Highly fractalised shapes (for large map)

[Roqoco]

I'm creating a quite large world map (12inx12in LP size) with quite a few different landmasses (continents, islands...). These shapes are highly fractalised to give the detail required at higher zoom levels. I have only added a couple of continents so far, but things slow down noticeably when I select the node tool and zoom in to manipulate the nodes. Am just wondering whether what I am trying to do is practical or whether everything is likely to grind to a halt when I add more of the landmasses to the drawing?

I would like to reduce/simplify the node count somewhat, because it is rather uneven, but don't see a way to do that, other than to delete nodes manually, which is hardly practical. I did try exporting to SVG and using Inkscape's "simplify" function, but that is much too destructive (when it works at all). Perhaps it might be an idea to break up the larger continent shapes (into countries), but I haven't worked out how to do that in a simple way.       

[GarryP]

Have you tried making a rasterized copy of each continent and (temporarily) hiding the vector versions while you work on the current vector continent?
When you want to make changes you can delete the raster version, switch the vector version back on, make changes and then rasterise and hide again.
Probably not an ideal solution but it might speed things up a bit.
Maybe someone else has a better solution and will share it here.

[Roqoco]

Thanks Garry. Actually, I think now that the slow down problem is to do with the sheer number of nodes in my shapes rather than having other shapes on the screen, which don't seem to make much difference. Maybe what is happening is that when I make changes to a single node or attempt to drag it, the program is recalculating the position of all the other nodes in the shape which would be quite compute intensive. So whilst this is a bit irritating when editing the nodes, I don't think it is going to stop me creating a large map - after all even the thousands of nodes in my shapes is a small amount of data compared to a raster image and the maps redraw quickly enough, when not in node mode. Am also thinking I could quite easily split the large shapes and fit them together a bit like a jigsaw puzzle and maybe that will have other advantages in making my project more modular.