Dynamic Borders. Can it be done?

[Vince_Sixx]

So, I first posted this on Bethlen's thread on reddit, but I'm kind of interested in seeing how this could be done. After I posted it I started thinking about it more.

This was my original post:

This might be a weird question (it's a bit of a pipe dream really), but have you guys considered a game with a dynamic border system? What i mean is that instead of provinces, national (or regional) boundaries would be kind of a "snap to fit" along geographic boundaries such as mountain ranges and rivers. So, instead of conquering provinces, you carve out a region and annex it.

I realize that may be hard, considering cities, population statistics, economics, and trade, but if statistics were tied to cities and a certain radius from cities, it'd be doable (if processor heavy).

Here's the idea with a bit more organization, which may be more or less confusing than the quoted post:
Border Management
Instead of defining regions and nations by pre-defined provinces, there would be a dynamic border system, where you can snap your borders to geographic features such as mountain ranges, rivers, watersheds (or a collection of historic boundaries), or draw them yourself. The snap-to boundaries could be defined in image files like the provinces already are. For example, when you invade and defeat a nation, you can either conquer a region of theirs (which would also be define by dynamic borders), or you could carve your own piece of their nation out.

What about the statistics defined by provinces?
Simply, those would now be defined by cities. Instead of provinces, there would be cities placed around the map. These cities would have areas of influence where their culture, economics, resources, wealth, technology, etc. would spread to. You could choose to conquer a city and its surrounding area to become your new border, or you could carve out your own border.

Cultures could be defined by city-province as well, or it could be a borderless "cloud". That could create situations like culture clashes in areas where two distinctly different cultures are mixing in a "transition zone".

Why?
Well, aside from being able to make your own borders and such in Europe and Asia, where I'm hoping this will get its biggest use is in games like EU3 and Victoria 2, where colonization is huge. You can create a colony (which is basically like colonizing a province in EU and Victoria), and define the colony's borders. You can add cities, carve out someone else's colony for your own purposes, or whatever your imagination wants.

I realize there's some major problems with this, as it could probably be really performance-heavy if the game has to constantly think about where the borders are and the different in-game consequences of dividing up a people or culture. I could be wrong too. I'd at least like to entertain this idea, and if problems I haven't thought of can be worked out, that'd be really cool.

 

[SweArdaia]

snip

I love this idea and have wished for it to be implemented in these kinds of games since forever, but I am not sure if it will ever be in a paradox game.

 

[Orko80]

At the moment i don't see this possible. There is just too much that is influanced by provinces. The first step toward's this would be implementing some kind of grid to seperate troop movement and the positioning of battles. like i posted in the getting rid of the grid (province) based map in PDX games thread.

This would increase the cpu load immensly with little gain. But still would be so cool if we ever get that =).

 

[lordrock8]

Theres something like that already, surpreme ruler, it still has hexes but its close to what you want.

 

[Orko80]

Theres something like that already, surpreme ruler, it still has hexes but its close to what you want.

Looks interesting. Still too big hexes for my taste. I would like to have a merger of the EU map with a invisible hex grid for troopmovement like in TW.

 

[Demonsul]

Looks interesting. Still too big hexes for my taste. I would like to have a merger of the EU map with a invisible hex grid for troopmovement like in TW.

I thought since their new titles it was all vector based, since everything is based on distance (circular areas of influence and all that)? Or is there still a grid, just infinitesimally small?

 

[Orko80]

Well the moevement itself doesn't look like it's bound to a grid. But the placement of battles you can definatly see the grid that will define the makeup of the battlearea. If you zoom all the way in, when you are next to a enemy army, you can see the green and red squares. Well in Shogun2 you can.

Not so shure about the movement. Could be a visual trick with the range indicators but there is definatly a grid presend.

 

[eleinvisible]

I don't like it. Provinces are the best option, now and forever.

 

[Orko80]

But i want both .... and pie and ponies!

 

[Oliver Twopence]

I don't like it. Provinces are the best option, now and forever.

That kind of thinking will get you nowhere.

 

[Fawr]

Practically speaking it sounds like your system what used to be called a "province" is now called a "city". In your new system if you own a city you get the economic benefits that used to be connected to owning a province. If non-cities have no economic benefit then there isn't really any advantage to owning them.

 

[EB14]

Civ 5's borders are dynamic aren't they?

 

[Orko80]

Civ 5's borders are dynamic aren't they?

Yes but still based on a Hex grid. Similar to the way i proposed.

