What is the point of making provinces drastically different in size?
Compare micro provinces of Germany to Kola.
I realize that much decentralization and wealth vs wasteland, but provincial sizes actually have strategic value.
For sake of argument let's assume that instead of Kola being a single province, it is composed out several Germany size provinces (they are still extremely poor) mixed in with some wasteland, what would change when Sweden attacks Novgorod?
Well, conquering Kola would take longer and require multiple operations, in contrast to it being a single province that can easily be occupied.
There is also the factor that because army movement is tied to the province size, playing regions Scandinavia where provinces are huge, is simply unfun in compared to smaller province regions.
If you split kola in 10 provinces you have ten provinces with 100 people living in each.
Province size depends mostly on terrain and population density and it makes more sense than equal size provinces
which is why development should be steeper. Paris starts with 30 dev while Stockholm with 10. Absolute ridiculous when Paris had a population of 200K and Stockholm 5K, Paris was also richer than all of Scandinavia combined, but nope only difference is 20 dev.
>If you split kola in 10 provinces you have ten provinces with 100 people living in each.
This, and probably more like 90% living in the three most important provinces and the remaining 10% split between the other 7.
then make the rest of it a wasteland
Why though? Can't you just play and pretend the majority of the Kola peninsula is a wasteland instead? What difference would it make?
Why make moronic big provinces? Why not make a small province and the rest of it wasteland and you just pretend it's a bid province?
Yeah that's ok too. As I said, it makes no difference.
it would limit troop movement
>Finland is an impenetrable wasteland
>Finland is an impenetrable wasteland
Why are you saying that like it's a bad thing?
Someone had to civilize Finland.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Affleck
Simon Afflect "the Hound" was an unpopular Swedish tax collector in Finland.
He abducted multiple Finnish peasant women as his wives and was widely hated.
In 1725, starving peasants stormed his mansion in hopes of lynching him, however, he shot himself before they could reach him.
Worth it
Wastelands are mechanically an impassable terrain that armies would have far too many issues traversing to be worth it. There's nothing preventing you from walking across these provinces, they're just an empty shithole.
>There's nothing preventing you from walking across these provinces, they're just an empty shithole.
I see you have never been to Lappland or Kola.
It is a collection of bedrock and bogs, even bow most it is a natural park with few roads. Marching an army across is just impossible.
I just don't get why foreigners who have never visited the area think marching the army across when time, when it had even fewer people, is viable. Many mods make Lapland and Kola wasteland.
They are told it is "forest" and imagine it is like invading through the Ardennes.
>and imagine it is like invading through the Ardennes
Generally not a great idea unless your opponent is functionally braindead?
It is infinitely easier to invade through the Ardennes than it is to invade through Eastern Finland. Civilized people do not get the concept of "no roads".
I hate how PDX game don't have any roads, you can just go from any random province to any adjacent province with no issue.
Any significant army would have needed a highway to move effectively, moving through unpaved roads would have been painfully slow. Do you think the Roman constructed their lavish road network for the aesthetic? No, the road network to be effective so that the empire could be governed properly.
Imperator Rome has roads and I guess infrastructure in hoi3 and 4 represent roads in a way
Meanwhile EU4, they actually road building a few years back. Simply genious.
>What is the point of making provinces drastically different in size?
It's completely arbitrary and based on how much dev/player interest in the region there is.
Iceland could and should just be one province because unlike Sardinia and Sicily there will be no wars fought on it and its only lost economic value is an impressment office or soldier's household because you should never dev it.
>population density
So places like Scotland, Newfoundland, Australia and Cuba should be one province?
Gibraltar shouldn't be a separate province larger than a pixel?
Paris needs to be split up?
The video game does not represent real life.
>which is why development should be steeper.
I agree with this at least in regards to how uncolonised provinces have more dev than half of Europe's.
>capital of Castile = Cape of Good Hope
>Caribbean > Wales
>Newfoundland = Southern Nordic
>Australia (or New Zealand) > Hungary
>So places like Scotland, Newfoundland, Australia and Cuba should be one province?
Yes, irrelevant shitholes don't deserve multiple provinces
>It's completely arbitrary and based on how much dev/player interest in the region there is.
You can see this in CK2 where England is notably full of small provinces, while Iberia has five times larger provinces, despite having the same population density
>Paris needs to be split up?
Not directly related, but I find strange how in CK3 Paris one province on the west side of the Seine, when Paris was an island that extend to boths ides of the Seine.
Sure, you can that Isle-de-France is too small to depicted in-game, but so is Venice, and they just made much larger it is reality. So, they had no excuse not to make Paris an enlarged island on the Seine.
I do think that these provinces should just be AI generated and of a similar size at this point.
>advocating for GOY$ provinces
have a nice day.
Nta, and to play devil's advocate:
The ones from HoI3 worked out pretty well. However, each individual province had the exact same potential, and some of them already had it fully tapped.
It still would feel weird in EU to go this route. Imperator tried and it's a clusterfrick of empty void
Because they're usually based on existing administrative boundaries, and if you (rightfully) split them up to make smaller provinces, you'll make shit up instead of tracing a map, and have to make up a bunch of made-up names or call them e north-south-central Karelia or something.
They had no problems doing that for HOI and VIC
I have no idea of paradox does it but ideally provinces are centered around important areas of trade/commerce. The idea is you are never going to march a medieval army for weeks through a frozen hellhole and even if you wanted to eu4 is never going to accurately portray that with attrition/supply system they currently have. I assume there would be chokepoints in the terrain anyways, places where an army is always going to move through, that's basically why it's better to have large province for desolate areas. Another reason but probably not intentional is it allows less troops for fronts. Similar to sea zones you're are probably going to detect an enemy army with scouts with plenty of time to intercept them and it makes sense large provinces would be flat desolate areas.
