@Miredly JA2 had an overworld map, consisting of about 200 hand made local maps. The whole thing was continuous, so that while their engine would only render one map at a time, if you lined them all up they would match up in their features and make sense from one to the next. So if I was in an urban battle on the far west side of a city I knew to have a swamp to the west, I knew that fleeing west would put in me in swamplands, but east would take me deeper into the urban core