Trails and Routes - 1867

I don't know, I kind of liked the old one more. The excessive layers in the latest version makes smothered in way..
I wonder what it would look like if you gave the previous version more of a 3D-ish effect.

I prefer the old frame, but is still looked like a wall chart of the ancient trails.... perhaps that's what you were going for?
With regard to the map itself, of course the background land and regions have to be subdued and the main features are the trails, circles and labels, so they need to be more prominent.
If you darkened the trail lines and also separated the Labels more from the background with either a bolder stroke line or a dark sprayed overlay, those two adjustments would separate the foreground from the background more.

What if you made the edges ragged? Like an old rolled up map that someone hand written the trails on? It could be a transparent PNG so the board background would show up.

I adjusted the text up to be one pt larger, two for the title. The text on the inside of the stroke should be more clear and I made the stroke a little stronger. Because of the text changes, I moved some of the names a bit as well as adjusted the circle for Dallas / Fort Worth, since the text for that was already so close to the dotted trail line. The trail lines were also thickened a little and should look slightly darker.

I tried some variations to the border and was not satisfied with anything I tried. So this version is going borderless to see how that looks.

Thanks Glanru, it's all getting refined nicely.
Because it's a P2P map with connections junctioning at circles, it's probably best to delete the connections where the circles will sit, as Psymon did on the Switzerland map.

The labels still need to be more in the foreground... perhaps a dark outer glow to give them more contrast to the background?

Have we discussed the font? I can't remember now. What would an 1867 USA font look like, do you have ideas or references about that?
Personally I like the font used in the title, perhaps that can be used on the labels.

Is this the original size of the map ? dimensions are only 944 - 687

@ aeronautic, Both types of fonts were used, but differed on size. I'll play around with that while I'm trying to make it stand out more as the foreground. I hadn't considered removing dots for the circles, I'll see what I can do there.

@Hoodlum, I just cropped it to see what people thought about it without the border. So yes, it is smaller. It would be easy to blow it back up to proportion to get back to the 1024 width.

I didn't like any changes to the font type, but I did decide to up the size again. After removing the trail dots from where the circles were, I had to adjust many of the circles a little to fit them within the remaining dots.

100% view

Much better with the deleted dots.

I don't want to cause you lots of time adjusting and readjusting so I'll try to convey what the map needs.

Stand back and look at the map overall, it appears to be a faint map, this is because even though the map needs the background to be faint, the images are not faint enough and the labels and dotted connections are slightly camouflaged..
The connections and labels also need to be separated more from the background, so they need to get some contrast by way of dark pixels between them and the background.

Reduce the opacity of the images in the background a little bit (I think these are the main cause of the lack of contrast).
On the labels, even a tiny bit of dark outer glow or drop shadow would raise the contrast.
The dotted lines need to be slightly darker or more black.

I also added a 100% view to your post, it makes a big difference to see it at actual size.
It was this link with the outer brackets included: url=https://images2.imgbox.com/a5/89/ig1WzfDN_o.png]100% view[/url

I made several small changes to the background, including lowering the opacity of the images.
I thickened the stroke around the labels a little and added a drop shadow.
The more I tried to adjust the dots to be darker, the more glaring they became. I decided to try out a light glow instead.

100% View

The labels seem just right now, but I think the dotted connections need to be glaringly black.
We need them to be in the foreground and that means standing out, right now they are almost part of the background images and state lines.

What I'm pushing for is during a game, a player being able to look at the map and initially only see the connections, labels & circles, then notice all the detail behind them when they have time.

I've tried several adjustments to the dotted connections and various other line types. I am not getting any results that I think are good enough quality. I've been fairly busy, but if I get more time I'll make some more attempts.