Anyway the dominant one right now from the way I've seen it is based on how far you can travel in 1 day. Any new site founded by your civ after that is another province. This has the advantage of being easy to figure out. However, this probbaly is the most flawwed one. It doesn't take into account changes in technology and/or infrastrcuture which can greatly increase this range. Lets say FE that you found another city before you impliment roads (pretty common early on). This city is far enough away from the captial to be another province so it is. Then you build a road to it. Well now transportation allows you to reach there in less than 1 day. Now you found another city near that new one. Should the provincial size increase? If not we'd have tons of provinces, much like the Feudal Europe, but with even smaller regions. If we increase it, then eventually we'd have almost no provinces at all. FE the US using only land and sea transportation would have 4 provinces (E. US, W. US, Alaska, Hawaii). This also doesn't take into account natural boundries or cultures which have influences province sizes more than anything else.

Another way is to base it somewhat on map generators obsticals such as mountains, etc and another to use cultural types. This probably better, buy still this can lead to many provinces early on which under the system may end up staying.

My propasal:

Provinces were originally only used for Empires because all other civs were either A> Too small B> Too Barbaric (IE not high enough to cooperate and low gov levels), FE the Guals.

To this end provinces should only be used when the gov/management tech level reaches a certain point. Before this time each community pretty much acted as city-states, such as greece. They had no absolute ruler, but could work together if the need was great enough.

At least my take on how it should be done is there in the Econ HTML document on the web page. A little more than one-third of the way down. Provinces can't be arbitrarily resized, but there is some scope for action in that area by the player. Like I say in the HTML document, I don't want to give people any reason to micromanage the province size. I picture resizing your provinces as something that might be done three or four times over the entire game.

There is further, more detailed information at the top of the demo 5 Econ thread. Some of it is of course just a first try for demo 5, but I think it gets the general idea of what I'm trying to do with provinces across.

I guess give it a read, and then let me know what you think.

My responses to some of your points...

Provinces, or something like them are Required for the current economic system to be feasible. Basically it's because a lot of things done in the economic model are too computationally intensive to do for every square. If we use provinces that are of order or 20-50 squares large, then the calculational load becomes much less of a problem. So that is kind of the minimum province size I have been shooting for. This also matches in general administration-type provinces in lots of empires throughout history.

I realize that models other than the Econ one are going to use provinces, so clearly there is a reason for there to be some compromise. I think your ideas of allowing the player to automatically organize provinces along cultural or other guidelines are quite reasonable. However, there should be a functional maximum province size that depends on technology IMO. This maximum province size would help add some realism in the economic model, the government model (based on what I have seen from Rodrigo) and probably in other areas such as the characters model.

But...

If it makes no difference whether a square is in province A or province B; if provinces have no material effect on the game, why are they there at all?

--

I like the province system a lot. (I would like it a lot more if military management was province-based rather than unit-based, but that is not important now.) I think that provinces should, if possible, be a coherent cultural, geographic, and political unit defined by the computer, and that they should be fixed in place so the player cannot change them.

I disagree with LGJ about not having provinces at the beginning. Defining all minor tribes as a province would be a good thing IMO. It would make economic and political interactions with that tribe a lot easier for both the players and programmers to deal with. I would prefer that minor tribes be treated as little civs, and having them form a coherent province structure would let this happen.

Geography should play a major role in generating provinces, tribes, and cultures. A path algorithm could define areas that are similar and easy to get around within. These areas could then be assigned culture groups. This is reasonable to do because unique culture groups are more likely to form in these areas. This combination of similar land and similar people makes the province a natural political and administrative unit.

