My maps for No Quarters -- Progress or Regress?

[Cheomesh]

This is my first post here, and the first maps I'm sharing. I'm not a particularly artistic person, but I think I'm starting to get somewhere. These are for a fantasy table top game called No Quarters. Though it's not widely known, I like it because it allows me to customize my army from the ground up, letting me calculate custom stats for units and weapons.

The first few versions were brown-scale, done from a tutorial I found linked here, I think. The brown scale ones were all done using cloud layers and posterization.

My concept started off with something like an island chain, with the equator up at the top of the map.



Then I changed it, with the land being something like Australia, a large but isolated continent.



Didn't care much for that idea, so I shifted to the much more familiar "justified" map.



After eventually rejecting that, I decided to do it in color this time. Unfortunately this time around I wasn't able to get the cloud layers to work like they had before (upgraded from CS3 to CS4). The resulting maps sucked, and I decided to go with a hand-drawn version done in Photoshop itself (don't have access to a good enough scanner to do it by pencil). I decided to do a "normal" version, complete with a half-assed attempt at height-mapping, and a "political" version to show the people playing just how far reaching a particular faction was. I lost the mountain brushes I had before, so I found one here. If these are your mountains I'm using, they're fantastic.


==


Unfortunately, I thought it was a bit small after a while, so I enlarged it (and will probably enlarge it again) to open space for more players in the future (particularly up and left). This lead to the current versions:


==


So I thought I'd share these and see what the "pros" think. I've seen a good few awesome maps here that use tools I've never used in PS before. Currently, I just use simple brushes and layers. No cities and the like are marked as they don't currently "matter". That'll come later. How do you think these could be improved? I'm not entirely sure I want to go for a really realistic map, more similar to a colorful but simple version for the moment, but you never know; I can be pretty fickle about these things as you can see. The real size of the "current" version is 2304x1440; up from 1920x1200 which is the first color version.

If you want more information about the game world I've made, I have a wiki for it here.

M.

[Ascension]

Looks good to me. No need to get all fancy...sometimes an easy to read map is best.