I'll do my best to answer these and I will assume you're building for the mid-war and late war areanas....
Keep in mind realistic does NOT equal playable from the game standpoint.
What percentage of water?None to any. There is no set amount.
Symetrical or Asymetrical.....ie like pizza where everything is equally spaced?Land mass for each country should be equal but not necessarily symetrical. Smpizza was in response to people wanting the old AH1 "pizza" map. I couldn't recreate it (AKDesert) so it was the next best thing on a smaller and lower scale.
Flat terrain or w/ some moutains or mostly mountains?This is where your imagination has to come in. Would you enjoy flying over completely flat terrain? Does flat terrain make for good game play?
My personal experience is people hate flat terrains, but the don't want to have to fly to 20k either. AND they don't want to have to actually fly their planes out of an airfield either (ie: Mid Mesa). The biggest complaint in Mid Mesa is they can't auto pilot out of a field, which was intentional on my part.
OH and that reminds me. Perception of how high a terrain is can be WAY off. The highest mountain in Mid Mesa is 8k but people still insist they have to fly to 15k to get over them. Be prepared for perception errors.
FT/TT?FT - No
TT - OK
Approximatly how many bases per team?On a 256 x 256 terrain for the MW and LW areanas 20 to 30 is about right.
Percentage of vbase to airbase?Any. Again game play comes into consideration. You want enough v-bases to keep the GV players happy and enough air bases for the flying group.
How big?.....I think 256 is gonna be mandatory.You answered your own question.
Average distance to bases?In general air bases in the MW and LW areans should be no farther then 25 miles, no less than 3/4 of a sector. There are exceptions to the 25 miles, but they should be limited. There are no exceptions to the 3/4 sector.
Strat spread out or clustered around hq?If you cluster strat you have a bombers heaven. Personally I wouldn't do it, but people seem to be asking for this.
One side note.....I think it was ROC or Wmlute pointed out the fact that the map is totally rebuilt? The process was even different then the SEA maps?Anyone could tell me what processes are specific to a MA map I would really like to know.SEA/CT maps are highly specialized. 99% of what they do is custom.
The biggie is MA maps CAN NOT have any custom objects (fields, towns, buildings, etc). All objects used must be "stock". However you can use custom textures. You just have to keep in mind that using custom textures increases the size of the .res file drastically. Make it too large and it won't be useable for the MA.
Now my own comments....
Think about game play when you make your map. How will it play out?
Does any one side have a major advantage over the other? If one does don't be afraid to start over. You don't know how many maps I've started thinking they were perfect only to find a major flaw that ended development or caused a repositioning of land mass or fields. The reason for this is if you give one country an advantage over the others, that position on the map will be prone to winning the map. And despite what some people think, that is not a good thing.
If you successfully build an MA map you will have people that love it and you will have people that hate it. It seems the "haters" are more vocal than the "lovers". Don't let that get to you.
Now FYI, my Compello map (I think it's the largest map ever made) took over 6 months and quite a few revisions before it went online. Dont' even think that getting a map online is fast. It usually isn't.
