CC3 Questions

[Gandwarf]

The only advice I can give:
- IF you decide to upgrade to CC3 you'll gets lots of symbols. Check them out first and then decide if you want any of the Symbol Sets.
- City Designer 3 is very great addon I think, but only if you plan to map a lot of cities, towns or large neighbourhoods.

I have no experience with CC2, the Tome or Fractal Mapper. When comparing maps between CC2 and CC3 the maps made with CC3 always look better. I am not sure if the features are a lot better or just the graphics.

[Midgardsormr]

The Tome's support files are not compatible with CC3, but I understand that most of the tutorials and such within it are still very useful. I don't have it, myself; I'm going to wait for the update, so don't take what I say about that subject as gospel.

Fractal Terrains is very nice if you need worlds completely from scratch or you want heightmap data. If you already have an idea of how you want your world to look, then I'd skip it for now.

City Designer is a wonderful product, but I think you might actually want to look at Dungeon Designer first--that's where you're going to get a lot of help for encounter-level maps.

Also, take a look at the Cartographers' Annual. Each month has a nice tutorial that produces a new and significantly different style. Most of them are overland maps with CC3 alone, but there are also some months with further support for Profantasy's other products.