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My current mapping project is big and complicated: an attempt to capture all the pertinent political map information from a big RPG book into a single map. This particular book focuses on the Western Empire from Palladium Fantasy RPG. It's a nation divided into a dozen regions and further divided into about 50 provinces. Each province has a capital city, each region has one provincial capital double as its regional capital, and a single city is the capital of the empire, it's own region, and its own province.

Thus, each province requires two labels: the name of the province/noble house that rules it (mercifully, these are almost all the same) and the name of the provincial capital. Each region requires a label that stretches across its internal provincial borders and therefore must compete with space with the provincial labels. That comes out to 112 labels.

My goal for this map is to include as much information as I can while keeping it nice to look at, and herein lies the problem. I've seen many fantasy maps that look awful because of overcrowded and confusing labels, and I think there's a real risk of that happening here.

My current convention is to curve labels of provinces and regions while keeping city labels straight, small, and oriented the same way. I'm trying to think of ways of helping the user tell the difference between label types, and I'm concerned that it may be too easy to confuse provincial and regional labels. My ideas so far:

+I could invert the colors for either the regional or provincial labels (having some with dark letters and bright highlights.
+I could color-code the provincial or regional labels to match the regions they describe.
+I could make some labels solid (probably the city ones, so as to minimize how much terrain they obscure.

Any ideas on other steps I might take? Any overall comments on the map? Please keep in mind that the version I'm posting here is a work in progress; I intend to do a lot more with the compass rose, scale, and adding a frame.

Thanks!