Also I read the provinces part in the economy section and the way the diminshing returns work isn't going to work because the provinces continually get larger over time. I think they should pretty much be set, only major events like civil wars, conquest of one small province by another small province (ie Feudalistic periods), drastic change in culture(s), etc. These shouldn't change as technology increases. There is one exception:

At the beginning of the game we use Rich's method to determine where provinces are set up initially. The AI uses these to manage events and whatnot, but the player cannot micromange provinces until he reaches a certain level of gov/managment tech, at which time he can. This number will be low so that players can start doing it early on, but allow the player to experince the growth of control of the government as well as giving more realism etc. The player wouldn't need too many provinces anyway before this because they should only have a few citites by the time they reach this level, whatever it is.

Final note on provinces: I think we should allow city-state provinces. They are common enough throughout history and in modern times to allow it. These city-state provinces would only become so after reaching a certain level of population (based on say the known world population). It would also be limited to only a few cities (10-20). These city states would include the city and the 4 or 8 squares surrounding it. If the city falls below a certain level it is reabsorbed into the parent province if possible, if not, the most culturally suited province of the parent civ ajacent to it. If for some reason there is none next to it (Such as Hong Kong was), this doesn't occur and it becomes a "special" city-state province, where it is not counted on the city-state number level. If at any time it is below that point and the parent civ comes ajacent to it (assuming its not conquered), it automattically gets absorbed.

Shimmin:

Well, the idea is to have it not be critical At the Margins which square a province is in. So, it shouldn't make a big enough difference for most people to micromanage whether a particular square at the edge is in province A or B. However, there would be places where it would make a difference. I just would like these instances to come up fairly infrequently. I think we are going to have to mess around with several designs before we get this right since there are a lot of trade-offs. If we can get something automatic that would work reasonably well I would be very happy. But I'm not sure we can do a good enough job to satisfy most players under most circumstances.

Richard:

I really don't think provinces can be fixed in place. For one thing, the typical slow incremental conquests that will happen when one is starting with a very small state wouldn't make any sense with fixed provinces. For instance, let's say I am playing the nascent Roman republic that controls something like two squares. If I take two adjacent squares from other Latins, and one adjacent square from a Celtic tribe, to my mind I should still be able to have a single province for my five squares, even though it goes across what used to be the border between provinces. But maybe I don't understand what your point is...

BTW the barbarian cultures that you saw in demo 4 Are each a single province. Handling them that way is what seems sensible to me also. I also agree with your and others' points about using geography to set up things reasonably. It's just that after the set up I see things as being somewhat more chaotic, and thus needing to be more flexible, than I guess you do. I think we can just let the playtesting be the final judge on that...

LGJ:

Yeah, clearly under active conquests situations you need to be able to allow smaller-than-usual provinces. I really think you need to get used to the idea of having multiethnic provinces however. IMO frequently they're going to be completely unavoidable. And frankly, lots of despotic rulers in history didn't care one bit about the peoples they stuck together and moved about to create provinces.

I think province size Must be able to change with technology for the game to be playable. Otherwise there will be modern states with 42 provinces, which is way too many IMO. Do you recall what civilization gets like with 42 cities, not to mention 100! Now I think because of the generally smaller province size for ancient civilizations that sometimes a large ancient civilization could have 30 or so provinces. But one this large would typically be hard to hold together, and would tend to only last so long before being broken up by revolution or other factors. But this is really another point where we can wait until the game matures more before we need make a final decision.

In ancient times, typical conquests were not slow or incremental. For almost all of history, one battle would determine the fate of an entire province. My view of ancient conquest is that winning a battle should turn the entire enemy province into a satellite or subject state. This is assuming that the entire defending army is a single task force, which it almost always was.

What you say about ancient conquests changing the status of large chunks of land at a time is, I think, generally true when two fairly large states fought. But some provinces will represent collections of many small states that only have a common culture. These are the "barbarian cultures" in demo 4. The province in fact Does Not represent a coherent political unit. In this case winning one battle even decisively, will only represent having defeated one of the many small kingdoms within the province. So the squares representing that kingdom only should have their status changed. That could well be a few squares at a time.

