Looking for advice (Kaldere Continental Map - WIP)

This started out in another discussion, asking about the mountains, but has now grown into looking for general advice.

This has largely turned into a practice map, so there are some things tossed in, just to see how they look.

Besides general advice, a few specific things I would like thoughts on:
  • I think I went a little too far with the Taiga, at the top of the continent. Is that too full?
  • The use of the terrain fills (desert, scrub, grasslands)
  • Does it make sense to use the farmland fill to show the more civilized areas?
  • Should the opacity of the farmland be higher?
I also have a few questions:
  • I know how to scale a terrain fill and I know how to scale a symbol that I am placing, but how do I scale the symbols used in a symbol fill?
  • Are there general guidelines for when and by how much to change the fill scale (as shown on page 129 of the CC3+ User Manual)?
  • Do the desert and grassland placements makes sense, based on the continental divide? I went back and forth on whether the desert should be on the other side of the mountains or, possibly desert on both sides. For reference, the 30th parallel almost bisects the western inner sea, running across the northern edge of the western desert, and the equator runs just below the southern tip of the continental divide.
I appreciate any and all advice or criticism.

Sean


KALDERE (WIP)
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Comments

  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    Posted By: smhollingsworthI know how to scale a terrain fill and I know how to scale a symbol that I am placing, but how do I scale the symbols used in a symbol fill?
    I am assuming you are talking about the various commands for filling an area with symbols, such as Fill with Symbols, Symbols in Area, and Symbols along, as opposed to the fill type symbol fill, since the latter clearly has the scale settings on the fill property page.
    For the other commands, they follow the default symbol scale scale, which you set in File -> Drawing Properties
    Are there general guidelines for when and by how much to change the fill scale (as shown on page 129 of the CC3+ User Manual)?
    Not really, but if you change them by too much, you may need to change resolution settings too in the Display Speed Settings image dialog too, otherwise you can end up with pixelation. Generally, fills from the same style should be scaled similarly, but importing fills from a different style may need to be scaled quite differently.
  • For the symbol scaling, I am talking about something like Terrain Default Taiga or Terrain Default Orchards in the Mike Schley Overland. I don't see those in the Fill Style dialog. Do they just use the scaling values from Drawing Properties?
  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    Yes, those use the default symbol scale from drawing properties.
  • Are there any reasons other than performance impact to not run CC3+ with the bitmap quality set to High Quality? Resources are not an issue; I am running on my gaming PC and it is a beast.
  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    Performance is the primary factor here.
    But I often find that the map looks better when zoomed out when using the automatic setting rather than force the high quality setting. The reasons for this is that scaling down the high quality textures live doesn't look as good as using the premade scaled down version. High Quality isn't really doing anything good for you when the image have to be scaled down by a factor of 10 or more anyways.
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