I’ll be going back and rewriting most of my posts to liven them up and add some historical context and some examples of what the results of the combination of mechanics I am working with could look like.
Fantasy Water Geography
Axioms is a fantasy game and as such the default map generator isn’t configured to generate a world quite like our own. Instead at the high end it generates a world roughly 10x the side of ours and it is roughly 70% land. Half the water area will be oceans, so 15%. Given a size increase of 10x for the overall surface area that means 1.5x as much square mileage.
12% of the world will consist of inner seas like the Baltic and gulfs like the one in Mexico. The Mediterranean Sea is roughly 0.5% of the surface of the world. That is roughly a third of the non-ocean salt water in the world. So those areas will cover roughly 8x as much surface area as they do here.
That leaves 3% of the surface area of the world for medium to large lakes, inland seas, and navigable rivers. This is 3x the percentage of our world that is fresh water. Which means it is 30x as much surface area covered in enclosed fresh water compared to our own.
The main purpose of this change is to reduce low quality space which limits the scale and complexity of civilizations. More great rivers, ideally in complex connected networks, more lakes, and more inner seas allows the world to open up proportionally.
There is far less wasted deep ocean. In a lot of cases the reduction in ocean market share just means sticking a big continent in the middle or having a vast and varied archipelago. For my purposes a bunch of empty ocean is low value. There is also a lot more valuable land proportionally which means more variety in states.
Fantasy Land Biomes
Additionally the default worlds that will come pre-generated with the base game will be set such that landmass wise there will be roughly 10% deserts, 10% tundra, 10% mountains, 25% forest, 25% various types of plains from steppes to river plains, and then 20% swamps and river valleys and hills. Now you’ll actually have 3x as much desert as in our world and the same for tundra but the world will proportionally have more land suited to high population and expansive societies.
The significant alteration in the make up of land serves the same purpose and proportionally vastly increasing the “interesting” bodies of water and reducing dead surface area. While the game models the potential for desert, mountain, or tundra specialist societies and the current distribution still allows me to have “Russias” and “Swiss” and so forth, we have much more space for high value land.
Especially in the ancient world you rarely had many true empires at a time who could and did compete. You also had limited peripheries and borders. This got somewhat better as northern Europe developed but it was never great. I’d expect to see, I even plan on, having something like multiple 7000, out of 40000, province empires, ideally of different styles, while still having a ton of room for a variety of smaller states both far away and in the sphere of influence of the empires.
Pure Fantasy
Many fantasy stories involve improbable or even fantastic polities. With a large world with last “waste” area you can have an empire surrounded by periphery, two empires in brutal conflict, and a large number of powerful nations, republics, federations, archipelagos, and so forth that barely interact with empires at all. You could even have 3-5 medium empires, say 4000 or so provinces, all duking it out with *tons* of options for politics, diplomacy, and intrigue. So much intrigue.
For reference Imperator had about 7000 land provinces/territories. Europa Universalis had something like 4000. Crown Of Kings had a couple hundred. Field Of Glory had several hundred.
One thing I also wanted to do was give people the ability to blob hard, cheesing and exploiting, for centuries or even millennia, and yet not conquer the world. The sheer scale combines with the internal political simulation to limit blobbing in a natural and fun way. Coalitions and such can still happen, and easily. Since internal and external enemies can work together.
Additionally puurely population based limitations also exist for empires that grow too fast. Much like real history you can make trade offs between fast growth and stability. I wanted to make something like the Ottomans doable without railroading while keeping blobbing under control. The catch is that the best players could handle something like that but then you aren’t even close to world conquest. There won’t be any difficulties. It is just a matter of how extreme your talent at manipulating the systems is.
Economics And Land Stewardship
Axioms actually has a detailed climate and biome system beyond broad terrain types. Provinces are a mix of habitats, at least in a large number of cases. They also have temperature ranges, rainfall averages, land features, and plants and animals have ideal conditions as well. You can cut and plant forests, build dams and levies, and do all the common and basic land management. But you can also employ magic for environmental control purposes. In quite extensive ways assuming you have the magical and economic resources to do so. Anything from heated shelters and greenhouses to altering the temperature of the whole province or calling rain. Canal digging and lesser irrigation as well.