Initially, I would have my core be a province, and as I expanded, I would move more developed regions into a second province, keeping one region of my empire fine-tuned for growth and expansion, and the more developed core regions aimed at becoming an economic powerhouse. Special circumstances (border with aggressive neighbor -- tune this province for military readiness; plentiful local resource -- tune the region to most efficiently exploit it) would create other regions.

If the goal of the province is to speed gameplay, then the player should be able to make region A and region B part of the same province regardless of geography if they wish to administer A and B in the same fashion.

I did not understand how much land was in a square. At first I thought that there would be three or four provinces and about sixty squares in a place the size of Italy. I saw province sizes as being about the size of the territories on the Castle Risk board, the one that only includes Europe and a few surrounding areas.

Then I realised that each square would have a width of one degree of longitude and a height of one degree of latitude. Looking at a map, I saw that this would mean Italy would be about ten squares, or a half to a fifth of one province as it is currently defined.

The land area I was calling a province is equivalent to the land area everyone else was calling "two squares."

To cover your "management strategy" blocks of provinces I had envisioned the player to be able to issue orders on the level of Province "types". The types would be something like Core, New Conquests, Colonies, Front-line or whatever arbitrary ways that the player would like to divide provinces into classes for administrative/economic functions. So although the individual provinces would be limited in their size, most management could occur at the province-type level when the player gets more than a few provinces.

Richard:

Well, to make you feel better, Italy is something like 60 squares in demo 4. That may have been where you got your impression from! While I would like to put some of these discussions behind us, I don't want to do it prematurely either! By my calculations modern Italy actually should have something like 25 squares (60 miles per side), putting it solidly in the realm of a single province, but not by as much of a range as you stated. A large ancient province would be something about the size of France at the current scale. Of course, we may also decide that at this scale there are just too many squares, and enlarge the squares by up to a factor of 4 in area for the "standard" game. That would indeed make it more like your 10 squares.

I picked the current province size scale because it seemed a reasonable compromise between governmental provincial functions, reducing micromanagement as much as possible, reducing the number of calculations, and economic realities.

All:

The Arabian desert is about the came size as Mesopotamia. The Sahara desert is about the same size as Europe. Siberia and the wastelands in Asia have the same land area as all of the Asian civilizations combined.

Does a parched wasteland deserve as many clock cycles as the "cradle of civilization"? Does a bigger collection of sand deserve as much processor time as all of western civilization? Do a few barren, ininhabited regions need to be given the same status as all of eastern civilization? I don't think so. Yet any system that treats all land squares equally will inevitably have this result.

If we make the squares and provinces smaller to try to give enough detail to the civilized areas, we will waste a lot of processor time on the wastelands. If we use larger squares and larger provinces to avoud wasting time, we will turn some entire countries into a single square.

I think that it is very important that we consider this problem of detail. I have an idea that could help solve the problem. Whatever you think of my idea, please give some thought to this issue of map detail.

In Mark's new economic system, all calculations are done by province. The inputs from all of the squares are added and then run through the production equations. This is a good time saver, but the province calculation speed will still depend on the number of squares in the province. The squares must be considered individually and then added together.

What would happen if all squares in the province were the same? If they all had the same properties, then all of the province equations could be found simply by calculationg one square and multiplying by the number of squares. Everything from the cost of roads to the returns from farms could be quickly calculated this way. Many long summations would become a few multiplications.

This would have two important results, The first would be that the quicker calculations would allow us to have more provinces without slowing things down. The second, and more important, would be that the calculation time for provinces would be independent of the number of squares in the province.

The calculations for a province with three identical squares would take just as much time as the calculations for a province with seventy identical squares. The computer only has to calculate one square and multiply.

This means that the number of provinces, rather than the number of squares, is the thing that determines how much time the computer takes. A map with thirty provinces and a hundred squares would take just as much time to compute as a map with thirty provinces and a thousand squares.

I think that such a system would be a good solution to the detail problem. We simply make the provinces in good land smaller and the provinces in bad land larger. If the number of provinces is the same, the processing time will be the same. Civilizations are more likely to form in good land, so the inhabited and civilized areas can have small, detailed provinces while the wastelands can have large provinces that are calculated quickly.

