and incense in North America. For this map I consulted The 21st Century World Atlas by Trident Press International and the Goode's World Atlas by Rand McNally.

Please see my site for more details:
Jason's Civ3 Archive (http://www.jasonmorrison.net/civ3/)

http://www.jasonmorrison.net/civ3/namerica10b.gif

Let me know what you think.

I forgot to put a readme in the zip for my North America 1.0. attached is the new zip.

The minimap looks nice! Good job Jason. :egypt:

Beautiful map!

Do you mind if I use it in my post-apocalyptic mod (with proper credit of course). It is exactly what I have been looking for, created much better than anything I have been able to do. Of course, I may need to modify it slightly - mainly just adding remnants of civilization, but I might alter the terrain in some areas.

This is a pretty good map. I have one gripe, however. The plains seem to extend too far east. Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio would have no plains, as the climate is far too humid (I know because I live there). Grassland and forest would have been appropriate from Pennsylvania to eastern Nebraska, based on what's actually there. That said, I don't really care. It plays fine so the map is fine. Thanks for putting the time in.

I disagree with pilferman regarding plains not being in Illinois. I grew up in the middle off the western hump of Illinois and currently live up in the NE corner near Chicago. The soils are different. The soil where I grew up was closer to that of what I have seen in Iowa compared to this Chicago area soil. We also had a bit different vegetation, there was this thin ugly grass called "prairie grass" and some trees (don't recall their names) that you don't see here.

I know this is just my opinion and can't currently back this up with factual currently.

If you get your hands on a fairly new Goodes World Atlas, they have a section that shows the soil makeup and you will be able to see that the soil makeup of central western Illinois isn't the same as the North eastern part.

Note: I do not know if the Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin plains are correct or not, because when reading that Atlas I mainly paid attention to where I grew up and currently live.

Bantha

Cool!, now all we need is a mod with settlements representing civilizations; Confederates, Indians, Inuits, etc.

Reguarding the plains: I'm actually working from two atlases, one Goode's World Atlas and Trident Press' 21st Century World Atlas. The problem with having so much good source material is that I don't have enough terrian types in the game to cover everything on the map.

So I tried to balance. For example, many vegetation maps cover all of Ohio with deciduous forest. Ive been all over Ohio, and there's plenty of trees in some places but most of it is cropland. Now does that make it plains or grassland? Here I kind of assumes that the areas on the Environments land that were just cropland were plains, whereas mixed cropland/forest would be grassland. This works out well for the Great Plans and the East Coast, respectively, but it does become debatable in Illinois, etc.

Another way to look at it is that plains are more or less where you grow wheat, feed, and livestock. Grassland is where you do cotton, tobacco (ick), fruit, dairy and other general farming. I think my plains/grassland fit that pretty well for North America.

But like I said, it's version 1.0. I still don't think my rivers are quite right and I need to do somehting about the straight vertical line through the Great Plains. That's meant to represent how the rivers carve valleys out there, but it doesn't look right at all.

Now gripe time: Why is there no elevation, like in Alpha Centauri? That would make it easier to make "real-life" maps. Also, why are there no swamps? I had to cover the gulf coast in Jungle to represent the swamps.

And of course, why can't we add cities, units, etc.? With this map I could make a colonization mod, a U.S. independence mod, a Native American mod, a modern day mod, etc. with Civ II. With Civ III--just a map.

At my website I have a saved game with many U.S. cities vaguely where they are supposed to be. http://www.jasonmorrison.net/civ3/

Some information some people find very interesting for map-makers, if you like to surf the web.

This shows a relief map of Illinois.
http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/image.asp?T=0&S=20&X=41&Y=59&Z=0&W=2

This is the home page of that site, from here you can zoom in to see most parts of the U.S. in topographical (confusing with all the streets and roads drawn in), relief style, or my favorite SATELLITE IMAGES! (I can see my house!)
http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/default.asp

This last one won't help any map-makers, but is an awesome picture. It's a picture from space of North and South America at night-time. You can see all the lights from cities, etc.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg

Nice looking map. ;)

A few points though. You may want to consider adding a trench (row of mountains, row of coast, row of mountains) along the edge to prevent sailing around. That said, also adding a place to create a "panama" canal would be nice. I realize panama isn't on the map, but an extra lake in Nicuragua would do the trick along with about 3 cites and blamo, there's your canal.


Should Hawaii be on the map or is it farther away?
Similarily, Bermuda?

Are all of the Bahams represented by that single tile?

Where is Kodiak Island (off of southern Alaska)? Or is it blurred into the mainland?


Holy mountains, Batman! Pretty hard to create any towns in the west with all those mountains. Perhaps look at your maps again and try to intersperse some hills instead. In my maps, I try to resevere the mountain tile for only for mountain peaks and ridges. Towns in solid hills will never grow either, but at least you can place them if you want.

Make sure in the settings the number of players agrees with the number of start locations you put on the map. I only count 4 --Washington, one near Montreal, Mexico City, and Cuba. Perhaps add some more for more Indian (err Natice American) tribes, the Confederation, the French in New Orleans, Texas (not sure how long it was an independant country), Spain (maybe in Florida or the west somewhere), etc.

Good idea putting Forts on the map where real life cities are. I'll have to try that.

Keep up the good work! ;)

One of the difficulties of trying to stick to the real map is that islands are often way too small to show up as a full land tile on the map. This is just version 1, so I may be adding more islands in Carribbean and working on the coasts and nearby islands.

