First, a big thanks to everyone who has helped my map get this far. I am now ready to take the final steps to get my map completed.

I have three steps to completion. First, I need to establish general altitudes (using the least number of ranges that are necessary). As my map is based on Future Earth projections, this shouldn't be too hard, but I can play with a few things due to the natural forces at work. I would greatly appreciate any advice on how to make different lines for elevation changes (otherwise I'll probably use the "not-so-random coastline" method of Rob A to create different versions of the continent, using different colors and using those as altitudes).

With altitude established, I can move along to climate. I have a few resources that will help, but I'm sure there are some people on these boards that are quite skilled in this area of expertise. For instance, I know about the general bands of moisture and temperature (from equator to pole, I believe it goes hot/wet, hot/dry, cool/dry, cool/wet, or something like that). A climate map can be a lot more uniform than the altitude map, as it's generally guidelines anyway (there's no line where climate suddenly shifts after all).

With climate and altitude defined, I can get down to the important part: defining terrain type (as my map will largely be used for Gaming, this is what I fundamentally need). I'll probably be very simplistic with the terrain (such as desert, forest, grassland, wetland, and tundra, with hot, temperate, and cold versions of most; no hot tundra, that doesn't make sense). I'm under the impression that hill and mountain are more of a terrain feature than a terrain type, except where you get into alpine (which seems to be a type of tundra). Again, I'm not incredibly learned in this area, so suggestions would be much appreciated.

My ultimate goal is to have a multi layered map. The base layer will be the land and water, with an altitude layer (I'd like the altitude layer to note hilly land and mountains as well) and a terrain layer.

Here is a JPG of my base layer (shrunken to a small resolution, so there are annoying artifacts on it).



I've added longitude and latitude lines, as well as dotted lines for the arctic and tropic circles (which should greatly help in setting up climate).

Thanks everyone for any help offered.

PS: Why did my last thread get closed? Was I breaking proceedure?