This system would also allow the map to become much more detailed. The area that used to be one square can become four, nine, or even sixteen squares with no increase in the time needed to calculate things. A more detailed map will allow more detailed and accurate province sizes. A map of Earth would no longer have to represent Switzerland with two squares. The country could instead become two provinces and have a realistic shape. Meanwhile, the huge expanses of wasteland in the Sahara would be combined into only a few provinces, so no calculation time is wasted on them.

Such a system would require certain sacrifices. Players could not resize provinces. Provinces would have to be taken whole in military combat. Ecological and economic provinces would have to have the same borders. I think it would be worth it, and in the absence of a better plan I think this should be considered.

quote: In Mark's new economic system, all calculations are done by province. The inputs from all of the squares are added and then run through the production equations. This is a good time saver, but the province calculation speed will still depend on the number of squares in the province. The squares must be considered individually and then added together.

When a province is formed, the various sites in all the squares are simply added up. After that, additions of labor or capital are just handled at the whole-province level. Since we know how many people are working in each economic sector (like agriculture), we can come up with a good estimate of the population in each square when necessary by distributing the people working in the sector proportionally with the number of sites of that type in each square. And even when the number of sites in the square changes its not particularly expensive, since the square will just inform the province of the change, and the total number of sites in the province will be modified accordingly.

The most expensive part of this is when you need information on individual squares' population and what they contain in terms of capital. That penalty will come in for two cases. For the case of small states were a few squares make a difference, both the player in the AI will need to know about the properties of the individual squares that are nearby. The other cases when the player wants to examine individual squares for whatever reason. My guess at this point is that neither of these exceptions will be particularly expensive computationally since they will generally apply to only a very small fraction of the squares on the map. I also have some ideas for minimizing even the small penalty.

So there would be no problem with multiplying the number of squares by sixteen? If they is the case, I think we should decrease the size of the squares. The dimensions of each square could be one fourth of a degree of longitude or latitude at the equator. This detail would make the map look and play a lot better.

I like your proposal, but not the fact of conquering whole provinces at a time. I don't mind those for purely war games like RISK and Genghas Khan 2, but Clash isn't purely a war game and I also really really want to be able atleast sometimes to only take a few square only out a large province w/o making it a warzone province.

I do have a proposal for this which hopefully will only increase the COU usage a minimal amount. For this we have 2 (or optional 3) layers of provinces. The first layer is for the type of provinces you talked about above. The second is based on that, but say it is devided by 2 nations, well here's how it works. Anything that doesn't have to do with whoever controls a section or not will be calculated on the first level for the entire province. Such things would be for disease, famine, climate changes, etc. The second level would take that same area and calculate each section seperatly for each level 2 province for both contries so say the province had 10 squares and Civ A controlled 5 and Civ B controlled 5. Lets say a drought hits the province. No matter which side your on, reguardless of how you deal with it, the intial effects of the drought will be calculated for the entire province. Now after that things like what your civ does in response are calculated after that. Also how it effects the economy might in some cases be done province wide and in some cases not. FE a drought will affect storages for both sides. But if storgaes run out in Civ A, prices there will go up, but not ness. in civ B.

Anyway the first could be the ecological provinces you talked about and the second could be sub-ecological/governmental provines.

I think multiplying the number of squares by 16 would be pushing it. Actually, I'm almost certain it is prohibitively expensive. That's because we already have 64 K. squares. Another factor of 16 would give us one million. Even if you thrift on the sea squares in terms of memory usage, that is an enormous amount of memory to tie up. Even the incidental amount of processing that needs to go with each square would be prohibitively expensive if there were one million squares IMO. Personally I think 64 K. is already probably too many...

