Vapourware Province Size / Design in Grand Strategy Games

[what am i doing]

tl;dr is it bad to have a smaller number of provinces, but in more detail, in a grand strat?

I am currently programming an engine for a grand strategy game and one aspect I've been a bit iffy about is province size (this isn't strictly part of the programming process, rather part of the world map design process, but as I'll explain it does indirectly affect parts of the engine that I'm currently working on). The way Paradox handles it is lots of small provinces in high population areas, and a few big provinces in sparsely populated areas. What I am considering is to go with a model of having a smaller number of larger provinces (and of these being more uniform in size across the world), but to have them be "compound" in nature.

Compound here means each province would have three components: geographical border, developed land border, and urbanized border, each of which has a fill texture, and they are arranged with urban in front, developed land in middle, and base terrain in back (in terms of rendering - foremost hides further back ones). Geographical border is the entire province and denotes land that is either uninhabited or inhabited only by subsistence farmers and small hamlets, or hunter-gatherers. Developed land border is inside it and denotes mass farmland (given a farmland texture rather than a wilderness / raw terrain texture). Urbanized border is the smallest and denotes the region's capital city, as well as smaller but still significant towns. These would not need to be contiguous, so there could be patches of each.

There would be a few levels of geometry to be displayed, switching out the outline of each depending on how settled and developed the province is. So a province in rural Asian Russia would mostly be undeveloped land, but as the player sent colonists it would start to show small patches of farmland and a small city. As it grows, it would show greater amounts of farmland, a larger city, and auxiliary smaller urban regions popping up. Because these can be coloured separately, it would also allow for visual depiction of cases where a city has been established but the surrounding area, though claimed, isn't really administered as such (so urban and developed geometry would receive the controller's map colour, but undeveloped land would display as uncontrolled or only faintly coloured until administrative efficiency improved - that way something like the American or Russian colonial frontiers would show more how they were in practice rather than looking like integral parts of the nation until they become more heavily settled; similarly if you acquired, say, a treaty port, then you'd control just the city while the country you got it from would control the rest).

This would also allow for things like depicting urban vs rural pops on the map more accurately. Take Germans & Jews in eastern Europe for example - they tended to be concentrated in cities. Due to their small total size they aren't depicted on the map in Victoria 2 (barring exceptions like Riga), but with urban and rural populations distinguished, they could be shown, via only the rural sections of a province having some shading for their culture.

But a consequence of this increased detail (harder to depict in a very small province), and of having different "levels" of development to indicate how built up an area is, rather than province size/density, is that province sizes would be larger, or rather, more consistent across the map - fewer areas of sparse, large provinces, but also fewer areas of many small provinces.

So, say, Wales, instead of being four provinces, would just be one. Bavaria, instead of two states of several provinces, would just be two provinces. However, there would be more detail in the provinces. Another major difference is that it would lead to fewer armies and simpler frontlines - but this could allow for battles to have more player interactivity like activating abilities or methods of engagement (say, creeping artillery) in a battle, since there would be fewer battles to keep track of; it would also lead to better performance. Last of all, by not being able to parse out small areas in a peace treaty - say, only the cores a country has in a state, rather than all the areas in a state, it might be harder to have nice-looking borders.

Part of my reasoning as to why it's ok to reduce province count is that, at least in Victoria 2, provinces as a subdivision of states only really have any relevance for army pathing and certain peace treaties (and even then only with mods); in every other regard the state really acts as the smallest government unit. All provinces in a state share factories, national focuses are state-wide, wars typically exchange terrain on the state level (barring mods), etc.

Thoughts? Angles I've missed here?

(I'm not really sure if this is the correct subforum for this thread since it's about design rather than a specific game, but I figure it's the best place to post it if I want grand strat players to see it and weigh in.)

 

[mondblut]

More provinces is always better, as long as you don't need to zoom in to actually select them (I am talking to you, late patches CK2 Wales, or modded HoI3 tiny islands in the middle of nowhere).

The question of historical lay of the land also plays a role. When you've got historical duchies and countries of any notability in there, you can't just sweep them under the rug and make a "grand duchy of Wales" or something. It does work the other way around though, you can split a large swath of steppe or desert into any number of fictionalized subpolities.

So, yeah, go with paradox model with more uniform size by the means of splitting uncommonly large provinces into smaller ones. More map to paint, win-win.

 

[Tigranes]

More provinces certainly isn't always better. Some Pdox games end up with a meaningless province bloat where the sheer number then requires you to reduce level of detail, affecting the entire gameplay loop - you end up clicking mass builds or fiddling with a thousand sliders (or delegate big chunks to AI governors).

