The nice US Postman brought me a couple presents today. For those just joining us, I ordered the EVE Strategic Maps Second Edition shortly after the EON/EVE store merge, and apparently there was some confusion on the inventory; in short, the Strategic Maps copy I bought technically didn't exist. However, to make up for it, the kind folks at EON said they would send me one of the first copies they got of EVE Strategic Maps, Third Edition, a trade-off I was more than happy to live with.
First impressions, just flipping through the book, are mixed. The ability for these guys to compress three-dimensional star charts into two dimensions is, I admit, impressive. It's hard, for me at least, to get a sense of where things are when I'm trying to flip and twirl this friggin' huge star cluster around. But no biggie - I get where I need to be at times. Once I sit down and read the legend, figuring out what all the icons actually mean, I admit to no small amount of surprise at the amount of data crammed in there. Oh, granted, there are some things you lose versus the map browser in EVE - dynamic information, for example. But you don't always need dynamic information just to get an idea for a destination (mining, anyone?) and one of the big things I like about it is that it comes with a small sheet of yellow stickers perfectly sized to replace a system icon - a system icon filled in yellow indicates the presence of an outpost. Thus, as new ones are scanned down/established/whatever, you can simply look up the system in the index, locate it in the map grid on each page, and voila, update your book.
As I said, it won't ever fully replace the in-game map, and I doubt this was the intent - this is more a desk reference that does exactly what it says on the tin - for example, you can, at a glance, see several relatively close-together clusters of systems that feature ice belts. You can then jump into the in-game map and look at dynamic information (recent kills, for example) to determine where, exactly, to go.
I've never seen either the first or second edition books, but even as someone who runs semi-independent ops more often than not, I can see dozens of ways I might use this. For someone who plans ops for a corp or alliance, or just a gang of friends, it's useful to get a feel for the "lay of the land" before even typing in your account password. Yes, even folks that just want pew-pew can use it to see where complexes are, or identify likely spots for those silly miners to be hiding out.
Overall, I'd very much suggest folks at least take a serious look at it.
Author's note: I hadn't intended on writing a review for it, but writing a post just gloating that I had it seemed like it wasn't enough. Besides, I really do like this thing. About the only thing that could make it cooler was if it was a hologram and came with a free Seven of Nine.
