I need some opinions from you people.
I will take into consideration Yoda power's Giant map and WW2 Global scenario.
As far as mountains and hills, I will take into consideration both maps, but google earth helps a lot. I prefer to use more google earth and less the mentioned maps.
The problem is the rivers.
I have to select either Yoda power's map or WW2 map. I don't know which map is more precise.
Google earth does not help on this matter.
As you saw on this version of the map, rivers are too few.
I do not want to make many rivers, since it counts in my logic as a strategic resource, but also I don't want to create an unrealistic or unplayable map.
The solution is in the middle. I have to select on a map and copy the river topography by 60-70%.
Which one do you recommend?
I have more thoughts about hills/mountains than rivers, because I've thought about hills/mountains more.
In my opinion, hills/mountains should primarily indicate areas with moderate/high amounts of elevation change, respectively. This doesn't necessarily correlate to absolute elevation, though it can - but flat plateaus are not hills or mountains, though they may neighbor them.
The actual proper way to do this would be to use topographic maps, including factoring in which areas have significant differences (not just high flat terrain).
A few months ago I was looking at creating maps for Railroad Tycoon II and III, which have variable height terrain, not just flat, hills, and mountains/volcanoes. Thus, it has utilities that allow you to use actual topographic map data to set the in-game elevations. It's very powerful; it needs some tuning to get serious mountain ranges such as the Alps both realistic-looking and playable in-game - you might not want them to be an absolute barrier with no passages, but you want them to be problematic - but overall it makes it relatively straightforward to create the height part of maps accurately. I was able to figure it with a couple evenings of fiddling around with programs, topographic maps, and settings.
Not everything can carry over to Civ, of course, but there's a good guide to the process in general at
http://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=3708 . The most relevant part to what you are interested in is likely getting topographic map data via BoundingBox (
https://boundingbox.klokantech.com) and Earth Explorer (
https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov).
I wish I'd written up more notes on how I did it this spring; in part I was following an older guide (
http://web.archive.org/web/20050302.../bowlby/rrt3/tutorials/Microdem/Tutorial1.htm) as I hadn't seen OilCan's newer one. But I know I got GTOPO30 Digital Elevation Model maps, and used the U.S. Naval Academy's MICRODEM program (
https://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/website/microdem/microdem.htm) to view and transform those maps. Its interface is a bit clunky as it's been around since 1984, but it does work. For your purposes, the Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs) and a program to view them would give you a more accurate view of elevation changes than just a sateillite view from Google Maps. I would probably try Quantum GIS before MICRODEM, since it probably has a better user interface, but if it's not working, the Navy's there to help.
I think the U.S. Geologic Service (which runs Earth Explorer) also has maps that highlight the difference in terrain rather than the absolute terrain, or maybe I figured out how to do that with an option in MICRODEM (it has a lot of options to choose from). That would also be useful since it solves the high plateau problem.
It gave me the idea to add some sort of Digital Elevation Map capability to my editor, to supplement its current satellite-image capabilities, but realistically not a ton of people are using it to create maps, and it would probably be a lot of work. If this were 2005, I'd probably do it. And shortly after playing around with Railroad Tycoon maps, I got swept back into the C7 project.
Rivers... those are hard to see from zoomed-out satellite images. I am sure others will have more opinionated opinions, but I would probably look for maps that show e.g. the rivers of Africa or the rivers of Europe, and if they're from a reputable source they're probably a good guide. Or in areas that I know decently well, fall back on my geographic knowledge. If we're talking Europe, the Danube has to be the first choice. Then maybe the Rhine or the Loire? The Don and the Volga farther east. The Po if there's space for it in Italy. I'm more uncertain in northern Europe, I think of the Spree first but that's probably only because I've traveled on it.
In North America, it's the Mississippi, followed by the Missouri and the Ohio. Rio Grande would be nice, and the Colorado, it's had some rough years with overuse but historically it is a major river. If there's room, maybe the Hudson?
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Edit: Okay, so I got out my Rand McNally World Atlas. I should really get this book out more often, it's better than I remembered! It has topographic maps of all six inhabited continents, color-shaded, great for reference, and pretty detailed. So if you have a topographic atlas, or your library has one, that could be worthwhile. The USGS ones are great if you need it to feed into a computer program, like for Railroad Tycoon, but a paper atlas may be just as good when you're updating the map by hand. Certainly easier to open a book.
I should also note that if you haven't tried it, one of the features I put some thought into in my editor was river editing. I'd always found that frustrating in the Firaxis editor, accidentally placing rivers along tiles that I didn't want them. So in my editor I made sure to code it so it's based on which tile-edge you click on, and that it doesn't place a river if you click too close to a tile edge. The thresholds are also configurable (Ctrl+P, map tab, "River sensitivity options") if you find it too eager or insufficiently eager to place rivers. Finally, on the right-side pane, you can manually toggle rivers on or off on the tile edges, great for fine-tuning river placements or removing a stray river.
Looking at your map, this fine-tuning could help with some rivers that seem to wind up just short of the seas/oceans (checking in the Firaxis editor as well to be sure). Such as the Po, which just meanders around northern Italy, or the Mississippi, or that river in Georgia (the U.S. state) that doesn't reach the ocean.
Focusing specifically on the U.S., where I live, a few things I notice:
- The Rio Grande doesn't reach the Gulf of Mexico
- There are a couple rivers in the Rocky Mountains that don't go anywhere. I think they're the westernmost parts of the Missouri; if so they should connect up with the Mississippi. There's also one of those farther north in Canada.
- The eastern U.S. probably needs a river beyond the St. Lawrence Seaway. I'd favor the Ohio; admittedly I am biased, but it arguably is the most important river east of the Mississippi. The Hudson in New York being second, and if you want more, perhaps the Potomac in Maryland but that would probably be too many for game balance.
- In the western U.S., probably add the Colorado, and maybe the American River in California, which is not nearly as long but is important for agriculture and irrigation, which is relevant in Civ.
For mountains/hills in the U.S., subjectively speaking but probably also objectively, the Rockies seem a bit flat. They're big, they stretch a long way north-south but also a significant distance east-west, but in the map the Appalachians look like the more serious barrier. I love the Appalachians, but I'm not going to pretend that they're anywhere near as hardcore of mountains as the Rockies.
Also, the Sierra Nevadas appear to be a range of hills, they should really be mountains. Or maybe they're the range that's east of that desert (Death Valley?) and they're just too far from the coast? Here's a picture of what I'm trying to say.
I also kind of think that either the U.S. west coast juts out too far west, or Baja California is too far east, or maybe Mexico in general is too narrow? Or maybe the mountains are just throwing off my point of reference; cross-referencing my atlas, the slope of the western North American coast is generally correct, at least within the bounds of what Civ3 allows. Probably the overall problem is that the mountains east of the "Sierras" in my screenshot are more or less where the Utah/Nevada border is, which is high elevation but not a major range. Maybe some hills there, but mostly desert; hardly anyone lives there but not due to mountains.
The other thing that could help with anchoring references in the map discussion is adding some dummy resources which are simply labels of relevant places. A few maps have done this with "resources" that are actually just "Mauretania" or "Po River" or something like that. When looking at the Rockies and Sierras, I found myself thinking, "where is this area in relation to Los Angeles?" Not saying you should add cities, but labels for mountain ranges and rivers might help frame the discussion, and provide some geographic education for players.