The question should always be what 'size' provinces you need for what gameplay purpose. A 1-2 province Wales where you make lots of meaningful decisions and come to intuitvely understand what Wales means for your Empire is far better than 18 tiny meaningless provinces with tiny modifiers.

 

[Malakal]

It highly depends on other game mechanics doesn't it? Having a ton of provinces can be a massive and unfun micro hell unless you can have automated systems working with that - this is the difference between HoI3 and Hoi4, for example.

Also I think it is important for provinces to just be a map thing and not actually a gameplay issue like with economy depending on population and indystry rather than arbitrary divided map.

And of course more provinces is better for movement and strategic operations.

 

[thesecret1]

Bigger provinces = each province is more valuable, but you cannot really sculpt the borders as you'd like (for example, you cannot have just a part of Bavaria, you need to take ALL of Bavaria because it's just one province), and the military part of the game suffers from it.

I'm not a fan of the whole visualization idea, sounds like a lot of work for basically a gimmick. I will always defer to the actual numbers showing the situation in the province rather than making any judgement calls based on how big a city I see on the map or similar.

 

[Galdred]

It really depends on the focus of your game. Lots of small provinces, or even hexagons (Shadow Empires, Gladius, War Plan, Civilization) makes maneuvering troops more interesting(especially in wargames, with supply and encirclement), but most map units hold nothing of value, as the management has to be kept at a reasonable level.
If each province needs to be managed, then it's better to have a smaller number of them. Otherwise, the more the better.
One drawback of compound provinces would be that they would all be similar maybe, unless you add distinct resources.

 

[what am i doing]

Good points in all the posts here, for both sides, and I appreciate the input. I think I have heard enough to persuade me towards having a large number of provinces at least as far as the combat layer goes, although I do still lean towards a smaller number of larger administrative regions (with more things to do in each one, but avoiding finnicky tedium like how upgrading forts works in vicky). So perhaps a small number of large provinces, but they're broken down into many small tiles on the map, permitting encirclement micro and the like.

I say this in speculative terms because I'm still working through some optimization headaches, mostly related to triangle counts pounding the vertex shader too hard and causing framerate issues on weaker hardware. But I think it should be viable, once I figure out a rendering model that's reasonably fast and can handle a sufficiently large number of provinces without framerate drops. Turns out nouveau is just that slow compared to nvidia's own drivers. All good, back to making the editor.

 

[Sinilevä]

To have smaller number of provinces is not bad at all. For example the number of provinces in Darkest Hour is much less than in HoI 3, but still allows you to do maneuvers with your armies, while HoI 3 is just a horrible mess of hundreds of copy paste provinces that turn army control into real work and micromanagement hell.

 

[Galdred]

To have smaller number of provinces is not bad at all. For example the number of provinces in Darkest Hour is much less than in HoI 3, but still allows you to do maneuvers with your armies, while HoI 3 is just a horrible mess of hundreds of copy paste provinces that turn army control into real work and micromanagement hell.

It really depends on how the game works. In World At War, not being able to cut opponents off was a bit weird for a game about WW2. However, it still worked on the strategic level (ie, chose where to spend your military and insutrial efforts), but I would have prefered a finer military grid.

 

[Storyfag]

Good points in all the posts here, for both sides, and I appreciate the input. I think I have heard enough to persuade me towards having a large number of provinces at least as far as the combat layer goes, although I do still lean towards a smaller number of larger administrative regions (with more things to do in each one, but avoiding finnicky tedium like how upgrading forts works in vicky). So perhaps a small number of large provinces, but they're broken down into many small tiles on the map, permitting encirclement micro and the like.

Something like Sectors in Stellaris, except actually working.

 

[Sinilevä]

That's why I said smaller number and not small. In terms of the Darkest Hour they found a golden middle. If you want to understand why huge number of provinces is bad, try to play on the Eastern Front in HoI3.

 

[Sinilevä]

For some reason I thought E3 map was a standard for Darkest Hour. I had to look it up and yeah the original extended map does look kinda small. When I said the golden middle apparently I had the E3 map in my mind.

That's why I said smaller number and not small. In terms of the Darkest Hour they found a golden middle. If you want to understand why huge number of provinces is bad, try to play on the Eastern Front in HoI3.

The only problem with the E3 map is that it often ignores the Golden Rule of Map-Making.

Which one would that be?

