use xml to increase land mass?

i have noticed that when i play civ 5 the maps it generates always seem to have rather small and thin landmasses, except on pangea obviously. i just want to play a continents map where i can place at least 2 cities side by side instead of having these winding worm continents that make you either place cities too closely or spread them too far to ever acquire all the resources.
is there any way using the XMLs that i can force all land masses to be a few hexes bigger on each side so i dont end up with 30% land 70% water on my maps?

Not with XML. The files that deal with map generation are all written in Lua... MapGenerator.lua, FeatureGenerator.lua, and, if you'll excuse my language Gedemon, AssignStartingPlots.lua.

Assuming you're using G&K, those are all found within: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\Assets\DLC\Expansion\Gameplay\Lua

(For BNW it would be Expansion2, and for Vanilla just remove DLC\Expansion altogether.)

damn. i was hoping to fix it without using mods because mods of any type disable achievements.

You can use custom maps without mods. Move the map from mods to maps folders and your off.

cool. you know any good high land mass maps?

Possibly not relevant, but have you tried lowering sea level to increase land area?

I guess you could try looking through the Map Scripts forum... we might be able to tweak the land-to-sea ratio, but we'd have to figure out which variable determines that.