Provinces (Management & Size Limitations)

[alms66]

The post that spawned this thread is here.

In a mail, alms said:

In addition to 'Rename Province,' 'Set to province capital,' and 'Set to civ
capital,' on the right-click menu, can you add 'Reassign Province' so that
the player can draw his own provincial borders? It would be really nice,
though not necessary to also put a limit on provincial sizes, though I'm not
sure of the best method to do so.

In playing the Ancient Middle East Scenario, which has a single province
called 'Native Land' that nearly covers the entire map, I've discovered that
this feature would be very useful (at least for this particular scenario).

Laurent wrote:

I guess you mean a menu that lists the provinces you currently have and which one you'd want to reassign to?
But then we never decided how provinces are formed (there are some discussons in several old threads that I don't have time to look for right now). Are there limits on these provinces you would like to have (like only reassign if square is neighbour to the province)? Creating new provinces from scratch is another question, would you want to do it?

To which, my comment was, and still is:

I'm not sure exactly what I want here. I just know that we need a way to reassign squares to another province.

[LDiCesare]

Playing the scenario where there's a huge native province made me understand better what you want/need.
I managed to find an old thread which relates a bit to this subject: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=671887
I think an 'add to province' which creates the province if none of that name exists would do.
This would give total control to the player as to what a province is, what its borders are, etc. This looks like people agreed about such a solution at the time, the real problem having been not to have to reaffect a square after someone else conquered it.
I'll probably offer that to the player and let the ai ignore it, since it doesn't micromanage anyway at this stage (ai doesn't handle econ at province level but only civ level, so it makes little difference for it, and it doesn't really need provinces for presentation of data).

[Mark_Everson]

By the way Alms, you really shouldn't have one big province at the start for all the native peoples. That could lead to lots of problems, since all production for the province is pooled, and military units for a province are only created at the province capital. I'm not sure this criticism is relevant for your scenario, but at something you should know about anyway. You could tile the map with fifteen or twenty provinces in less than a half hour of design time.

I agree in general with the ability to assign a square to a province as Laurent has outlined it. At some point in the not-too-distant future, we should have a way to select multiple map squares in the same time so that whole provinces can be created fairly easily. Being able to "paint" in the selected area by just dragging the mouse over it would be valuable also.

Provided this sounds OK two others as an eventual game, I will add it to the requested feature list.

[LDiCesare]

Mark, I've coded a first implementation of this (which helped me find another bug by the way).
My conclusion is that indeed one would need to be able to select several squares, but what I'd rather have is something like this:
When your province spread too far, then it can no longer conquer new squares. At this time, you should be prompted to create a new province, and select which squares will be part of it. Otherwise, the newly conquered square would be part of an automatically named province (like "South whatever-province-it-would-have-been-assigned-to-otherwise").
Or something like that...

[alms66]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
By the way Alms, you really shouldn't have one big province at the start for all the native peoples.

I've already decided to break them up, partly for this reason, but mainly due to me wanting to have a few unsettled squares so the players can see/use automated settling.

[alms66]

What exactly is the maximum size you currently have coded, Laurent? I reached it once, though it's been a while and I've played several games since then, so I don't recall what it is exactly. However, I do remember it being rather large. Given the early timeframe of the scenarios we're currently doing, I'd think that no more than 10 tiles (though I could still be comfortable up to 15 tiles or so) per province would be more suitable, at least for the time being, while it’s hard-coded (that is, if we don’t do the following, or something similar).

In order to remove this from the realm of hard-coded data…

I think that, in the long run, it will be a combination of Infrastructure and Technology that will control the maximum size of a province. As of demo 8, adding Infrastructure means adding code, so for the time being, I think it would be best to leave Infrastructure out of the equation. Once Infrastructure is easily added via the scenario xml file, we can revisit its role.

