Initial Atlas Strat Ideas (subject to change)

TERMS:
Inner region- A region adjacent to the middle of the atlas
Outer region- One of the four corner regions where influence initially spawns
Dump region- A region with 4 watchstones in it for awakened bonus
Region level- The level of a region, based on the number of watchstones socketed in it.

After completing the quest line for Kirac in town, you'll get the ability to start using the atlas in your hideout. Progressing the atlas in 3.9 is very different, the majority of the questline revolves around mapping to trigger boss maps to kill the bosses to get their watchstones. Every zone has the ability to drop one of each basic watchstone, totaling 32 watchstones.
Each watchstone you get will increase the region level requirement of obtaining the next watchstone of that colour by 1.
To obtain your first watchstones you want to head to each of the corner regions to unlock the first 4 boss fights and their respective stones.

The strategy from here on out depends on how you want to approach the atlas. There are a few main ideas:

Complete each regions stones first

or

Evenly complete regions

I believe the latter strategy is more time and map efficient because it allows you to get map drops in regions you're not playing in, so you have those ready to go for the citadel spawning. How I've set up my atlas is that I've put one of each stone in each inner region after completing the corner regions and obtaining their stones. This sets all of your middle regions to region level 1. The basic maps then go from tier 1 to tier 4, this makes them easily obtainable from the corner regions higher tier maps. Leveling the central regions to region level 2 will move these maps to T8 and then region level 3 moves them to T10. Finally region level 4 will set them to be T14. This means that the starting maps are the same tier as the highest tier map in the previous level.

My current strategy involves placing all obtained orbs in a region + one extra and then spawning the next influence. This allows me to place the stones back into their tower once I've killed the boss. This works for all drops except the 3rd, where you might have to do some shuffling after your first set of influence has spawned so that you can do this for 3 of the 4 regions (it might not work for the first region to spawn influence, it is a 50/50 [an actual 50/50 this time too]).

After I've completed the 4 inner regions I intend to max out the 4 outer regions and complete them one by one.

I'm not sure if this strategy will be optimal but it does let you progress your maps fairly evenly!
Please pm me on discord (via steel's discord) if you have any questions or suggestions for how I can clean this up or any suggestions for other strategies.