I love the map. Really fantastic. Don't take it wrong if I focus on what I think are potential areas of improvement.
1) Too many resources. I'm playing the French, and I have Most of Central Europe, into Turkey, Isreal, Egypt, then down into northen and central Africa under my control. I now have 6 horses, 8 saltpeters, 6 incenses, 5 wines and 4 irons. It's overkill.
I would really like this aspect of the map if the AI were smarter about trading, but it doesn't recognize diminishing marginal value on resources. The Zulus occupy North America in my game, and they have 4 extra units of Fur, yet refuse to trade.
A lot of people are trying to lessen the importance of strategic resources to Civ 3 play, but I think it's a great new aspect of the game -- making geographic expansion and diplomatic relations much more critical. I'm not sure if I think you should remove some of them, but it's definitely something with could use some extra thought. I just wish the game supported putting oil resources on coastlines for offshore drilling. That would make the European oil race in the North Sea truly interesting (especially if you had to protect your coastline with a navy, a la the UK)
Oh, I do like the fact that Uranium is so scarce.
2) Jungle thickness is pretty out of hand. Again, I understand why you did this, but Civ3 has some pretty poor gameplay aspects to jungles in terms of lack of productivity. It would be nice if these were intersperced occassionally with some forests. It wouldn't change the look, but it would allow for those deep jungles to contain some useful tiles without mandating enormouse early-game clearing efforts. It's not like the Amazon Basin is without harvestable land -- look at all the stimulants (of both legal and illegal variety) that come from there!
3) I really think the Great Lakes are way too big. They're not meaningful in terms of game play in that location. Perhaps if you widened the St. Lawrence to be navigable with a canal city, then they'd be useful as naval depots. Otherwise, I think you can get the same effect of representing coastal resources in a lot less area, which should result in a more accurate opportunity to represent the Dallas - St. Louis - Chicago corridor.
4) If you are going to stick to your guns on the representation of strategic resources, then I think you've overestimated the scope of Mideast oil reserves. The Saudi deposit is much too rich, and you've left out Mexico, which is the second largest oil importer to the U.S. (Canada is the first, by the way, which is really only represented in the ANWR deposits you show.)
5) The representations of the Eurasian Seas -- again, I think they're all quite large. This was fun in Civ2, when you could build canal cities and bring Naval units in to pound the hell out of interior port cities. But in Civ3, that's an almost useless strategy since naval bombardments pretty much suck. So given that the fun aspect of this is taken out, providing a little more useful land in that richly populated area of the world might make sense.
A couple of other notes that aren't criticisms...
The number of rivers on your map is great for irrigation and trade bonuses, and I thank you for it. Interestingly, it has the side effect of making Engineering a much more important advance, since you need it for bridge building to get the road movement rate over rivers. I was surprised at how big a difference this made in my game.
I had no idea there were so many lakes in central/southern Africa.
I think you might have underrepresented Gold resources in North America. 1849 was a pretty important year for American development.
Again, magnificent work. I love the map.
bye people !
). So for now, I'm fighting in a great battle of the Atlantic with my ironclads destroying its galleon filled of cavalry.
