Scaling/making islands correctly

You have come to the right place, my friend.

I will post a picture explaining how I do this, but I have made many islands.  Basically, you go on Google Earth and use the measuring tool to make a line that is in the direction you want your squares.  This line must be exactly 4572 meters in length (equal to 5000 yards).  Take a screenshot of this.

Take it into photoshop and use the line to overlay the squares to be exactly the same length as this measurement (the original game uses 3.5" squares, but any size works if your mat has larger squares) and trace the outline of your island on paper or directly onto the foam.  Use that to assist cutting the foam into the right shape.  Assuming that you want to make the height changes real to life as well, use this website to help: en-us.topographic-map.com/      (if so, I'd advise you to exaggerate height changes, since the world looks a lot more flat at this scale).

I already have a whole bunch of this worked out for a lot of islands, including Iwo Jima, Saipan, Tinian, Aguigan, Guadalcanal, Savo Island, the Florida Islands, and am slowly working on basically every island in the Solomons chain, so if there are any which you would like to see how I did it, I will gladly put pictures in here.

That is awesome! Is there a good way to do it if your means are a bit more limited? The only computer I have acess to is my wifes and it has the speed of a snail being coaxed into a salt pile.

This is worth a sticky to the top of the page.