That would be cool, but it would need a lot of development first, because we can't give you the internal tools that we're working with.

Some of these tools are in the client, like terraforming and placing decorations. But that's pretty much it, the rest of what's needed for creating an island is very rudimentary (imagine a website with numeric input fields), we'd need to make long documentations of it otherwise you wouldn't understand, split it somehow from all of the other admin stuff that you shouldn't see, and so on.

Right!

-Another thought would be just rending Pre determined maps, (kinda small) not the enourmous Gamma maps but something small.  So you give up say 6 maps you have already done the admin stuff on the back side with.  We take those 6 maps and then place decorations etc.. on them.  We each pull the maps and then start working on the either individual or on corperation level and then submit back to you and see what you think.

- Also think up the parameter settings so you won't spend 2 weeks editing, like ...  We don't want to see straight highways.  We don't want to see decoration spam, we want sprawling zones, or we want to see X number of this.  We don't want to see offensive stuff(obvious *** island fun land is out).  How many terminals per island, what the distance from Terminal to teleport should be, Highway to terminal placement zones recommended distance.

-This would be additionally handy for two things.  1 you see what the players want to see(lazy mode engaged!) and you might get some additional islands.

-Would you ever think of seeing MPC structures within alpha?  Like the little neat tidy villages?

Edit: Just reread what you wrote on something bigger than a 4" screen.  Bummer on the internal tools

well, for the terrain, you need two things
1. a free sculpting software tha allows working on hightmap
2. a shader for that software that allows  wysiwyg editing of the terrain with the original terrain textures.

the only issue i see, is the the low resolution of perps hightmap. (could have at least twice the resolution of the world-grid)

ok, correction - a second shader is necessary for displaying slope restrictions.

nope, but i have already tried to figure out how to get perps worldmap into supreme commander (1) as skirmish map 1:1 in size.

the use of hightmap is not that uncommon, and the use of shaders based on the mesh normals was something i played with in C4D 15 years ago.

watching some Z-Brush tutorials also gives you a hint on whats possible with expensive software, and watching the YT video of Siddy using a Cintiq to draw the hoko tournament Arena back in beta showed how fuggly the DEV tools are

I put months into making maps for AoE2.  So much fun.

How about you publish the specs, let us figure it out and have us build the tools?