Test Map for future projects

Gameplay of a 6 person hard AI (don't mind the puppers in the background playing):

Lines under control now with Aero's help. Also added some coastline color difference.

Been messing around with some additional visuals that I think may appease the "it's not red so it doesn't quite look like Mars" thought process.

Adds:
- coastline from previous post
- mini-map with proposed region bonuses
- title
- shading in two continents (Serenum & Urmander - Bottom left "5" continent and center "6" continent)

The idea with the shading was to highlight major geographical features (mountains, craters, obvious cracks or drags) in two different shades of orangish-red. I think it begins to bring to life the idea of the actual planet being terraformed, with some of its "red history" remaining. I only added this shading to those two continents for the time being to gain some feedback on the process. Let me know your thoughts please.

the map is shaping up.
i just figured out what terraformed means. so the theme is making sense.

This is similar to what we use in the cartography panel to make sure the colours work for colour blind
https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/

in normal vision, the bottom left and region worth 6 are too similar. having similar colours in a map is fine, but it can be confusing when they are connected to each other. The territory Ji could belong to either.

Oooh, good eye. I'll work at that with the territory colors also. Thank you.

Think this may be better for color blind:

Capitals?

Capitals need to be either all on borders or all internal territories

You have had a good learning curve on the order of construction and have pretty much got to grips with the line work.

Sea Connections are difficult in Photoshop (unless someone knows of a tool or preset that can do them precisely). What you must avoid is resizing them or distorting them in any direction as they blur. Even rotating lines causes blurring. Lots of Sea Connections also make a map very busy and hard to follow, especially under time pressure. Therefore wherever possible, use straight connection lines, they are more crisp and more intuitive.

After gameplay setup, your Colour choices, Font type & size choices, Texture choices are all really important to the look and feel of the map.
It's always good to have each of your regions on a separate layer, so that you can make copies, check the "Lock Transparency" on the layer and paint the copied region a different colour to experiment with different tones and adjacent colours.

Choosing a real topography as your texture restricts it, but you should still experiment with the Opacity / Transparency of texture and always try to ensure that unrealistic features aren't caused, such as craters cut through by land outlines putting part of the crater in the sea, but no water filling into the crater. Simply draw your outlines around any land that would definitely be above the waterline. Try to think 3 Dimensional for where the waterline would be.

Personally, I would have opted for far less islands and simply joined up most of them, preferring inlet seas like the Baltic & Mediterranean on Earth for where you wanted land separation.

Sea colour is just as important to the look of the map as the land colours. The sea can even change the whole brightness of a map, making it glaring or dark, as it is usually about half of the image and mostly all one colour.