This really is invaluable, Sue. As I've printed-off the PDF mapping guides for virtually all the Annuals, I tend to remember if I've seen a given style somewhere, but if someone then asks, I end up hunting through the PF website pages to find it, usually guessing which year it's in first, because I can't find it in the mass of printouts otherwise...

I've not explored anything like enough of the issues in detail to have favourites, though my ongoing Community Atlas mapping has provided opportunities to experiment with quite a few.

@jmabbott If you're subscribed to the PF Newsletters, you'll find there are sometimes money-off vouchers available for webstore purchases in those, and the company has in the past run generous Black Friday promotions, which might make the complete Annual collection a bit less fearsomely-priced. It's how I completed my set a few years back; after that, it's "just" a question of keeping-up with it year by year. That's not so bad either, as if you're a subscriber, you usually get a time-limited, money-off renewal purchase option around the end of the current year as well.

Great looking map so far.

I'm not keen on the altitude scale being on the later version though, as it's hiding part of the ocean current flows there.

Stating the scale of the map (1:XXXXX - whatever it is) might be more useful than a physical scale that's accurate only for the equator, but the latter could be helpful to give a rough idea of the planet size involved, as Monsen noted.

I just gave simple "Drift" names to a couple of the main currents on my Errynor/NW Alarius map, based on Earthly examples, so inventing more names for the major currents elsewhere would seem very reasonable.

Similarly, continent names for the larger landmasses would seem in-keeping with this pattern.

I suspect most prior mappers, like myself, have tended to assume similar major prevailing wind patterns to Earth's. So, NW Alarius is essentially Europe, and Alarius overall would probably see weather patterns similar to Europe-Asia. Beyond that though, things become a bit trickier, as the parallels with Earth aren't so exact, particularly the smaller seas between most of the continents. Be interesting to see what you come up with, however!

At typical overland map-scales, the second version of the gum tree could also pass quite well for a silver birch.

All looking great, as usual! ?

Thanks Ralf; as we've discussed before, it's always best to make sure about these things!

Very kind Sue. I'll have a rethink and maybe PM you if something occurs. I had a couple of other ideas, but the TT one came to me earlier today as a simpler possibility.

Thanks very much folks!

@Mike: Weirdly, the Ireland maps are the only ones I showed that have never been published! The main Erin one is still one of my favourites, partly because it was done so early in my CC mapping and yet turned out so well, partly because of all the interesting things I was able to find while researching it.

@Sue: I rather envy people who can just sit down and create a map from scratch, or have an idea in their head they can bring to life as they go. I have to plan in detail in advance!

@OverCriticalHit: All these maps were done using CC3, not CC3+, and so far as I recall, there wasn't any other option beyond tracing the coastlines in by hand using that. There are options now that would let you automatically trace a sufficiently contrasting edge within an imported image, for instance, and that would have helped to a degree.

One big problem I had was that with the Near East and Black Sea maps, the areas covered weren't available on any single atlas or paper maps I could source, where there was a consistent scaling and use of contours. The problem was so great for the Near East ones, I eventually abandoned attempts to draw them as contour maps, and opted for the simpler Mercator-style drawings instead. Even on the Black Sea map, I simply had to wing-it to fill gaps towards the eastern edge on the maps I had.

Of course, things get still more complicated when you're trying to adjust coastlines to their ancient appearance using what may be a simple line-drawing map in a published research paper, a sketch-map that may not be even in the same projection as that in the atlas chosen as a potential base map, let alone have a similar scale, or show any contours or other connecting features!

I suspect that because I've been drawing maps for a very long time, at first only by hand, then later using various DTP or graphics programs, the idea of hand-drawing suitable polygons, both of the coasts and the contours, which may each sometimes take a number of sessions scattered over several days, hand-tracing something like these isn't such a big thing in CC. Indeed, there may be advantages to this, as several problems appearing on the Forum in recent times have resulted from traced coastlines having too many fractal nodes along them, and crashing the program as a result. Approaching mapping from the direction I have, means that for many years, I've tended to draw things like coastlines using only straight-edge polygons, since at this kind of regional scale, you can't tell any difference. If you need a curve, you just add a few more nodes. So if you look at the Black Sea map, for all the seeming complexity of the coasts there (many of the contours were done using smooth polygons instead), I didn't have a single CC3 crash while drawing it this way. I did foul up a couple of times, and have a lot of redrawing to do as a result (there may have been Naughty Words said as well...), but that was down to me, not the program!