Somehow I think I am failing to state my question accurately.

Let me try another way:

You are hired to create a world map and several regional maps of said world. Lets say they plan to hang them on their wall. Obviously the regional maps will show more detail than the world map but you still want them to have the same shape and major features.

I guess if it were in vector you can shrink and expand the areas as needed but you still deal with what detail to show or not as well as pixel loss at some point. I don't use much vector software other than Inkscape and I'm not great with it except for making labels.

So basically I am asking what methods have others found useful to do this. I have an idea but if there is a shortcut I'm all ears.

If I was doing everything by hand on paper I would have to make sure I didn't put a mountain where none existed on the other one (world/regional).