So this leaves us with technology being the sole limiter to a province’s size. Having hammered out, and pretty much finalized the tier one technologies somewhat recently, I think we can conclude that Communications (c) and Transportation (t) technologies will be the driving factors. Given this conclusion, I think we can simply say that the maximum size of a province is the average of the two techs, with the decimal truncated, plus 10. It is a rather simplistic “formula” for now, and by no means is it meant to be used in the final version of Clash, but at least it turns one more aspect of the game into something the player can manipulate and look forward to improving, removing it from the realm of hard-coded data.

[LDiCesare]

There is no limit to the province size coded in right now.

[alms66]

That is odd. I could have sworn I had hit it once...

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by alms66
Given this conclusion, I think we can simply say that the maximum size of a province is the average of the two techs, with the decimal truncated, plus 10. It is a rather simplistic “formula” for now, and by no means is it meant to be used in the final version of Clash, but at least it turns one more aspect of the game into something the player can manipulate and look forward to improving, removing it from the realm of hard-coded data.

Hi Alms:

I mostly agree with you in your argument up to the point where you propose a hard limit. I believe hard limits of that sort are a big problem with civ-type games in general. Such step-function changes make it hard to have a good AI, and also create the necessity for micromanagement. I am virtually always for "soft" limits.

In this case a soft limit might be that there are no penalties to economic function and tech generation for a province up to your 10+tech limit. Above that ideal there would be penaties of say squares / (ideal squares *4) in those functional areas. That way, adding a few squares beyond the ideal is not a biggie, but if the province gets twice as big as ideal the penalties would become quite severe.

However, I want to stress that Infrastructure is much more important than tech in this regard. For that reason we are probably better off just waiting for the infrastructure to be done properly than putting in a swag based upon tech level. Long-term I certainly agree that there may be a need to somewhat limit province size. However, if we balance things out, that may not be the case. Another issue with limiting province size is that historical scenarios that use real-world maps could have provinces that are in the range of getting big penalties. This doesn't seem desirable.

[LDiCesare]

If you've got limits for province size you also need a limit for province number.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
If you've got limits for province size you also need a limit for province number.

Why? Communication distance from the capital and other factors are much more important than number IMO.

[LDiCesare]

If you get a malus for having many squares in a province then the logical answer is to split your province in two. If there is no upper limit to the number of provinces, then the optimal thing is to have provinces of 1 square. That should be avoided. Although if there is no decreasing benefits from having a few several squares in a province, it is probably not needed. We must just check the model to see if there is a benefit from micromanaging a lot or if provinces are limited to a manageable number and still efficient.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
If you get a malus for having many squares in a province then the logical answer is to split your province in two. If there is no upper limit to the number of provinces, then the optimal thing is to have provinces of 1 square.

The minuses would only start at a the threshold value determined by infrastructure and tech. The system considered here would tend to drive province size down to that value, but no further since there are no advantages to size-1 provinces.

Rather than a fixed number of squares, in the past I had more been thinking of a critical distance scale from the capital. But this might lead to too much MM involving prov capital position.

There is a writup of some of my thoughts regarding provinces, their size, and the economcy here: Provinces and the Provincial Economy

[Lord God Jinnai]

I am assuming this refers just to the purposes of managing areas, because changing political province bounderies isn't something that happens too often, even if your an omnipitant ruler isn't still not that easy to change political boundries.

[yellowdaddy]

The only size limitation that should be put on provinces is that there has to be at least two inside an empire/state/country, and they have to be at least 1 tile in area, and by implication one disproportionately large province must leave at least one square left.

The other limiting factor is whether the state to which the province belongs has fixed or defined borders.
You could treat such border provinces differently - as Marches.

Provinces only exist in sophisticated pre-mediaeval empires; yet a lot of early empires are just religious centres from which power emanates and fades with distance - as in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica and Southeast Asia.

Do you propose to have a game wherein from the dawn of time all civs create provinces? Provinces come with bureacracy, which civs must surely research as a tech. .

Fair enough, have them if you play a Roman Empire scenario, but do you want them as a blanket game feature?