As for player starting locations, I'm really distressed that the map editor has no way to set up which civ starts where. You can make custom civs, but you can't even set them up in place. I realize one of the people on this board has created a hack to do that for a few maps, but that's just ridiculous... it should be a feature.

It wuld also be nice to be able to set up cities, units, etc. so you can create a real scenario. In some ways Civ II is better, I guess.

Okay, I listened to some of the suggestions here and also fixed some concerns of my own.

For this version:

Redesigned gulf coast between Louisianna and Florida.

Added Lake Champlain.

Repositioned Apalachicola/Chattahoochee River.

Added Bahamas.

Added sea tiles to Carribbean, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of California, Bering Sea and the western Atlantic.

Added Whale resources in Pacific and Atlantic.

Added Greenland, but good luck building cities there.

Added Hawaii--please note that the placement and size may not be accurate to the projection,
but a few people have asked me for it so here it is.

Added Kodiak Island.

Broke up mountain chains with hills where appropriate, added hills near rivers.


http://www.jasonmorrison.net/civ3/namerica12.gif


Concerns I still have include:

* Rivers in the Great Plains still don't seem exact. A big part of the problem is the way the map is stretch horizontally by Civ's threequarter view.

* I think it needs more luxury resources than it has. I'm open to suggestions for North American luxury resources.

Please let me know what you think. I'm developing a colonizaton scenario with this map so look for that soon.


Jason's Civ3 Archive (http://www.jasonmorrison.net/civ3/)

Here's the file:

As for the resources and luxeries, I heard someewhere that Arkensaw is the largest diamond producing state in the US and Wisconsin is the second, so you could put a gem or two in each of those states, and up in Canada there are some kimberlyt pipes that also hold dimonds.
On a side note, I don't really like having to make whole new maps from scratch, so would you mind if I took you map and modified it to my likeings and post in on here with credit to you. If not I can see why, and I'll do it myself.

Originally posted by Aanar
You may want to consider adding a trench (row of mountains, row of coast, row of mountains) along the edge to prevent sailing around.

No no! please don't

With Gramphos Civ3CopyTool you can make a map flat and remove the ice caps (i've tested this)

See attached version of your map below...

Now here's an idea.... Colonization II, anybody remember the old Sid Meier's Colonization? well here is the chance to create Colonization II.

Ideally we could do with several native american tribes, upto a max of 12... why twelve? cos I'm reserving the last four civ's for France, England, Spain and Holland (the same 'invaders' as what appeared in the original colonization)

My aim is to put together a Scenario with the four old-world powers on small islands at the left edge of the map (this would 'represent' europe) there cities would be of massive size and defended with huge numbers of troops (to prevent a player killing off his old-world opponent)

The aim of the four old-world powers is to colonize as much of the new-world as possible for a domination victory

What do you think????

Vonotar

Acrtually, I did make a Colonization Mod. It's in the Completed Modpack forum, here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?threadid=14649).

Basically I used this map and created 5 European powers (Spain, France, England, Netherlands, and Russia) and 9 native tribes (Souix, Ute, Apache, Arawak, Cherokee, Nex Perce, Cree, Aztec, and Iroquois). The Europeans all start in the Middle ages with Gunpowder, Monotheism, and Magnetism and the Natives start in Ancient times. I had alter the tech tree to do this and I also made it a little more logical for colonial times (esp. Magnetism and Navigation). The Natives can't build workers but they can build a new kind of scout that builds roads. There a few new units, like the Spanish Conquistador and new city improvements like Trading Posts and Oral History.

It's a beta test version right now, but I'm pretty pleased with it. The Europeans really do start with an advantage, but with a map this big the natives get a chance to build wide empires before they are attacked.

Please take a look at it and let me know what you think. No one's commenting on it in the mod forum yet, which is kind of disappointing because I haven't seen many mods that give that kind of tech advantage.

can i use this in my Civil war mod?? it's a great map and i'll give Credit

Oh, sure, feel free to use this map for any mods you make, just give credit. I am on a bit of a Civ 3 hiatus because the modmaking is so limited and buggy. But I'd love to see what other people could come up with.

Is there a copy of the map w/out the little forts? I love it, but the forts seem weird to me personally.

It's a great map, but I have two more problems as I press ahead with a huge Aztec game.

I) does it always start me in either Mexico, Cuba or Washington?

II) More importantly, I've got Tenochtitlan right where it is historically, on the rivers where that first fort is in the centre of the valley. And yet the computer is forcing me to build an aqueduct to grow.

Thanks, though. A nice piece of work. Clearing the Baja of Japanese was a pleasure.

R.III

I find this to be a great map. I truly enjoyed exploring. The AI´s tendency to build towns everywhere meant that even the mountain regions and the tundra was populated. The txt-file should be renamed to reflect what map it deals with, but I still think the map deserves a top score. It is really well done, and it must have taken quite a while to design this huge map.
- Martin B. Nielsen
"Malta"

While I enjoyed this map very muc, I think there should be less forest in Canada. Obviously, the map is realistic in that regard just the way it is, but for gameplay balance issues.

Great map I wil do a North America scenario with this map
(with credits)

BUMP

(since someone wanted news about that map).

i want to make the world a better place but mudder is illegal:lol: dont think FEEL!!:sniper: :aargh:

I don't know why Vancouver Island is connected to Vancouver...