Working on Some New Map Making Methodologies

I've been so far behind some projects as of late that I'm past the point of getting too worked up about them. Instead of working on a future map I spent all of today trying to figure out some new software that might make some of my map efforts a lot better.

The process I was using was a bit laborious and certain parts of my maps I wasn't happy with. This new software is not only overkill, but one of those things you practically need a year's worth of college coursework to understand. At best I'd only be scratching the surface of what this thing can do and I think it took me four or five hours just to figure out how to consistently get the data I put into the program back out in a format I could use.

The bad news is that I can't rely on this software to do my entire map. The good news is that the two most difficult & largest time-suck parts of my map can be done in a fraction of the time it has been taking before, with much better results.

This is the map I made today, which is the same area as Free Map060:

This is a relatively "quick" map which I'm not happy with at all. The good thing is though that this map's layers were easy to create and instead of taking up a lot of time getting the base layers I can spend more time tweaking and finessing what I have here while still adding the missing elements like I had been doing all along.

When I'm working on very large scale maps, being able to skip hours and hours of layer cleanup with my old methodology will be a huge boon. I should be able to create a large map and then zoom in to a smaller section much more easily.