Yes, exactly! If these games are all map painters anyway, let them look like maps, no uncanny valley faux photo realistic amalgamations of various 3D models of various scales.
Look at this, and tell me its not beautiful and practical:
<image>
The Civ6 example is actually kind of interesting because it cleverly avoids the exact pitfall that Victoria fell into. Both Civilization 6 and Victoria III include two types of maps, without
really biasing their UIs too hard towards either one. I think Civ6 is actually more biased in this way where thematically it all gets tied together more nicely in isometric mode, which is why strategic mode looks a bit wonky. Civ6's artistic style just happens to work out such that strategic mode ends up looking a bit off*. But both still independently work well as a cohesive whole for whoever may like either. The key however is that no matter which you like, both are available discretely from each other. Nobody is ever forced to use a map they dislike. It also means if performance is a concern you can cleanly pick strategic mode with no concern. I can 100% confirm this matters; my girlfriend's computer can barely handle Civ6 so the difference is
very noticeable between the two types.
Victoria III also has two map types, with its living terrain map and its paper map. But unlike Civ6 it doesn't have a toggle between them. They're just both there at the same time. All you have to do is change your zoom. So you can't choose to stay in one theme or the other; you're saddled with both, so Vic's map looks bad half the time no matter
which type you prefer and if performance is a concern you can't just choose to be in the faster one because there aren't two distinct modes; you're have to consciously not zoom in.
Honestly, I'd say just take a page out of Civ's book and make it a toggle. There's a lot of people who clearly do not care whatsoever about the living map. Personally, the most I want my map to be alive is to have dots on my paper map get bigger as my cities are more urbanized (analogously, imagine if in HoI4 you could see some cities grow from one victory point type to another) but I don't need trains or boats or whatever. There are also clearly people who do like it and have no issue with the performance implications of it and I don't have anything against their preferences. We're different people who like different things. So let's just stop forcing these two factions to mingle? Paradox can have a strongly performing paper map that's dead, and a living map whose performance is worse but has all the fancy graphics that they're playing around with.
*I want to be clear, I have no issue with stylization. I tend to like stylization more than not; my favorite character portraits of all Paradox games I've played are from HoI4, where they are specifically more stylized in that they look like paintings rather than the actual people. One of the biggest failures imo of Paradox's 3D models and the recent push to use them more is that they just end up looking like...well, bad lifelike models. A model that's supposed to look like the real thing has to be extremely high fidelity in order to not fall into the uncanny valley; if you're not willing to go the extra mile on that, then having good
art that's clearly just art is way better. The barrier to looking acceptable to the eye is much lower because your brain doesn't try to flag it as a person, just as a picture. Besides being why I dislike the 3D models so much, this is also why I like the paper map so much. The styling of it is gorgeous.