LGJ:

Almost all wars in history have been fought in a surprisingly small percentage of the land area on the planet. Everything else just isn't suited for military action. So we can make those provinces smaller; in some cases they could be the size of two or three squares on the current map. Especially valuable of strategic places could be even smaller. A system that had those provinces being conquered whole would not be appreciably different than the current system of square-by-square conquests. Meanwhile, the squares no one cares about can be lumped into provinces of thousands and thousands of land tiles that require no extra calculation effort at all.

The military aspect seems to be the biggest objection to the uniform province proposal. But if we make the computer smart enough to make small provinces in strategic areas, then the province based fighting loses its military restraints. IMO programming the computer to do a good job of province assignment would be a lot easier than programming a good enough AI to handle square based troop-micromanagement fighting.

The Big Idea: Homogenous econ/ecology provinces could improve the game by making many calculations depend solely on the number of provinces, not the number of squares. This should make the game go faster and allow the map to contain more squares.

The Big Objection: Wargamers want tile-based combat and flexible provinces.

After pausing to consider these two points of view, I think that they do not have to be at odds. It should be possible to create a system with small and homogenous, yet flexible, provinces.

The splitting of provinces due to military action is easy enough to do. The problem is that if there is not some mechanism to reduce the number of provinces, any military action will create extra provinces and the number of provinces will become unmanageable.

However, this splitting would not be a problem if provinces could combine and grow. This was proposed sometime before, and even if the ecological provinces are the same as the economic ones, it makes sense for provinces to combine.

I am defining a province as a region with an infrastructure, society, and environment similar enough to be treated as identical on average and administered as a single unit.

As people continue to inhabit a plot of land, the original natural characteristics of the land become less important. The natural vegetation is slowly replaced with human dwellings and farms. Also, the original characteristics of the land will have less of an impact on farming as people change and improve the farmland. If the two original ecological provinces were similar, the differences between them will become minimal and they can reasonably be combined.

Infrastructure will also tend to become similar if two similar, adjacent places are being managed by the same civ. If the provinces are not radically different, we can assume that their infrastructures can be averaged and the provinces combined.

Society and culture also tend to become more similar as people are managed by the same government and live in the same area. No one can tell the difference between Goths and Lombards anymore.

Given this, there should be no problems with combining stable, similar provinces within the same civilization. If two regions have reasonably similar infrastructure and environmental conditions, they can be combined into a single province that is the average of the two original provinces. History supports this province expansion; the size of the divisions and administrative regions of countries has increased over time.

The mechanism for province combination will require play balancing, but we should be able to fix it so it counters the province increase due to military action.

In addition to the benefits of the homogenous provinces, this system should make the player's job easier. By combining provinces, the player's management tasks are simplified. As civilizations grow in size, the provinces will grow with them. The provinces in the interior of the civ that have been a part of teh civ for a long time will require less management, while any war zones on the borders will have smaller provinces that allow for detailed military actions.

1. Technology should also play a part in province combining, basically if it exceeds maximum size for the current technology levels, it cannot be combined. We should also have a maximum size, reguardless of technological level.

There is only 1 problem i forsee with this, and it would be with any province model based solely on economic, ecological and infrasture. The problem comes with player admistation for those who want to do some micromanagment.

It seems there is no important detail in the game that you're not willing to change so that you don't have to modify your ecology system. Sorry, I shouldn't joke like that, I know you have the best interests of Clash at heart.

But Most of the things you would like to change were locked in long ago. Those particular details, like the size of a square, or the size of a province, or how many provinces there should be in a civ, have gone into numerous discussions in determining how a variety of models should work. If you are interested, you can use the search capability of Apolyton to find some of those old discussions. We just Can't go back and rework models from their foundations unless they are shown clearly not to work in playtesting. You can certainly discuss your ideas all you want, but we Cannot afford to turn the project upside-down to implement them. And I don't have time to discuss at length all your suggestions for ripping things up and starting from scratch. Most of our ideas will either be shown to be right or wrong only in the light of playtesting. Until we are at that point I really need to focus on implementing the existing models that have been more or less agreed-upon.

