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Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness Hints
Placing land tiles
First off, make the level look interesting. Don't make everything square like. There's nothing more boring than that. Spruce it up a bit. Put oddly shaped clumps of trees. Have the water bank and curve, instead of flowing straight. Even include shapes of things: one of the built-in scenarios has a picture of Pac-Man and a ghost on the screen!
When putting down rivers, make sure that they're wide enough so that ships can get through them! And also, put a large space around oil patches, so that ships can also move around them too. When placing oil patches, don't put them too close to a shore. Remember that Shipyards and Refineries cannot be built too close to them.
With gold mines, make a lot of them. Many people like more gold mines, more of them to annex. Also put a lot of gold in these mines.
Put various things of "interest" around. Just click on that "Random Interest" button and put some around. Also, you may want to try putting down dark tiles, to give areas a slightly different look.
When making a path or something, you'll want something smaller than the 1x1 square, which is the smallest possible. So, do this: outline the path with the "Dry Mud" square with 1x1. Now, choose the normal "Grass" square (also 1x1) and place them not directly next to the mud path, but one space over. It'll make the mud path skinnier. Do this all around. You can also use a similar method to make mountains smaller (as I usually think they are too big).
Don't put too much "Dry Mud" or whatever squares around. You can't build on these, and not being able to build on certain areas can make it rather frustrating. But some a little in, to break up the monotony in the background.
Try not to have too many areas of just fields. Put some trees in there, or something. You will want some, for building room (with a gold mine close by) but unless you want all-out on the battlefield wars, put trees around.
I usually chosse 96x96 maps, because anything higher slows down my 486/33. If you have lots of units on the screen in any map size about 64x64, you'll also be prone to slowdown if you have a slow computer. If you have at least a 486/66, you can probably do 128x128 without too much trouble. If making multi-player maps with more than 4 players, definitely make it 128x128.
