Glad I checked back in on this thread. Thanks for the kind words, everyone, and thanks to NoeL for the new palette! I've always felt that the AI overworld palette seems just a little too bland.
If anyone's curious, although the tiles are all PrinceMSC's in origin, I've actually put more work than I care to recall into that map. Prince's original ai.qst is very incomplete and you'd really struggle to complete a quest in it. I've been tinkering with the tileset to make it more functional in ZC (namely 2.5) for almost a decade--since 2008. The amount of time I've spent making objects compatible with all the different terrains, extrapolating from the sparse beginnings of dungeon sets, and completely restructuring the palette is enormous. And, at the end of the day, I'm not doing this for myself alone--I'm doing it so that the community can have another tileset, hopefully preserving a bit of ZC history in the process.
As for the map itself, I actually drew two rough sketches of the area on a 4x4 grid to make sure that everything would flow right from a gameplay perspective, and then drew another detailed map to make sure that everything would look good to the player. I really wanted the island to be fun to explore, and I tried to back that up with visuals that would make you want to explore it. It means a lot to me to see the community confirm that those hopes were successful.
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FS, I actually quite like your map. The tiles are unique and for some reason I always like to see the trees from Koten blended in. If I had to offer some critique, it'd be that the cliffs don't feel entirely natural; with a bit more variation in height, or with a few sections where the cliff splits into two tiers and then rejoins later, it'd look much more like something you might find out in the wild.
And I know the frustration of working really hard on something only to be totally outclassed by Ebola Zaire and Evile. Damn it, Ebola! This is why Cast Chaos made your cameo creepy.