I am interested in trying to make a nation-scale map for the setting I play in. Has anyone had any good experiences with programs for map-making? Or, do you have any general tips?
I used an old version of Photoshop and just followed some tutorials. If you can't access Photoshop, I'm pretty sure there are some tutorials made for GIMP (free, open-sourced, but a harder-to-navigate interface IMO), but I haven't checked those out myself.
Hexographer is nice. You can make decent maps but the paid version is much better. I have used the game Civilization as a world generator/mapping software as well very effectively.
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I tried campaign cartographer ($100), and I found it ALMOST useless. I pretty much needed an auto-cad degree to use the thing - it just wasn't intuitive at all.
So what I did was I copied all the clip-art out of it into another directory, and I use that as a clip-art library to make power-point slides that I can use as an on-screen map.
I suppose one could import those clip-art items into any program, but I use powerpoint because I make put the slideshow on a flatscreen TV and I use the TV as the gaming surface (I cover it with plexiglass).
It's cool looking, but not really worth the cost - although it does make it easy to scan maps into my computer and use them right on the screen.