It's so the devs can prevent manufactory spam from being as effective outside of Europe.
Because it's representing a sphere.
Some areas of the world are more interesting and thus deserve a higher province density.
Paradox games should support multiple maps. Not even just for the fact that they've been moving away from the history stuff in favour of memes and therefore the map is less important, think at the most extreme CK2 having the option to randomize all the historical flavour stuff but the geography remains static. But even within the framework of trying to represent history I think having more than a single map would make sense. Consider their rhetoric from the last few years that everyone on the map should be represented equally rather than the map having a focus, including the game series about European colonialism and CK3 having a high province density in places well outside of where the game's mechanics are actually attempting to model, and their love of sudden large map expansions like adding India to CK2 out of the blue. I think the logical way to square all this would be to have multiple maps with different regional focuses, aka a higher province density in the area that you're actually playing in and likely to interact with the most. So if you play as a European in Europa Universalis then Europe will be denser to represent more of the European polities that existed that a european power would actually be dealing with, and India and mesoamerica have a lower level of detail because they only exist to get fought over by you and the other Euros. If you play in India or mesoamerica then the map should model those places in greater detail while Europe only exists to show up as your endgame boss and thus your game doesn't actually benefit any from as many random European duchies being simulated as it did when you actually played in Europe.
>while Europe only exists to show up as your endgame boss
How would that even work? If you're playing in India, Europe can't become traditionally strong unless you repeat Bengal's exact frick-up, step by step.
Europe should become traditionally strong because it's in the western tech group
Anon, you're bootstrapping.
the western tech group should become advanced because of the quality of the european population
The problem is that provinces serve multiple purposes which are mutually conflicting. On one hand, they are productive nodes, most notably the producers of military units. On the other hand, military units move across them, and for that purpose equally sized units would be best. But then that would mean turning vast wastelands into an incredible factory for soldiers. You could group provinces into regions, and then have regions handle production while provinces handle army movement, but then that opens up a whole different barrel of worms.
>But then that would mean turning vast wastelands into an incredible factory for soldiers
Why would it need to be that way if the modifiers would steepers?
Like if Paris would start with 200 development, it would contribute 50K manpower, and all provinces in Kola would start with only 1 development and provide only 250 manpower each.
It's not about manpower, it's about one troop being produced per province.
Solved by banning army recruitment in provinces under xx manpower
Wait you mean recruitment? I mean, it is moronic that Paris can only train one unit concurrently, same as random province in Sweden.
Provinces all should be the same size because the core unit of the game should be identical in typology. Vic 2 mods that add London and Paris as provinces completely frick up here, the game doesn't recognise such thing as urbanisation or amenities, it only has factory workers and rural workers and that's it: a city province therefore does not work. If the game explicitly divides between the two in some regard, as EU4 and its mod do, that's better. However it still fails here on the military level as it adds additional unwanted granularity, furthermore if a city can't get off the ground its just a shitty province... But small.
There could be some reasonable exceptions for geographically notable provinces Eg Gibraltar, Constantinople, Panama.
The solution is to therefore have uniform in size provinces, but explicitly allow for province level subdivision like CK2 does. Eu4 for example could just have a single province for southern Ghana, but a "trade post slot" that European powers can have, preventing the need for Europe to moronicly start conquering swathes of Africa.
Unfortunately this will never happen, as Paradox players pathologically NEED le clean and colourful map painting. The days of HoI2 and DH abstraction, where you just sucked it up if Memel wasn't perfect, are gone.
>province level subdivision like CK2 does
Stellaris sort of does this too with holdings in planets. So you can be a megacorp and have branch offices and also overlord buildings, but you don't need to control the planet or conquer it. I hate having to paint the map.
You have to remember maps distorts things, provinces look more reasonable on a globe.
yeah but moment speed is calculated on raw data
Yeah, and the EU4 map is particularly distorted. They enlarge Europe.
I feel like (as the game is) it would not be a good idea to split it into territories for many reasons
If you look at the general province sizes they are decided more so by importance in history and "traffic" so for example Alsace will see much more army movement and war than Murmansk or Iceland
Also if you split it to 10 more provinces you 1st make create more calculation so more possible lag also you make the nation of that territory 10 times stronger (1 province 1-1-1 vs 10 province 1-1-1) so either would have to make everywhere else 10 times more development or introduce some "state level" development over province
And you could argue that province sizes are exactly made the size they are what would be a 1-1-1 development size (I feel like a province with 100 people having the development of Rome would make no sense either) and really there are tons of reasons why it is how it is
>Well, conquering Kola would take longer and require multiple operations, in contrast to it being a single province that can easily be occupied.
>There is also the factor that because army movement is tied to the province size, playing regions Scandinavia where provinces are huge, is simply unfun in compared to smaller province regions.
You want conquering Kola to take longer, but then you're complaining that walking into Kola takes longer.
???
That's literally what you're asking for, the movement distances in the North is what compensates for the lower amount of provinces so that army operations talke about the same time in dense and sparsely populated areas.
It does not.
The significant factor is the moment lock. Marching to the provinces takes a week and you can't retreat after 50%. The mechanic only works when travel distance is short.
>Marching to the provinces takes a week and you can't retreat after 50%. The mechanic only works when travel distance is short.
That's to make defending it easier for any armies there.