The only reason I'm posting in response to your proposal (which I estimate is going to take an hour of time out of pushing the coding forward) is I'm afraid you will take my silence for approval. And I also wouldn't want you to waste your Clash energy, which is quite valuable to the project, in a direction that isn't likely to do any good. I will certainly concede that your ideas might possibly result in a better game than the ones a bunch of us agreed to a long time ago. But nonetheless, those old assumptions have been discussed by many people, and locked into the project for some time. Given the project's painfully limited coding resources, I really don't think we can explore any of the alternatives at this point.

Just to fill you in on some of the thoughts that went into why things are the way they are, I will review as tersely as I can, why I think the provinces and map square core ideas should not be modified. Again, in general I think it would be of some value to re-address all these issues... but from the perspective of what we have available, I think the best approach is to get to playtesting as soon as possible. A few non-ideal models won't kill the project. Endlessly debating everything just might...

Some thoughts on the "standard" models vs. your recent proposal(s):

Provinces:
These have a multifaceted role in the game. The most important purpose of the province is as an administrative unit for the civilization. If provinces are made so small that you need 50 or more of them to have a decent sized empire than they have failed this purpose. I would vastly preferred if most civilizations could be run with 10 or less provinces. Your proposal violates this exceptionally important (IMO) design criterion.

The second purpose of provinces is to make the economic model, which is rather calculation-intensive, feasible to use in the game. I would actually prefer that it took significantly less time than it does, but I think we can get away with the strategy that has been mentioned earlier in this thread.

You seem confident that we will have enormous amounts of processor power to throw around just because we can make big provinces over much of the globe. (And in fact it Is a Very useful insight) But, considering only "militarily active" regions you are still left with something like 30% of the land area. (Figure taken from John Keegan's "A History of Warfare") So in fact your proposal is only gaining something more like a factor of two in efficiency of provinces given that even the "nonmilitary" land has to have some provinces. Additionally, given our ambitious targets for AI and realism, a factor of two gain in province economy in efficiency probably should just be reserved in case something else takes longer than we hope.

Map Squares:
First, as I said above, you are not really gaining much processor time, so you don't really have more to spend in putting yet more squares on the board. In addition to the marginal cost of extra squares to the economic model, the graphics cost of extra squares is not negligible. Plotting tiled graphics takes much more time for lots of little tiles than it does for the same screen area of larger tiles. I am already concerned that our graphics may be too slow once the number of tile overlays for roads, military units, and tokens to give the player various information are performed.

Second, the 100 kilometer tiles are designed with strategic movement in mind. It was thought that anything smaller would make the military part of the game too tactical. This would conflict with the overall strategic "leader-oriented" nature of Clash. If it makes you feel any better, I was once on the small-tile side of this argument. However, I was convinced otherwise.

Lastly, if the additional number of tiles really gives more military options, then doing the AI will become yet more difficult. The clock cycles required for the map AI clearly increases as the number of tiles does. Unfortunately the clock cycles increase not linearly with the number of tiles, but as a power law. For that reason, I have considered at times reducing the number of tiles. However, I decided to wait for playtesting to see where we come down on this issue.

Anyway, I'm really sorry if I'm being harsh. But there is still an enormous amount of design work to be done in terms of looking for fatal "gotchas" in the models, the interfaces for the models, and looking at how the major models interact... We need to move forward, building upon what we already have. If we are continuously worrying at the foundation elements of Clash, I really fear we will never get significantly far beyond them. It may be that some of your and LGJ's suggestions in this thread Can be grafted onto the existing models to improve them. I'll try to look at that tomorrow. But for tonight my Clash time is all used up.

I am asking you as a personal favor to please just figure out how to integrate the ecology model into the rest of the framework as that framework exists...

