Central and Eastern Cyro'bar - For my novel - (help will be dearly appreciated)

[Rhotherian]

Update - Latest state of the map (fixed the mountains, drew in the equator and Arctic Circle and added nations):

Legend:
Dotted red lines = Majour roads
Red circle-dot-things = Majour/notable Settlements (size of dot roughly represents size of city/town in comparisson to other dots)
Huge red circle-dot-things = Capitol cities. There are only two on this map, Darwin and Valdin. I think I posted the maps of both those cities (one of which, Darwin, is the largest and oldest human colony (in the tiny white area somewhere on the border of the green and yellow) on the planet and the other, Valdin, is the capitol of the one nation (on the southern shore of the yellow area) of native aliens (oxymoron-lol)).
Coloured bits = The edges of nations
Black lines between coloured bits = National borders
Semi-transparrent black curved line thingies = The northern one's the Arctic Circle, the southern one's the Equator




Well, this is a map of the central and eastern parts of the continent of Cyro'bar on the fictional world of Novusvita and is the setting for the first book in my The Peoples of Algol trilogy, The Start of Two Journeys.

The area of the map is about the size of China (the planet is about half the size of Earth). The grey is land and the white represents bodies of water (the oceans, seas and lakes).

I went about making this map by doing the following:
-Generating multiple worlds on Fractal Terrains, then cutting my favourite bits from each map and pasting them together to form a single map.
-Taking the aforementioned world map and orbing it in Fractal Terrains, then print-screening a zoomed-in view of the part of the map I wanted.
-I then took that image, traced it with a brush in GIMP and coloured it to show land and sea.

I still have a .xcf file of the map with the outline as a seperate layer.


In the second attached file, the black is mountainous area (it has to be overlayed onto the map). Let me tell you more about that:

I traced the areas that should be mountainous (this does not necessarily meen high in elevation, as no mountains does not necessarily meen low in elevation) using the selection tool, based on the original topographic Fractal Terrains image and my own interpretation of where tectonic fault lines should lie. I then aplied a black/white gradient to the selected region, made it a new layer and used it as a height map. The result was... disgusting.

So I undid that, now having no idea how to go about making the mountains.


My goal is to create a realistic looking map like the super-amazing ones I see all over this place (I'm talking about those that basically look like a view from space, but without clouds or sun-shading). However, I also want it to include the borders of nations, the locations of cities and roads and text labelling the map.

If all else fails, a simple un-coloued map would also work.

I also have images fitting that map which show the following:
-Topography (Fractal Terrains image).
-Which areas belong to which biomes, as well as where the equator lies.
-Where the tectonic plate boundaries roughly lie.
-Roads, cities and other notable settlements and the territories of the nations present in that region.

The topographical and tectonic maps are just for referencing mountain locations and such. I have yet to work out river placement.


So, uh, what should I do next? I really don't know where to begin...