It would be a nice addition to have.
Not a fan of rotated or heavily distorted maps personally. I’d rather have something like that, where the black areas are all separated by cliffs from the map like how they designed the Bohemian map.
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I’d be fine either way, but I still prefer having the Barents Sea and all of the Mediterranean.
Maybe put some limits within the map to only keep the inhabitable parts of North Africa and limit how far into the steppe you can go, to focus the action where you can expect rather than making a huge empire in West Siberia and the Sahara (as terrain is only cosmetic).
But I’m all for more real maps. I’d also love a new France map with proper major rivers and mountains.
Could you achieve the africa part of that request by ‘just’ making the sahara a resource-less desert
Or, we could have something like this. The map is from one of my games, so ignore the WWII borders.
The Sahara can be blocked by cliffs. I used a small impassable area for the Sahara, but it could be extended further north and south. Including America is a nice addition. The natives can easily be represented by the current Meso civs (or future Native American civs). Sadly, Greenland and Iceland had to be cut since America was moved closer to Europe.
Not sure how to handle the Britain situation. Should we be able to treb London from Calais? That would make Britons unplayable. But if we fix that, the map might end up way too big to be playable.
Don’t worry about the scale too much, this also means you can exchange arrow fire over Gibraltar and other weird things like that. In practice a full-eco town would take up half of England anyway, AOE2 is a RTS up to 8 players (though I once suggesting raising the max to 24 or 32), not a grand strategy game.
Or as England use the old strategy of keeping Calais as an outpost to draw any french attack there. But if you want a scenario better tailored for the fight around the Channel, better make a map more focused on that :
Done, Hundred Years War with the full France + British Isles, as well as Spain and the Low Countries as there was quite a lot of action there. Also parts of Italy, Germany and even Bohemia for good measure if you want to thrown in some wild cards. And if you really care about Calais you can use the old HOI4 trick by putting England further away from France than it should be.
(you can make it much tighter than that if you really want to focus on the Channel).
The Americas are too far away and have zero relevance to Europe before AD 1500, I don’t see why they would be included in an Europe map. To make them, I’d design an entirely different Conquistadores map (one half Americas, the other half Western Europe, with the ocean in between) with half the players playing Meso civs, lacking any naval tech and restricted to the Castle Age (+ very limited IE techs like elite UU and IE UT), vs European civs that have to move from overseas with a much higher tech level but a limited max population. Meso civs have to survive long enough as they cannot knock europeans out, but using diplomacy they can ally with them to knock other meso civs out and eventually be the last one standing.
More of a scenario than a random map but if I want to make it thematic it would feel better. Anyway, design a map for a specific purpose, what conflict do you want to portray implying what areas you need. If you play a full Europe scenario, it would be for some massive wars like the Barbarian Invasions, the Mongol Invasions (assuming they go all-in as Ogedei didn’t go too hard on vodka this time) or any other continent-wide affair, there’s already so much that can be done.
The Full Europe would thus look like this, I just cut through the Sahara desert as nothing is supposed to happen here. Doesn’t matter much how far north and east it goes as you don’t expect northern Scandinavia or the Urals to have a lot of action. I did expand to the Near East though as this would be very demanded regions.
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I was envisioning a multi-purpose, Europe-centric map that could later be used for all kinds of conflicts—like the Mongol invasion of Europe, the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, the Ottoman wars, etc. Or even for any kind of “what if?” scenario.
Also, the Mercator projection isn’t good because it massively increases the size of Northern Europe, resulting in a very ugly-looking map. The best one is the equirectangular projection, but even that still needs some adjustments to look aesthetically pleasing. It’s a bit subjective, of course, but a good-looking Europe map should be flat, slightly enlarged, with minimal distortion—and definitely not an enormous Scandinavia.
This one isn’t good either, because it’s curved.
Can’t do without distortion due to projection over a wide area, most will acknowledge the issue can only be mitigated, don’t lose sleep over that. I prefer the equirectangular over Mercator, using straight latitude/longitude as XY coordinates, it limits the distortion and keeps north straight upward.
As for Britain, it should be impossible to treb London from Calais. And it should be impossible to hit Paris from the English Channel with cannon galleons. Both Britons and Franks lack Elite Cannon Galleons, which makes things easier. Moving Britain slightly northward is also fine.
These two would be my sole criteria for how big the map should be.
Both distances are around 150 km so less than 10 km per tile.
Considering the distance from Lisbon to Moscow is around 3000 km, you’ll need a Ludicris size, and even then it might be tight.
Looks like an Axis and Allies board in that art style lol.
Ludicrous maps are hardly playable.
First, we need to determine the smallest possible map size that prevents trebbing London from Calais (and prevents hitting Paris from the English Channel with cannon galleons), but still covers most of Europe. Otherwise, it would be impossible to play with Britons. That’s even more important than covering the eastern Mediterranean. that case I’d go with TougherTrack508’s map.
Did the math, 1 tile = 8 km (150 km < 17 range) so for all of Europe you have to go ludicrous. If you keep your range requirement.
Moved Britain slightly north, and slightly enlarged Germany and Italy.
We can also fill Dover and Calais with cliffs to prevent the treb issue.
One thing for the projection : it’s supposed to be a square (tilted 45°), it’s only lower than it’s wide to simulate depth, looking 3D-ish.
The map should thus cover a square tilted sideways, as I did in my projections. To extend further north and south. Otherwise the map will feel stretched horizontally
If you care about the north getting distorted too big, you can use the Peirce quincuncial projection
It slightly decreases the size of North Europe (compared with South Europe), but the effect is very modest.
People will think it looks weird when looking at the full projection, but if you cut out a diamond with Europe in it (or some other part of the world) it’ll be fine.
This projection distorts Europe very little. (And is a very good projection by various other metrics too.)
We can also see in this projection that Scandinavia is genuinely big. (Compared with Spain.)
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