A couple moments of indecision and doubt on my map after looking at the other entrants. I wonder if I'm not overdoing the Photoshop effects a bit, especially around the text. The original purpose of the outer glows was to improve legibility of the text against the terrain shading. I've started experimenting with Inkscape a bit to see if I can do a better job of labelling and marking cities and towns in it.

I'm also looking at the national borders - is the current hard 3D-ish line good, or would something softer be more effective with the landscape style? I've played around with different PS effects and come up with this variant, but I'm not sure if it's better, worse, or merely different.

Click image for larger version.  Name: Saythen-test.jpg  Views: 64  Size: 207.9 KB  ID: 35891

The outside burn definitely highlights the country itself, but at the expense of obscuring the underlying terrain.

Alternatively, I can do a flat line, something like this:
Click image for larger version.  Name: Saythen-test2.jpg  Views: 60  Size: 205.5 KB  ID: 35892

A single borderline gets lost visually amidst the terrain effects, but a dual like this seems to be visible.

I will keep playing with styles and see if I can come up with something that looks better. Previewing this post I can tell that the burn is definitely much more visible when the map is in thumbnail form. The borderline is practically invisible.