Provincial Sizes

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Kanzid:

I've said as few as six or so provinces for the modern US. (Could even be 4 or so as LGJ asserted) Roughly something like northeast, SE, north middle (up to rockies), south Middle, west, and Alaska. Obviously its on the large end of the state size scale, but not the top. In US colonial times you'd need more like 12-20 provinces because of the reduced efficiency of travel then. (At least if we scale province size somewhat with transport efficiency)

[The Diamond]

My number of 52 was based purely on the number of states in the US...not necessarily an accurate reflection of the province sizes in the game.

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?

Many provinces = prohibitively expensive to run, allows immense specialisation. Legislation and orders are swift and culture diverse, possibly leading to a lack of general unity in the Civ?