Hmm...
The big thing in Kingmaker is that you control a kingdom that spans many many hexes and you get to build things on those hexes. Roads, bridges, towns, mines, farms, quarries, fisheries, aqueducts, forts, etc. And you can have many such things in one hex.
But interesting terrain features - there's a giant (dead?) tree, hot springs, hidden temples, statues, lakes, islands, abandoned castles, natural river crossings, ferry stations, waterfalls, mountain passes, enormous draconic skeletons half-buried in the ground, swamps riddled with smaller waterways, animal and monster dens, hermits, and more.
Wow.. those do look nice.
You may want to look over Ultimate Campaign.. the rules for Kingdoms and Cities from Kingmaker were updated and made part of the core there.
People have had a hard time finding the print copies of Kingmaker, so I would not be surprised if your FLGS doesn't have any copies. The PDFs are available here on Paizo's site, but really only one volume has those rules and the graphics for them... and those are all in Ultimate Campaign with more added.
The graphic elements were really all about the cities, except for a handful of markers for the hex maps.
And that's what would really be useful.. more markers for more features that can be *added to* a hex map; not so much hexes themselves. A hex-grid overlay on a standard map will do for many. Adding farms, watch towers, and similar markers may be a bigger market.
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I really like these they're very good. I might use something like this if I were going to run a new KM. They remind me alot of the older gazetteer style maps.
I would use these for the individual 1 mile hexes within a 12 mile KM hex, there are 144 of those per hex. The variety would make for an interesting map. The 1 mile KM Districts would fit nicely too.
I would either redo the entire map and reveal it as they explore, changing the locations slightly for veteran players. Or just rough out the geography and draw a random hex to represent it.
I would be cutting out a huge amount of maybe 1/2" hexes to do it, that alone might make me just plot it all out on the PC.
The visual difference alone may be enough to make it a completely different campaign.
I like the idea of letting them map out X number of 1 mile hexes per day, doing away with the KM hexes, it would flow a little more organicly or naturally.
There's a couple of ways to subdivide Kingmaker's 12-mile hexes into smaller 1-mile hexes. The problem I have found, however, is that the hexes end up slightly crooked if you try to create a regular hexagon.
A regular hexagon comprised of 7 layers (13 hexagons from point to point, with each edge having 7 hexagons, and containing 127 hexagons total) will actually do the job really well, since if each hexagon is exactly 1 square mile in area, then the distance from the center of one 'mega-hex' to the center of another will be ~12.12 miles. That's almost perfect, but the mega-hex will never be in the same alignment as the new mini-hexes, so that is one thing to keep in mind, but also, because each edge has the same number of hexes, in order to fit each mega-hex together, you will have to offset them slightly, resulting in them being slightly crooked (See picture linked below.)
On the other hand, if you don't want pretty, regular hexagons, there's a simple irregular pattern which, though not as good of a fit, clocking in at either 11.18 miles from center to center for a 108 hex configuration, or 13.04 miles for a larger 147-hex configuration. The benefit yielded, however, is that these irregular hexagons line up perfectly, rather than being offset. (See picture below.)
External Link to Image Example
Personally, I'm not sure which of these is inherently 'superior', or if that's even something to assess them for, since breaking the larger hexes into smaller ones can free you from having to stick to the traditional hexes. Therefore, I feel that if you're going to go for a system like this, you should also institute feudalism as a system. There is an awful lot of math and micromanagement involved in the kingdom building rules, so why not let players parcel out large portions of land to barons, viscounts, earls, etc, and let them manage the land on the players' behalf, in exchange for taxes and a pledge of troops in time of war? A single hex at this scale is large enough for an entire city block, ie, a town, so you can also represent settlements... but then you also get into other interesting stuff, like maybe each farm at this scale feeds a city block worth of people (1 square mile = 640 acres, and it historically took about 2 acres of wheat to feed one adult, so assuming a bit of wasted land and such, this actually computes pretty well.) and that it takes one House to support say... 4 farms/mines/quarries/etc. But... I'm now way off topic from discussing breaking up hexes into smaller units.
Kingdom hexes are actually 12 miles wide from side-to-side, not corner-to-corner. The corner-to-corner measurement was never corrected after they were pointed out as being a unique way to measure a hexagonal grid found nowhere else in the gaming industry.
The side-to-side measurement is the same as from hex center to hex center, which is the normal method for counting distance on a hex grid. You'll find it makes a nice neat 132 hexes with an additional 4 half-hexes per side, for a total of 144 full hexes. Very handy when using more detailed movement rates as most are based on multiples of 3 or 4.
Sub-dividing Kingdom hexes gets very easy as you can just outline whichever hexes you want and poof, there's a 200 square mile barony. (Just assume each hex is a square mile and you'll be happier.)
Computing crop yields by acreage is a level of detail I would not recommend. Stick to a Kingdom hex of farmland reduces Consumption by 2, or by 1 for each 72 1-mile hexes of farmland if you want.
I have measured out our KM folio maps so that 1 pixel is equal to 1 acre on the map, that's enough detail for adding stuff to it.
Having 1-mile hexes just makes it easy plot out locational and features within a Kingdom hex. I printed out a hex grid on a transparency for measuring withing Kingdom hexes, that was a huge help. Also if you do use smaller hexes, you will quickly find out that the Kingdom hex grid is slightly warped and irregular. You can either use a single pattern and center it on each Kingdom hex, or just use the smaller hexes to create new Kingdom hexes.
It would never even have occurred to me to just split hexes apart like that, and was instead working on a design where each mini-hex clearly mapped to a specific mega-hex. As for my thoughts on acreage and such, that was actually part of my plan for getting players to choose feudalism. It's really simple for me to plug a bunch of numbers into a spreadsheet and manage dozens of little baronies, which in turn minimizes how much of the kingdom the players have to worry about, while creating lots of NPCs they might interact with, and a great way to reward NPCs they like.