Is my map believable?

Question

I am requesting feedback on my in-progress fantasy world map, primarily in 4 major areas:

• biomes
• rivers
• cities
• borders

Do they make sense? If not, what should I change? Any observations or inferences concerning my world's geopolitics are also welcome.

Additional information:

• The sea in the center of the map is roughly analogous to the Mediterranean in terms of size and location.
• Colored dots are major cities. The larger dots with stars are capitals. Diamond-shaped markers are sites of significance, but not settlements. Triangles are ruins. The dashed line is a ruined ancient wall. Smaller towns, villages, and military outposts are not shown (yet).
• The Red city in the middle of the desert gets their water from underground aquifers. The Red city next to the eastern mountains gets theirs from a spring.
• The lonely mountain in the desert is an inactive volcano.
• The southwestern peninsula is currently uninhabited, but used to be a powerful empire.

Answer 1

Your map is quite accurate in context. A few pointers:

• There might be fighting over that linely volcanon in the desert, but the nation controlling the desert might own it anyways (volcanoes are rich in resources and minerals, even inactive ones).
• You should add more rivers expanding from the lakes, some inland parts of the map have to go a ways to have access to water from lakes or the sea.
• Some nations might fight over the middle small island in the sea, as it might become a central fishing area of sorts of a control tower.

I will add more points soon

Answer 2

Just some random observations

The red country in the middle is going to have trouble. They only control desert and plains from what I see, which means a lack of solid building material. While water can be sourced from aquifers, these are pretty rare, so food may be a problem. They do have 2 pretty nice rivers, but lack of wood and metal (because lack of wood for smithing) may limit how much use they can get out of them. I'd expect some conflict with the southern countries since those guys have a LOT of forest.

Purple country stands to gain the most from exploration because of that big chunk of uninhabited land near them. All they have to do is cross the river and they get easy access to a wealth of new land.

Pink land probably fights or trades with green land a lot, since green land doesn't seem to have big forests to get wood. Parts of red country may also source wood from there.

Red will have issues with their capital getting invaded by sea, it doesn't seem like they have enough wood to build a blue-water navy to control the mouth of the bay.

Some of the forest countries might want to sail over to the ruins of the southwestern peninsula since they lack living space. Alternatively they could clear large amounts of forest and sell the wood to Red for profit and space.

Red not having expanded into that small peninsula by their southwestern border (not the big one) doesn't make a lot of sense, maybe it was under control of the SouthWest Empire until recently. They may also try to get over the mountains to control the ruins of the SouthWest Empire. In general Red will be a significant military force on land, since they have so much of it they will have plenty of wild horses/camels to tame and experience fighting battles with rebels and other riffraff.

Yellow is just one island, which makes me think they have a big navy to keep them from getting invaded. They don't have much wood though so they will have to steal or trade it from purple/pink.