Oh come on! Washed-out grey next to washed-out light blue next to washed-out pale yellow is the easiest colour scheme in the world. And don't get me started on that terrain map, with its magnificent "are those hills or not?" feature. It's like you're an actual WW2 military commander, having to properly interpret maps before an attack.
Yeah, looking forward to seeing the map mods too.
You mock, but there are people using these very arguments on the Paradox forums, you know
For real confusion, check out the east coast of Australia. If you think "entirely covered in rocky mountainous texture" means a province is mountainous (rather than plains, or in one case forest), then you're not thinking like their map designers!
There's a HoI2 colours mod out already, that makes things look a lot better, in the Political mode at least. And I've seen screenies of one that brightens and pretties up the terrain, though I can't actually find the file itself.
Having seen the "Hand-Painted terrain" mapmod for EU3 and how amazingly gorgeous, fitting and useful that was (on the same engine), I have high hopes someone is going to come out with something similarly nice soon enough.
Somebody punched in the wrong province number in some text file, from what I read. It's an understandable mistake, though really one that should have been picked up on before release.
Stalingrad however, is ridiculous, as is the slightly more amusing Rostov-on-Don not actually being on the Don River. New York also looks a bit off, to me.
There's also no rivers in Mesopotamia - you know, that area whose name literally means "land-in-the-middle-of-rivers"?
The latest one that's emerged is that there's no Qattara Depression. Someone really should have told Monty that - he went to all that trouble taking El Alamein, when he could have just driven around it....
Seriously though, a bunch of map errors - sloppy, but whatever. But when you're stuffing up Stalingrad, Gibraltar and El Alamein in a game about WWII, that's pretty damn sad - especially when it actually impacts strategy.