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I've got two problems with the FI map as an image (gameplay notwithstanding)

The larger is that the base icons are simply too large. They're hiding the names of some areas and in many cases overlapping borders so it's not immediately recognizable which area they're in.

The end result is that the map looks cluttered, and my immediate reaction is that the person who created it simply didn't spend very much time on it.


The overlays are very cool, and they diminish the issue quite a bit, but it's very mouseclick intensive and a convoluted way to solve a simple problem.

The underlying problem with this is that by making the base icons small enough that they fit inside the territory and don't overlap with the territory name, the base icons themselves become unreadable. That was the problem that I had with making this OYW map, and fixed it by adding the additional sector maps. Doing something like that is probably impossible for FI because it simply has so many sectors, and the map is not the same as a real world map, so it would be hard to get the supplementary images necessary to create them and make them look believable.

You could just make the map larger, but any larger and it may not fit on some users screens. The map already feels a little bit large to me. I dunno, it's not an easy problem to solve, but creating a system with overlays like that seems too roundabout to me, and too intensive on the user. You want the end result to have the minimum number of required mouseclicks.


The second and lesser problem with the FI map, and this one is very simple to solve (albeit time consuming), is that it's just an ugly image. All the cut ins where there's water areas from colony drops and what not look arbitrary and not based on any real geography. The base icons need 1 pixel borders so that the colors don't clash so much and look like hastily done copy-pastes. The names of areas are often in positions where the background is both land and water, which can be hard to read. Middle East has those weird white borders which aren't repeated anywhere else on the map and look jagged. A couple areas names are different font sizes seemingly arbitrarily. The base icons themselves do not appear to all be the same. It's as if a larger image was scaled down in size, pasted multiple times, and then saved as a .jpg so that the artifacts changed the de-scaled image in different ways for each icon.

The image itself just needs some care taken to it so that it's cleaned up and every part of the image is consistent with every other part of the image.

Map page needs a key too. It has no key.



For what it's worth though Threid, it looks to me like you're doing a lot of work to make pretty big improvements on problems that were the result of somebody elses negligence.