@Argothair
Yeah, although making a colorblind friendly map isn’t the goal in itself, its just a natural consequence of making better graphic design choices hehe. The stuff I’m talking about is very much for players with normal vision. Since our brains fixate on patterns and our eyes are drawn to contrast in any image, and because value is such an extremely powerful component in that, the first thing I’m drawn to in your draft (just like the WWII maps), is all the neutral tiles. So my eye darts around from Sweden to Arabia to South America etc, because that is where the highest value contrasts are occuring. There are lots of ways contrast can be used to highlight various focal points in an image, I just think that the standard WWII maps do a poor job of it, so I wouldn’t suggest following them as a model.
Instead I would set the primary value contrast between the land tiles and the ocean tiles, so the whole map reads well at a glance. If you have the variation on land be in the mid-range values, which can still be very dramatic at either end of the mids, you can eliminate the unseemly pops while still preserving the high contrast for something more relevant like you wanted between Axis territories and Allied territories.
I just brought it up since its a new map you are free to make a different color value choice for the ocean than they did for Revised/Global, which is now the default for all those WWII maps.
For sure, I read over the ideas on how to streamline and simplify, Russia balance etc and it all sounds good to me. Nice work