Very interesting! I see what you’ve done with Novgorod; that’s very clever. I’ve wanted to do something along those lines, but couldn’t quite figure out how. I guess you’ve enlarged Lake Ladoga far beyond its actual size, but if you include the marshes and tundra and areas like that which were difficult for infantry/tanks to cross, then it makes sense. I very much like the way that stacking Novgorod with German infantry would (1) allow the Russians to continue fighting the Finns from Leningrad, (2) prevent the Russians from attacking Army Group Center out of Leningrad, and (3) not put any particular pressure on Moscow itself.
I also like the river connections; that’s interesting. I might add one myself to connect the Caspian and the Black Sea, maybe only usable if you control both North and South Caucasus, or one of them, or something like that.
I think we have some similar design goals; I agree that Germany should not be forced to capture Moscow, and that nations should continue producing income and building units even after losing their capital (that was one of the first rules changes I made in my map). I like the idea of optionally sending a few Russian units south; in my 1942 setup, I have Persia waiting to be claimed by either Russia or Britain (Allied player’s choice). I like the idea of Baku, but I left it out of my map because I didn’t have room for it. All of my ‘circle’ territories are the same size, and all of them are victory cities – that helps me keep the map cleaner and easier to read, but it does limit some of my options.
Part of what you need to make good relief tiles is a strong sense of graphic design – you have to know how to paint a map in a way that will look attractive. That I can’t help you with; I’m not an artist in that sense. On a technical level, though, the relief map is just the regular map with the white land color and the navy sea color both replaced by transparent nothing. You make all of the solid areas of the map transparent, and then you add on a translucent layer with whatever features you want to include in the map. E.g. if you want to show canals, or rivers, or forts, or stalin’s smiling face, etc., you just put it on the relief map where you want it to appear, and you make sure it’s at least 30% (preferably closer to 80%) transparent so that players will be able to see the map underneath your relief art. Then you use the Tile Breaker in the Map Creator Utillity to create relieftiles for you automatically, the same way you create your basetiles – just select the relief map instead of the main map, and select the reliefTiles folder instead of the baseTiles folder.
You may find this thread helpful:
https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/2315/trouble-getting-relieftiles-images-to-appear-in-the-game?_=1601592309277
