Everyone loses without a CAW tool

I agree. In TS2, I've never played the pre-made worlds...even before I knew about the save corruption issues they have if you don't clean them up. I recently got TS3 to see what about that game people find so appealing (so far, I'm not particularly impressed...but I haven't gotten too far in my test saves yet because of school, so I'm reserving final judgement until I'm at least 50-100 hours into things) and downloaded CAW, but I'm still learning to use it properly. My main criticism of the TS3 CAW tool is that you don't get a decent preview of the map templates in the starting menu, just this weird grayscale thing that doesn't give you a good idea of what the land templates look like before you load them up, and it's difficult to discern the actual scale of the landmass when you do load it up in the program, so I can see why it might have been underused--it's not that intuitive. You really do need to read those tutorials to know how to use the thing. Better map template previews and some form of visual scaling element would have done wonders for TS3 CAW's intuitiveness and ease of use. Give me a bare chunk of land in the middle of a blue field of ocean, I have a hard time discerning how big that chunk of land is. Put a clump of trees or a strip of road down, then I can get a better picture of what I'm working with...and whoever had the "brilliant" idea of having those grayscale height maps instead of a decent picture of the landscape you're about to open up should be sent to bed without desert. No cake for that one.

If TS4 had a world creation tool that was intuitive to use and well-designed on a visual level, that would definitely enhance the game enormously. But, they need to learn from the poor design decisions that make TS3's incarnation of the tool confusing and cumbersome to use for more visually-oriented people like me.