While a fully fledged map-editor would take a long time to develop, being able to import a heightmap is something that the developers could implement with little effort. Of course, then you would be limited to 256 height-levels unless you used a bitmap-format with more than 8 bits per greyscale-level (or used something like R*65536+G*256+B). Unfortunately, even with a heightmap, you’d still have no control over town and industry placement, so you’d have a real-world country with all the towns in the wrong places. You could have a secondary bitmap with a spot telling the map-generator where to place a town, and spots in different colours telling it where to place industries. Then you’d have the wrong towns in the right places, but if you are then allowed to rename the towns, then you can have a proper real-world map. Also, we could have a third bitmap telling the map-generator where to place trees, farms, etc. Or a fourth bitmap telling where coal, iron etc. are buried so that the industries can be placed randomly only in those areas.
Train Fever
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