[Shaira]

I've been a keen user of the entire Campaign Cartographer suite for the best part of ten years now, and can recommend it highly. The Campaign Cartographer 3 stuff in particular has some excellent graphics capabilities - as you mention - and you can turn out some beautiful maps. Dungeon Designer 3 is likewise equipped, and City Designer is currently awaiting its upgrade to "3rd edition", which should be just as cool.

I should mention however, just in case you're not aware, that Campaign Cartographer has a learning curve. It's a CAD program, and so deals in vector-based objects rather than the raster-based stuff you generally get in programs like Photoshop. It therefore owes a lot of its program logic to CAD - ie its command structure, dealing with layers / sheets, elements such as "multipolies" and fractal functions. If you're coming at it "cold", it can be a bit daunting, and seem counterintuitive at first.

Having said all of the above, version 3 of the software is the friendliest yet, and avoids some of the aggravatingly over-technical aspects of previous versions in favour of defaulting to the likeliest map-drawing behaviour. The tutorials are good, and the documentation sufficient (if digital...), and with the additional packages in the "Annuals" you can achieve some substantial results (I'm a particular fan of the Mercator catalogue).

Lastly, CC3 is not cheap. It's not expensive, either, especially in CAD terms, and you certainly get a lot of flexibility and versatility for your buck. If you want to make some great looking maps, either for online use (they look GREAT in programs like Klooge) or for printing, it's a great tool. I'm still using it ten years on.

Hope that helps,

Cheers,

Sarah