Critique/Tips Wanted

[Nekrosys]

Please look at my map and voice your opinion, keep in mind this is my first map i've completed and the majority was done in MS Paint. Be honest i am not fragile lol

[Elterio Delgard]

Beautiful map Nekrosys, but with so many rivers you should have some lakes. I like your forests, pretty cool! You should try to label some régions a little bit more, so that we have the impression that the landscape changes even more. But so far for a first map it is great!

[Azélor]

That is a pretty good map considering it was done in MSPAINT. You could try the Gimp for your next map (it's free) , you'll see that using multiple layers really makes it a lot easier.

One thing that i noticed on you map is how the mountains appear to come out from nowhere. You have multiples ranges crisscrossing each other and that looks unnatural.

The flow of your river seems problematics. You have at least one passing under a mountain range. Also, many of these rivers are neither reaching the ocean or an inland sea. Maybe they get dried up before reaching the sea like the Colorado river?

I think there is a problem regarding you climates as well. Maybe this is getting too technical but if your interested: coniferous forests are generally found in the. 1 the boreal forest (cold), 2 in higher altitude, and 3 on some temperate regions with an oceanic climate (usually on the west coast if your planet is rotating like Earth). So in this case it's probably meant to be a boreal forest but then there is a desert far up north. It is possible to have a desert there but unlikely because it would need to be extremely dry. As you move closer to the pole, it gets colder and thus in order to have a desert, you need to lower the precipitations even more. If you look at Mongolia for example, you can see that most of the country is not quite dry enough to be a desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geogra...sification.svg and Mongolia is located south of the boreal forest, it's supposed to be hotter and so, drier than your desert.

And if I can add a last tip, the placement of the name of the kingdom is not good. It's too close to the border of the map. If it's a title, it would be better in the top middle. If it's to indicate the location of the kingdom on the map, it would be either inside the kingdom's border of very close to it, in order to avoid confusion.

[tilt]

Looks really good, especially for your first map I leave the climate comments to azelor and give a few comments about the graphics - I like your icons, nice mountains, better trees and cities. The towns seems to week in comparison to the cities though, and the blurriness under the mountains and forests seems a bit distracting as well as the blurriness in the water. But damn nice and as Azelor mentions, see what you can do with a software upgrade to gimp

[Robulous]

Great start for a first map - that must've been very hard work in MS Paint! As Azelor says try GIMP, a learning curve but makes life easier in the long run.

The sea shading is a little heavy handed but given the limitations of Paint that's hardly surprising. Also the icon you've used for most of the land - I assume you intend that to be grassland? To my mind that looks more like a swamp/marsh symbol.

Your coastline is very smooth, which is ok for an antique-maps style as they tend to have less detail, but the shape of those islands look a little too naive and unnatural. Take a look at the shape of island clusters on real world maps.

The rivers are a problem. Rivers branch like trees, they flow from multiple branches on high ground, into a main "trunk" that flows to the sea. It's a common mistake for many of us mappers, I've even seen horrendous river police violations in maps printed in well-known fantasy books!

Have a browse of our tutorials section, the Rivers thread in particular.

But well done and welcome!