Can you post basically what was decided because I did look b4 this came out and what I saw was about provinces that A> they should reduce porccessor time by reducing the calculations needed for each square (The whole reason for them) B> They should grow over time dependant on technology C> Based almost completely on ease of adminstration.

tiles: (which BTW i was basically standing neutral on since as far as I see it, if a player wants more tiles, he can create a bigger world and not use the standard one, but he should know that it might eat up proccessor time) Anyway, on tiles, I seen that A> the STANDARD would be 100km, but for scereio purposes the size can change. B> The number of tiles can change to suit differnt worlds/scerios, but that there will be a STANDARD number C> There will also be a STANDARD number aloted to ocean to help reduce proccessor time (though once you start having the ability to put cities in oceans, it may be diminished somwhat).

As I'm sure I've demonstrated I'm not the most diplomatic person either... I'm at work right now, but had a few quick thoughts I can add that might help on your post. (And I still haven't had time to look over possibilities in the new proposals that could be appended to the existing system...)

Specs:
I think I have presented all of them above. In order of importance

Provinces:
1. Give player and AI reasonably small number of empire subdivisions to work with (ideally 10 or less, Max 20 over the long haul) Primary use of subdivisions is for govt and econ.
2. your A,B, C above.
3. Ideally 20-50 squares. (Size of historical large provinces)
4. Since empires are expected to grow, with conquest and technology, provinces should be dynamic to satisfy 1.

Map Squares:
100km
1. military: some tactical flavor remains esp for modern warfare;
2. AI: can't have too many squares to deal with;
3. graphics: get slow above this with target comp (may be a bit too much anyway when we get all the map levels going)

I should have stated it better in my post... I am talking about the square size that the game is tuned for, assuming something like a 600MHz P3. We need to use something as a standard, and what I didn't like was the suggestion that that be greater than the already large number (64K!) of squares we have. I in no way meant to throw doubt on all the discussions we've had about giving the player options in square sizes. The player should be able to go to a million squares if they have the desire and hardware for it. But remember we are scaling the default tileset to go with a certain number of tiles per screen when it looks best...

My main point is that if a new model doesn't fit within this framework then the new model should be the one to change. A year of discussion has already gone into these things! I'm sorry you guys weren't here for all of it. I realize its somewhat unfair in the cosmic scheme of things that you've been presented with a fait accompli, but that's life.

And, specifically, I don't think the ecology model would have to change much at all to fit in perfectly. I just don't see how the govt/econ and the ecol provinces can be made to match, at least as I understand the ecol model. Players will want to have all of forests, grasslands, and mountains in one administrative province some of the time. FE, all of modern Italy. And I think we need to let them do so.

My recent province proposals were entirely incompatible with the current ecology model, and I knew it. Most of that model is designed around dynamic border-shifting provinces. If province shapes were made static, I would have to completely redo all of the terrain change aspects of the model. Doing things your way means less work for me. As soon as I know how many farm sites should be on mediocre land, bad land, great land, etc. I can easily output the farm sites per tile.

I didn't know that so many things were set in stone. I guess my view of the Clash design system was skewed by my work in the technology model. LGJ and I entirely restructured and rebuilt a model that everyone had already agreed on and done some work on, and the response was positive.

I won't waste any more of your time by trying to come up with a compromise on something that apparently will not change.

Sorry for the misunderstandings. We appear to have sorted things out in a reasonably efficient fashion.

I try not to be too dogmatic when wearing my hat as "lead designer". After all, everyone wants to get their own fun ideas into Clash, not just flesh out mine! I guess the way I'd characterize our design process is that if something is "set in stone" but all the stakeholders agree that there's a cool new idea they'd like to explore, then that's fine. (I need to add the caveat here that it shouldn't hold up existing progress, or throw away a bunch of existing work either) All these criteria were fulfilled with the technology model work. In this case the potential changes involved a lot more things that were already firmed up in a bunch of different models, and at least one stakeholder (me) who thought the new proposals were actually going in the wrong direction.

What we're looking at is maybe not defining provinces so strictly early on. In the very beginning, govts. won't be large enough to consider the idea of a province. It won't be until the civilisation starts to get a little too large in either population or size that separate provinces will need to occur.

