Good Map Textures

Large tiles (dominant texture) alone:

Large tiles blended with metal (recessive texture), a diamond shaped brush with maximal opacity used:

Natural cliffs and dirt texture added:

The formerly recessive metal texture is now dominant, the dirt is recessive. The seams of the metal texture are intact. Rock is added to the dirt texture with a round, soft brush with minimal opacity. The rock texture is especially added to the parts that are near the cliff.

Alrigthy then.
The tileset I'll use for this tutorial is Agria.
Let's start with a sketch. That's the logical first step where you don't think about the details, just about the genereal look you want to achieve. The basic shape of the map, like cliffs, starting locations and ressources come before that, but I feel that good texturing is the most important part of letting your map look good. Doodads are just used to further improve upon that, but can never make up for bad texturing. So, right now I created a representative little village, and I want a street that goes through it. Our whole village is built on a high ground, and there is another high ground to the right. Furthermore, I want some farming and two small forests, so far representated by the Agria-foliage texture (the dark green one). So this is how our village looks like with the textures sketched on it:

The street is on the dirt texture, and concrete is used to show where our village should be.
Now, I'd like to group textures into two different categories, those that I would use spaciously, and those that I'd use for transitions. So far, all textures I used are those that I'd use spaciously. Some textures usually don't look good when used like that, and those are textures that may be used for transitions. Rubble and stuff like this are textures I use for transitions. This classification is anything but definite, most textures are somewhere in between but just more useful as one. Textures with big elements that are better left intact or boring textures without too much detail are usually spacious textures while textures with many easily recognisable small details or rough textures are more useful as transition textures.
In this case, I used a rough dirt texture for the transition:

I used a 5.50 soft round brush with around 16 opacity (I don't know how it's called in the english version, the german version calls this Inkrement) on very fast to apply this texture.
Now, I want to emphasise that you can work in layers, and use both the grass texture and the brighter dirt texture to again paint over the rough dirt. You don't want the transition to be so prominent, it should just be barely recognisable. You cannot only paint textures by holding down the mouse button. For more accurate texturing, I usually click fast instead. Remember that it looks much more natural when you bring in some variation. Here's what I got:

I used the same brush as before.
On the next step, I'll show that you can bring some variation with different textures of the same type. On Agria, we don't just have the normal grass texture, but also another one called Grass yellow, as opposed to the green grass we used before. I used the yellow grass to brigthen it up a bit, especially the parts that face the street. I then used the foliage texture to further emphasise the cliffs. You pretty much always want a different texture on the parts that are very near to the cliffs. It would not have been that much of a deal in my example because the street is so close to the cliffs and there is a natural transition anyways, but if you have a very large area without too much variation, lets say a desert or pure grasslands, you really really want another texture at the cliffs. I also used the rough dirt texture to paint some more details on the normal dirt, but it's not too noticable. Here you go:

I varied the height of the cliffs a bit, but not too much. I usually heighten the protruding parts and lower the others a bit. Don't overdo this, again this is just to add little variation and not to add whole mountains to every piece of terrain. Oh, and I also added a sea so that nobody asks why I didn't texture the lowground. :-P

Finally I added some doodads to show how it could look when improved further. The doodads give additional detail, but would not work if the textures beneath them were crappy.

Next I looked at the tileset and found the rock texture useless. For the path to the right of the place we just textured, I figured I could use another transition texture to set it apart from the main road.
So I changed the Agria-rock texture to the Tarsonis-rubble texture that I thought would fit. I first did the transition between grass and road with the rough dirt, and then did did another one with Tarsonis-rubble over the first one. The rest ist just the standard texturing stuff I mentioned before plus some more doodad usage.


I'll add some more parts of texturing the village later, I feel like the post is already ridiculously long enough and I want to know if I should explain certain things more/less exact before I add more.