How best to represent the whole world in a map?

[Oliver]

So I'm playing around with an idea for a project which would include representations of real world empires.

So I see there are a few options for doing this:

1) Have a scaled down map of the world
Pros:
Easy
Realistic

Cons:
Lots of "wasted" space in the sea and places like Siberia, Australia, Inhospitable parts of africa eg Saraha.
Places of interest which would ideally have more area (eg France, Germany, Near East, Japan, UK) are so tiny they don't meet their full potential.

2) Have a warped version of the world where places of interest are made larger and other areas are scaled/rotated to remove "wasted space"
Pros:
Better detail in "places of interest"
Effect can be increased for a smaller map.
Can pick anywhere you want as a place of interest, at expense of the areas near it (which are shrunk relative to it)

Cons:
Gets very unrealistic fast
I'm finding this very hard to do
Still have lots of areas of "un interest" which are kept around because they're close to areas of interest

3) Have separate maps at different scales linked with waygates. I saw a War in Europe Victoria map which did this, so Europe is a high definition map with Asia and America split as separate maps.
Pros:
Lets certain continents have very high detail
Each area looks fairly realistic

Cons:
Still lots of wasted space
Some points of interest (eg Japan, South Africa, parts of North America) are in too small-er definition
Waygates limit freedom of movement for units.

4) Have certain areas are represented on the map, others are represented by buildings or trade routes alone. Eg on the edge of a map there is a circle of power which trade ships can interact with to "trade" with the phillipines.

Pros:
Fairly easy to do
Limits scope of scenario making it easier to finish (less factions to flesh out)

Cons:
Difficult to figure out nice representations.
Can't really do "colonial" combat stuff very well (eg missing out on spanish colonies in Americas and Philippines)
Downplays the importance of certain important areas.
Missing out some key factions (eg missing Japan and China if the focus is on europe)




So with my current thoughts out of the way, does anybody have any other ideas for mapping the whole world or for improvements to the ideas listed here?
What negative impacts do larger maps have? does it take the AI longer to path find?
As a side note for this, which tileset is best for this? In the past I've used sunken ruins since it's dirt makes a fairly good sand texture.

cheers

 

[noob]

Larger maps can be boring due to travel times.
You could have separate maps at different scales for the regions connected by line teleporters (in order to get rid of the sea excess) and an intermediate sized world map(roughly twice the size of one cam view) that you can switch to and from with a button then try to make a custom pathfinding system (so you can give units orders to move to another region of the big map from the big map and the unit would automatically move in the right direction to teleport).
The problem is vastly augmented work.
It is also possible to add a lot of extra things to area which were low in content but it is complicated to do and can be less interesting than working on things you like.

 

[Goffterdom]

It depends on what you want to achieve gameplay-wise (you said it yourself: I want players to trade, colonialize etc.)

How many units are fighting at once? (IE what ideal size a small, medium and large battlefields would be?)

How many players at once on the map? Where do they start?
Okay so how many "points of interest" to make sure these players meet?
Where should they be? How should they be connected (depending on where and when you want your player to meet, who should have a ground disadvantage etc.)

Okay, you're starting to have a "cloud of points" representing points of interest of different sizes.

What does it look like? What scales does it seem to have? Do you have like three point in Russia and nothing around?

Play around with the dots and see if you can fit your matrix of "points of interest / connectors" within an acceptable scale for you.

 

[Lon-ami]

Open sea is useless unless you plan to have lots of naval battles, so I'd just move the continents and islands closer, ignoring realistic distances, and then use naval routes for naval transport.

These naval routes would be represented by mazes in the sea, their length mimicking realistic distances. In the map, Australia would be right next to Africa and India, but to move there you'd spent quite some time, since you wouldn't be able to sail in a straight line. You can apply the same concept to land routes.

Personally, I don't like waygates, they're too easy to exploit, be it an ambush or a choke point. Ranged units are at a disadvantage there too.

I'm sure you want it to cover as much as possible, but the scope is usually the biggest problem. Following your example, you can represent most of America following the Spanish viceroyalties (which weren't colonies, by the way), each with its own government and such. So yeah, just resize America to just the same size as Europe, or even smaller, and call it a day.