Need a helping hand with an existing map

[Hippo]

I don't think the problem is about what you have, but rather about what you're missing. Transportation network needs details. Are you going to make the cities look like something other than dots?

True, transportation network only contains motorways. The problem is that when I try to add smaller roads, they never seem realistic enough. Major cities already contain yellow (urban) areas.

[gilgamec]

Hi! I've done some work on this, but real life has reared its head and I'm not going to be able to do anything more with it. It was harder than I had expected, due largely to some problems (not necessarily your fault) in the SVG file; Illustrator definitely didn't like it!

(I spent a lot of time gluing together bits of motorways and rivers with up to four different transformations.) Again, this may just be how Illustrator handles Inkscape-generated SVG files; it certainly throws a warning about it.

I also noticed some problems in the geography that you may want to look at:

• As foremost mentioned, the transportation network needs work. I'm particularly wondering about the motorways, which tend to avoid towns and terminate in the middle of nowhere, neither of which looks much like highways of my experience. (You also have two M88s, one near Montrouge, one near Warwick.)
• The river network doesn't make sense. Depending on the direction of flow of the East River, either Hippo Lake has three outflows (East, Avon, Hippo rivers) or the East River splits in two at Studham. Both are no-nos. Also, the Guezermeer has far too many outflows, and they split several times, which doesn't make sense unless Oranjeland is basically a two-hundred kilometer wide swamp.

Anyway, attached is a sample of what I managed to make of the map, and may serve as a style example. Towns don't have names because the positions all change if you change the font size, so positioning should either be made relative or at least done last.