Day 2:
Made a lot of progress on defining and creating the map. The map itself is a BMP with the land, sea, forests and mountains drawn on it as pixels. It is read in and the tiles are placed according to the pixel colors. It also has special colored pixels that represent settlements. These settlement pixels are referenced in the game by their color to match them up with the settlement names and types, etc.
I also created some more graphics, including water animation, ships and a font.
As it's rather easy to create the map, I plan to have it quite large with a lot of settlements on it. I love exploration in games like this so I want a big area to do it in, but have enough in it that you may not see it all in one play through. As survival is about the locations' geography, as well as your economy, it should lead you to experiment in finding the safest locations which also have the highest potential for further trade.
The realistic limit for the map size in real terms will probably by from Sicily in the west to Jerusalem in the east, and from Egypt in the south to Byzantium in the north. I think this will give the best trade off in terms of historical accuracy vs. being interesting as a game.
More about the game:
Culture: The goal of the game is to increase your culture through trade and settlement. All settlements will be placed from the start, but may have no existing culture, allowing you to "settle", giving you a cultural affinity there. Other settlements may not be settled if they have an existing cultural affinity, such as "Mycenaean" or "Egyptian", but you can still increase your culture to be the majority one (though never replace the affinity). Cultural affinity provides a constant increase to that culture, so if you stop trade, it'll gradually revert to the affinity culture.
Doom: Disasters will be periodic events that will appear at random locations and could potentially destroy your culture. To survive these events you must have enough culture in cities that survive the event to continue spreading culture. If you don't, the Minoans will die out.
Trade: Trade is a matter of assigning routes between cities. Say Knossos > Athens for example, that route will link those cities resources together, possibly allowing new resources to be created and traded. The trade resources that provide the most culture will be the hardest to create, requiring the most base resources. You'll be able to view what is being created or what new resources you need, but it is otherwise automatic, you just set up the routes you need. You can manage trade from any city in which your culture is the majority. Also, the longer the distance of the trade route, the less culture it will generate in target cities (but it will have no negative effect on resource acquisition).
There's still a lot to figure out, but I don't believe it's so much that I'll run out of time, lol. It's not really the kind of game I've made before. But it's the kind I play, so hopefully it all works out! :)