It’s true that A&A maps (and A&A-type maps from other games) always include distortions, with diffent areas being shrunk or expanded or re-proportioned. Different maps, however, do it to varying degrees. In the Global 1940 map, for instance, Africa is about twice as wide as it’s tall – but in this map…
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/672203/wwii-struggle-europe-and-asia?size=large
…it’s three or perhaps even four times wider than it’s tall, which to me at least makes the continent unrecognizable. Generally speaking I quite like the Global 1940 map, both because of its semi-topographical look and because the distortions it contains are (speaking very generally, and acknowledging that there are exceptions) distortions of size rather than distortions of shape. South America, for example, is much too small relative to Africa, but its overall shape is pretty accurate.
From a game-map perspective, two big problems with the real world are that it’s spherical (meaning that any flat map will include distortions due to projection requirements) and that it contains both an awful lot of “wasted” space and an awful lot of “crowded” space. The Pacific Ocean is an obvious example of wasted space: it’s mostly empty, yet it covers about one-third of the world’s surface. A similar but less obvious problem is that most of the world’s land masses are located in the northern hemisphere, which contains all of North America and Europe, virtually all of Asia (the world’s largest continent, with 30% of Earth’s land area), and more than half of Africa. The only appreciable land masses below the Equator are the majority of South America, the lower section of Africa, and all of Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica; the rest of the southern hemisphere is mostly water.
Some of the world’s land areas have the opposite problem: they’re too crowded. The land area running west-to-east from France to the Volga and north-to-south from the Baltic coast to the Mediterranean coast is tiny on a proper world map, or on a globe, but most of the fighting in WWII (if you go by troop numbers and by military and civilian casualties) took place there. Since cramming that much action into a space that small is clearly impractical for game-mapping purposes, the tempting solution is to shrink the “wasted” mostly-empty parts of the world and to use the saved space to expand the “crowded” parts of the world where you need to deploy lots of troops and equipment. I think it’s a valid approach as long as one doesn’t go overboard and take the distortions too far (especially the distortions of shape, which I think are more problematic than distortions of size).
One side-effect, however, is what I’d call “cartographic determinism” – choosing what areas to expand (or even depict outright) and which ones to shrink (or even eliminate altogether) based on retroactive knowledge of where the major actions of WWII were actually fought (as opposed to where they might have been fought). For example, the Pacific 1940 map doesn’t mention Yap (which has a land area of 100 square kilometers) but it does mention Iwo Jima (which has a land area of just 21 square kilometers) because the latter was the site of a major amphibious campaign while the former was not. The Europe 1940 map allocates lots of space to northern Africa because of the Desert Campaign that was fought there, and little room to southern Africa because no land battles were fought there. Likewise, the map divides the country of Libya into two map territories: “Libya” to the west and “Tobruk” to the east. This east-west division has some geographic validity, since Libya did used to have three administrative divisions (Tripolitania in the northwest, Fezzan in the southwest, and Cyrenaica in the east), but the labeling reflects the events of WWII: Cyrenaica is called “Tobruk” because Tobruk – which is actually just a port city – was the site of major battles. And so forth. These are valid design decisions, but in a sense theymight subconsciously “channel” players into replicating the course of WWII as it was actually fought rather than leaving them more open to alternate courses of action.
