I have a few goals with the Basternae 3 surface map:
1. Has to be fairly small. No epic 90,000-room maps that take half an hour to get to the next zone.
2. Has to have both raidable and non-raidable sections. The raidable sections should be easy to get to for both sides. The non-raidable sections should be more-or-less “safe”.
3. Should be contiguous — no randomly-spaced islands, be they large or small.
In short — I want it to be small enough that the world doesn’t feel empty when there are only a few people on, but large enough to have room a good number of zones, and for people to chase each other around a bit. If there is an error to be made in sizing I’d prefer to err on the side of too small.
Here’s what I’ve come up with. It’s subject to modification, of course, but it captures the general idea:
It will be a while before it’s in the game, so it may evolve. There will also be cavern (underdark) map at some point.