 

[Ol' Willy]

Hex-based > province-based

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Province size aside, it always annoys me in Paradox games when provinces do not conform to natural geographical borders. If you have a large river such as the Danube, then you shouldn't make a province which goes across it. Beyond ruining the gameplay experience of those people that care about having neat borders, it's simply dumb. Sure, you'd still have the river crossing penalty for attackers regardless of the borders of the province, but it's still a flawed abstractization visually. If a state conquers territory precisely for its defensive advantage, then it wouldn't just take a small patch of land beyond it which nullifies that advantage.

 

[what am i doing]

Province size aside, it always annoys me in Paradox games when provinces do not conform to natural geographical borders. If you have a large river such as the Danube, then you shouldn't make a province which goes across it. Beyond ruining the gameplay experience of those people that care about having neat borders, it's simply dumb. Sure, you'd still have the river crossing penalty for attackers regardless of the borders of the province, but it's still a flawed abstractization visually. If a state conquers territory precisely for its defensive advantage, then it wouldn't just take a small patch of land beyond it which nullifies that advantage.

Having finished a draft of base tiles for land (ocean will come later as I may be adding or removing islands and for technical reasons I want to ensure that no island is ever wholly contained in one ocean tile) my next step is to start grouping them into the zones that will form the base unit for country-side simulation. The hierarchy here is that a zone contains several tiles, armies can occupy tiles, which are very small, and allow for a lot of front line micro, encirclement, and so on, but by themselves tiles aren't signficant to the user; ie if you think of it in terms of how Victoria 2 goes down to the level of a province, here you only go as far down as a zone, and populations are by default associated with a zone, not with a tile - tiles are the atomic unit for military, but zones are (mostly) the atomic unit for everything else.

Now, that being said, what are your thoughts regarding cities and rivers? I agree that borders based around rivers do tend to look nicer and in some cases be more logical, but conversely, cities are often formed around rivers and particularly at the mouths of rivers entering bodies of water; similarly, early civilizations often form around rivers too. So there's a bit of a conundrum here, and I'm not really sure which way to go. There definitely are a lot of cities that I do want placed either at the mouths of, or somewhere further up major rivers, and my current inclination when setting up zones, at least where a significant city is present, is to have the zone be generally centred on / radiate out from the city. So in cases where there isn't a major city present, a zone can be set up to encompass a set of tiles that only go up to a river, but in cases where there is a major city, that city is right at the river and would probably have an associated zone that spans the river.

One resolution that comes to mind is to simply associate any major city with two zones (associate here not meaning in a gameplay sense, but just in a design sense), one of which is on one side of the river, and the other of which is on the other, and the city just happens to be placed in one. Another option is to just arbitrarily say that for major cities which form the centres of civilizations, they are unlikely to form a national border in most cases (barring severe destruction of the country they're associated with) and can be allowed to span a river without issue. Since this is a fictional setting I'm working with, not historical Earth, there's some freedom here with either option, as many historical cases where this would be difficult to work with aren't applicable, and there's some freedom to structure the world and populations around what works for the game rather than vice versa.

 

[Malakal]

Big cities should get their own provinces with a specific terrain type that is very defensive.

 

[IDtenT]

Territory should flow like rivers of blood through the natural contours of the bosoms of the Earth.

 

[Hellraiser]

Territory should flow like rivers of blood through the natural contours of the bosoms of the Earth.

One could say that it should be like paint poured onto a map?

 

[what am i doing]

I may as well continue basing my design decisions off of whatever RPGCodex says. So: sea tiles - straight lines, or minor curvature?

Doesn't make a difference mechanically since there will be the same number with the same adjacency, basically just which looks better. I guess one non-aesthetic side is that these are decided by hand, but if I were to stick with straight lines I could save myself some drafting time (for the rest of the world) by just generating a Voronoi diagram, which would look similar but perhaps with fewer irregular shapes. In any case I'd rather get a bit of external feedback before I start moving on to the rest of the ocean areas.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Personally I prefer more provinces, it allows a superior level of detail. I'm a details-oriented kinda guy. Also I really like city-states and such.

I always wanted to do my own dream post-apoc GSG one day, and one idea I have is being able to use real-world data to generate provinces on the fly, and allowing players to adjust province number before generation. Think of it as a "World Size" slider found in 4X games, except the world ins't getting bigger or smaller, but the province count is.

That's nice for larping analytics, but it can overwhelm at times. I remember initially liking AGEOD's Pride of Nations, until I realized that I was going to have to manually build farms, factories, and manage tax rates in every single province in Russia.

There are times when the KISS(keep it simple, stupid) rule can apply.