Elemental: Fallen Enchantress Random Map Developer Journal

In order to give us a better understanding of the advancements they've made to Elemental's random world generator in Fallen Enchantress, Stardock has cranked out a new screenshot-laden developer journal penned by former Civilization V lead designer Jon Shafer. A snip:
On tiny maps, we made the continents kind of square-ish so we could fit as much (stuff) on the map as we could. But as you get larger, the interesting shaped continents really come into play. You will never see that world I just posted again because it was randomly generated.

At tradeshows I've talked to my friends at Firaxis (Civilization series) about the map generation (challenge) and it is one of the most programming intensive pieces of strategy game writing.

The philosophy of random map generation is different from game to game. Are we looking for (realistic) or (fun) or somewhere in-between? For Fallen Enchantress, we focused on continents that are interesting and otherworldly that present a lot of opportunity for choke points and exploration.