Minne also happens to be split into provinces (but probably mot enough for EU). I think you have to ignore your logic when it comes to the Guildword map though. J Edward's and also Diamond's also have provinces as far as I recall.
My country has a few province but in Eu4, a province is the smallest possible territory. IRL most provinces/states would include several Eu4 provinces.
My concern was more about climate/population density. A densely populated area like Flanders need to have more provinces than say Scotland or Norway.
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Yeah. I was looking at the overall map (which seems to be missing more recently completed maps) and there are a fair few maps divided down, but most of them would require even more than depicted there. In addition to that there are the as yet unmapped territories. It's actually a huge project. I can help divide and name some of the things if you give me more specifics/instructions. You might also consider some judicious use of terra incognita.
Another concern is that for best results with the actual in-game usage in EUIV you, in general, want to avoid 'stringy' and/or highly concave province shapes, even if that doesn't exactly mirror the political divisions. It was one of the details the Paradox devs mentioned at some point regarding geographic/historical accuracy in the map versus reasonable-looking gameplay for the vanilla game; they often tended to 'square' or 'central blob' up some historical divisions to make the provinces fit together in ways that make more visual sense for moving troops over them in the game and so on.
I'm not sure what that means. You mean to say that voronoi type arrangements are better for gameplay? As opposed to a line of provinces with no access from the sides? What does highly concave shapes mean?Originally Posted by AzureWings
Roughly speaking, yes - provinces ideally should be convex in shape and of relatively similar size to their neighbors.
Having provinces with mostly convex shapes helps avoid strange behaviors from the apparent relative geography (since each province acts like a single point as regards troop movement and adjacencies, regardless of the shape and size of the area it contains) - otherwise you can have provinces bordered by the same other province on both the north and south, for example, which while valid and workable technically can look very strange for a player when they're moving through and around it. Basically you want the provinces to intuitively have adjacencies where a player can look at it and go, 'okay, this province is the neighbor of this one in this direction' as opposed to being a neighbor of another province in multiple directions. Since in gameplay provinces function more like an adjacency graph, if the geographic layout begins to diverge in appearance from that layout too much it looks more confusing ingame.
The relatively similar size to neighboring provinces (along with not being long and stringy) helps make the overall map more uniform so you don't have single provinces adjacent to a disproportionately huge number of other provinces, and avoiding those cases is generally better for gameplay. This doesn't mean all provinces need to be the same size, just that you want provinces with many neighbors to have relatively similar sizes amongst themselves. Obviously coastlines and wasteland/perma Terra Incognita provinces are exempt from a lot of these concerns - a long, curved, narrow peninsula being one province can be okay since most of that long, curved, concave shape doesn't have any other land adjacencies; while the adjacencies of non-enterable provinces obviously don't have the same impact on gameplay as those that can actually be moved through.
A line of provinces with no access from the sides isn't really a problem - but a line of many provinces that all share a side with a single other much wider province can have implications for the game's troop movements. Long squiggly provinces that run past all sorts of others also raise similar concerns.
Historical political divisions in some regions had some spectacularly bizarre shapes that would make for a much more awkward feel in EUIV's gameplay engine than most of the vanilla province layouts actually have. While Guildworld's provinces may be more conducive to the gameplay already, I thought I might mention these concerns as another potential reason for fiddling with the province layouts.
EDIT: As a more illustrative example:
The left-hand picture contains generally nicely-formed provinces for gameplay (and it doesn't need to be this precise, there's plenty of leeway).
The right-hand picture also works under the engine but the red province has some awkward gameplay implications. From the green province, for instance, you reach both the blue province and the purple province by passing through the red province, even though they are in opposite directions. Since troop movements through the red province go through one 'point' visually no matter where they're headed, this is going to look weird no matter where that point is. Additionally, you can move between provinces on opposite sides of the red province in one hop via that province... or many, many more around it even though geographically the distance is similar, which means either the red one takes too little time to move through for the distance or takes too long between some of the provinces that border it across one of its narrow directions. Consider the province left of the blue one and the purple province - moving between them via the red province alone should realistically take much longer than going start->green->red->purple, but I'm not sure that the engine would support that without going on to make, say, start->red->blue take much longer than it should.
Last edited by AzureWings; 05-05-2018 at 05:06 PM. Reason: Right and left
Ah ok. Yeah I can see how that would be problematic. Most of the guild maps that have territorial divisions within their maps do it with names only and no delineated borders. It would likely not pose significant problems to arrange them in an ideal manner.
There was a province in Gujarat that had very strange borders, like it had been "Gerrymanded" to reflect historical accuracy. Maybe it was in another strategy gamer and not EU4.
I see the problem with the red province, it's not practical for troop movement.
No, terra incognita only refers to land that has not been discovered yet.
Having wasteland/impassable provinces reduce the amount of work but they still count as province except you can't control them and they have no info on them except the colour and maybe a name.
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