Contemplating whether I could practically apply polar wrap if at all.
Noting that the rectangular map shape all but eliminates any possibility of a normal looking polar region due to the circumference of the arctic circle equaling that of the equator; what do you guys think of the polar alignment?
Try and focus on the tiles outlined in red as if you were staring at a flat map of Earth. Going directly north from North America puts you in the middle of Eurasia. North from the Atlantic puts you in Eurasia/Pacific. Basically anyway.
The indexes seem to line up in a way that is mechanically sound. You could say this form of map projection has some serious distortion at the poles, but is an otherwise practical method for polar wrapping. I am asking your guy’s opinion because I may be missing some key alignment-related loophole that could break gameplay such as “If you go north from tile X to tile Y you teleport across the map”.
In conjunction with this, I think I may seriously try to work the map in such a way that as the player moves around the map, the map moves around the player. This way I could have just 1 of each tile on the map instead of 3 versions for the world wrap. So if the map is 10 tiles tall, then if you are above index 5, then 6 through 9 will be above you, and 0 through 4 below. If you are above index 9, then 0 through 4 above, and 5 through 8 below. If you move up 1 tile, then all tiles on the very bottom move above you, and vice versa. The oddest part might be when you come over the pole from North America and see Eurasia flipped upside down. You could play the entire map flipped upside down just by staying on that side of the globe in that orientation. It would all flip back to normal if you just went south far enough(before eventually flipping again).
When I first implemented wrap I kind of wrote this method off as not being practical, and I didn’t really understand it so I went with the easiest option for my brain at the time. I now think I can make it happen, if very carefully. A few problems such as it will break my river splines completely, but the projection already does that. I may end up using normal meshes for rivers since it will probably take an engine upgrade to get them to work with the sphere projection.
I have a feeling that I will be adding an option for players to either use sphere map mode, or simply use normal flat map mode. The entire logic of the game will be happening on the flat map anyway, so that should be pretty simple(knock on wood 
).