Trying to find a good program or app that will allow me to create sci-fi maps. Being able to make large cities as well as detailed combat/encounter maps would be great. Grid-based or not is not important. I have used a program called "Inkarnate" before but I find it fairly limited when it comes to more detailed cityscapes. Anybody have a favorite program that they use? Thanks in advance!

Campaign Cartographer is pretty powerful. You might need the Cities, Dungeons and/or Cosmographer add-ins to get what you want. It has a bit of a learning curve, but makes some beautiful maps.

A combination of MS paint, google images, and occasionally just scribbling with Roll20’s freehand drawing tool.

I simply use Adobe Illustrator. However, the only maps I've done are floor plans for a couple of ships.

Other World Mapper has capabilities for overland, city, and dungeon. Not as powerful as CC, but way cheaper (especially since the default already has city and dungeon capabilities) and oh so much easier.

It should be able to handle starships also, although I can't say I've created any yet. However, I've been working on a fantasy campaign for Genesys and I recently easily made sailing ship with the dungeon/building making options.

Overland Map here

Village Map here

Tavern Map here

Sailing ship here

ETA: Did these with no graphic artist skills.

22 hours ago, Yaccarus said:

A combination of MS paint, google images, and occasionally just scribbling with Roll20’s freehand drawing tool.

"Occasionally".

Thanks for all the suggestions so far. I recently was told about Dungeon Painter Studio on Steam as well. Anybody have opinions on that tool?

For years I looked for a good mapping tool that was easy to use. You'd think this would be pretty simple to produce, but apparently not. I bought Campaign Cartographer, I'd probably use it more if it was Mac-based...but it has a huge learning curve and I've only used it to create the world map and one town. It's just tedious and irritating, doesn't do scaling very well, and you have to REALLY want to make maps, like that's the sole focus of your hobby now.

In the end I got the most use out of "Graphic" (for the Mac), I think it was bought by Adobe. It's like a cheaper Illustrator, about $50 last time I checked. I think it's the only app in its price range that lets you set up a grid with a real-world scale (nice for legends on the map as well as getting proportions just right), and most importantly it's easy to use even for a total non-artist like me.

2 hours ago, lordrizzo said:

Thanks for all the suggestions so far. I recently was told about Dungeon Painter Studio on Steam as well. Anybody have opinions on that tool?

I purchased and tried it. But, I moved on to Other World Mapper.