Here's what I've done so far. Made from satellite data, but I had to add the lakes and most of the Carribean islands by hand, which was a real *****.
Firstly a bit of shameless advertising The mod will start in 1689 and finish just before the American war of Independence in 1775. It will focus on the conflicts between the European colonial powers (predominantly England, France and Spain) and Native Americans in North America. If you are interested in helping out, pm me, but development and recruitment will not 'officially' start until the expansion is released, which I will be basing it on.
Now that's out the way, I have quite a few questions
1. First I just want to make sure it's not too big- I can't seem to find what the hardcode is. It's 1001x856.
2. Does the game take from this larger image when deciding where to place water/land or from the half-sized one? Just, when I halve it some islands are split in two, navigatable rivers become blocked etc.
3. Does it matter how I reduce the size? I was thinking of resampling with pixel resize through paintshop, will this work fine? And I just make it 500x425 right?
4. Is there somewhere which will tell me all the different terrains/climate/ground type RGBs? I can find them for RTW but not M2TW.
5. I was thinking of doing a huge 'terra incognita' province that's split up to take several areas across the map, like RTR7. I was wondering if there's some special technique to doing this, and if it will actually work (as it's been said they have completely remade their map, so it could have been buggered somehow).
6. What does the roughness image do? Add impassable mountains?
7. What are the minimum files I need to test the map, and where should I put them?
Thanks in advance