To clarify, you need 2 separate administrations when the population is too big for one to handle or for when the geographical area is too great to convey orders, etc. to the far borders.

However, I think the decision of when and how to divide provinces should be left with the player (with suggestion and leading from the AI).

As an example, let's say I have 10 cities strategically placed in a circle around my capital. In total, I cover about a diameter of 20 map squares and an area of 314. Forget about whether this is realistic or not for now.

Anyway, I decide to make this all one province. My problems? Orders sent to the peremiter of my realm take ages, corruption is high the further away from the provinical capital you go, taxes take a while to come in (probably reduced as well) and military production is harder to co-ordinate. Also, my provincial policies have to take into account 11 cities and a huge geographical area...not easy to do the best for everyone.

So, on that note, I separate my realm into 11 provinces. Now I have the opposite problem. Orders are quicker, corruption is reduced, inefficiencies in policing and admin are reduced, but their costs rise. Military production is much easier to co-ordinate and I'm more flexible. However, if you incur a running cost for every province, then I'm paying through the nose to run this. Probably I'm taxing like hell and people are moving out of the current provinces, making me even larger and making the problem worse.

I think the player has to find a trade-off that works for them. Maybe the whole Sahara desert, where population is thin and the terrain, etc. doesn't differ much, could be covered by one province. However, in the US, where terrain varies enormously very quickly and population is high, maybe you'd need up to 52 provinces?

Also, there's nothing to stop a disgruntled outlying city declaring itself independent if you refuse to make it a province...

I think the ecology model can be used pretty much as designed. As Richard said, he just needs estimates from me as to how many sites different types of squares should have. I have posted that stuff in the ecology model thread.

What I've taken away on provinces is that we should use really big provinces on fairly useless land, work hard to not give players the incentive to excessively micromanage their provinces, and try to encourage provinces based on geographic and ethnographic realities. Just about everything else that was brought up in this thread, I think will be better addressed when we can actually playtest some of this. Ideas regarding the economic nature of provinces, we can start to explore with Demo 5. For the government ramifications we will have to wait for demo 6 unless someone dying to code the government model shows up very soon.

The Diamond:

I think your ideas are pretty reasonable in general, although I might quibble with some of the specifics. The only thing I'd stress is that we need to make sure that these trade-offs are fairly gradual so there is no incentive at the margin to micromanage provinces. So specifically in your example when the player's civ started to get near 100 squares, they would start paying a serious net penalty for having everything crammed into one province. However, I'm pretty sure that we definitely don't want the United States to have 52 provinces, although I guess if the player really wanted it that way they could have it so. But there should be no net advantage for the player of 52 vs. 10 given modern technology. And we would not want the AI to have such small provinces, because the calculation load would get too large if everyone had that many provinces.

Anyway, I go back to my crucial point. Province sizes is purely going to be affected by size and scale of the map. If one square = 10sq. miles, then provinces will naturally be "larger" than if one square = 1,000sq. miles. That's just a simple relative concept.

However, if the world is 4,000,000 squares in area then there will physically be more provinces and there will actually be an encouragement for the micro-managing player to make larger provinces (who wants to micromanage 1,000 tiny provinces when they could run the Empire just as efficiently with 50?). If the program encourages the non-micro-managing player to make large provinces then the problem is at least reduced.

You talk of processing power...my question will probably be answered in a Demo at some stage or other, but at what point does the processor noticeably take time over the calculations? I'm not sure of the exact magnitude of these calculations, but I imagine it can't possibly be too bad...only if it starts to make the game irritatingly slow will that be a problem. Do we have a rough idea of where that line is drawn?

I agree with you that there should be no net "advantage" for any amount of provinces over another...however, the two extremes should carry their own penalties and all points between be a direct mixture of the two. To repeat my earlier point:

Few provinces = cheap to run, but hard to specialise in diverse terrain. Also takes longer for legislation to take place and orders to be given and carried out. Perhaps restricts local culture differences?