 

[Bard of Reveran]

It is quite complex I suppose, but I really liked this idea. You can also form the administrative regions by yourslef and it can be an established region in time. (Like gaining cores in EU3 or duchies becoming de jure regions of kingdoms in CK2)

 

[ByzCrusader]

It is quite complex I suppose, but I really liked this idea. You can also form the administrative regions by yourslef and it can be an established region in time. (Like gaining cores in EU3 or duchies becoming de jure regions of kingdoms in CK2)

Yeah... I thought when I bought CK2 that I was going to be able to carve out my own duchies from land won in crusades/holy wars/invasions. That would've been cool.

 

[Mixxer5]

Dynamic borders could actually base on provinces... For example- let's say we have Neumark province. It's controlled in 90% by Brandenburg and in 10% by Poland (of course borders matched). Of course splitting manpower and taxes isn't so simple as that- most important is who holds city in province (currently it's not much more than icon on map). Because every province can hold only one city, money and manpower gained by Poland is negligible- but it's always something. Similar system is in R2TW (or rather will be), my idea is just bit more generic.

P.S Of course, holding part of province could also decrease attrition, generate revolt risk and so on...

 

[Orko80]

Dynamic borders could actually base on provinces... For example- let's say we have Neumark province. It's controlled in 90% by Brandenburg and in 10% by Poland (of course borders matched). Of course splitting manpower and taxes isn't so simple as that- most important is who holds city in province (currently it's not much more than icon on map). Because every province can hold only one city, money and manpower gained by Poland is negligible- but it's always something. Similar system is in R2TW (or rather will be), my idea is just bit more generic.

P.S Of course, holding part of province could also decrease attrition, generate revolt risk and so on...

Nothing says there can't be several villages and city's of different size within a province. Scattered across. With fields and forest for hunting. So you could fight over a hill with a gold mine (insert any resource here) to get it into your province. Or conquer a border city.
Ofcourse a province have to be of a minimal size. Also there could be a mechanic for spliting up a province again. And a inefficency factor to make it desirable to keep provinces a decent size.
So could farm land require less administration and those can be incorporated into provinces with less cost to inefficency, compared to several villages and cities.

 

[Mixxer5]

Nothing says there can't be several villages and city's of different size within a province. Scattered across. With fields and forest for hunting. So you could fight over a hill with a gold mine (insert any resource here) to get it into your province. Or conquer a border city.
Ofcourse a province have to be of a minimal size. Also there could be a mechanic for spliting up a province again. And a inefficency factor to make it desirable to keep provinces a decent size.
So could farm land require less administration and those can be incorporated into provinces with less cost to inefficency, compared to several villages and cities.

Well, yeah- there could be... But it would be tremendous amount of work to do this (unless- for example- Paradox would give us some kind of map editor). I think, that devs could simply give community an opportunity to work on this, while system in vanilla would work as I said. It wouldn't be very hard to accomplish (although new engine would be needed) as it is, but more advanced version would need plenty of modding.

But as I said- I'd love to have such feature in game.

 

[Orko80]

Hey I'm just dreaming here how the most amazing map would work =)

 

[entirelyalive]

Cities with influence sounds like Civilization, which isn't bad, but it is also profoundly ahistorical for pretty much anything before HoI.

The way to do it would be to have cities placed around, but all the countryside would be something akin to vector spaces of population and terrain. At some base level, every pixel would have some small original population based on estimates of population at game start. Every day (or month, or randomly every few years) each pixel would randomly gain or lose a small number of people to represent the random chunks of birth, death and migration. And then things would happen at particular points on the map, like an outbreak of disease, that would diffuse through the pixels like a ripple in a pond, with probabilistic effects with each spread, so that on average it would spread continuously, but if you looked at a hypothetical plague mode map you would see that some communities are wiped out, some hit lightly enough that it doesn't spread from there, and some get missed altogether. The development of trade routes would turn the roads into a series of points (a line, if you will) that propigate out to boost population or wealth in the neighboring pixels, while a raiding army would have the opposite effect as it marches through your countryside.

In this fashion, every pixel has a population value, a terrain value, and maybe a wealth value or a few others and these values are changed through a process analogous to fluid dynamics or cellular automata. When you go to the peace screen and draw you a border, every pixel will then have an easily calculable value for the AI to compare against your war score. You can take pretty borders full of empty fields, or have jagged, jutting borders that reach out for that place with an iron mine and that other place with the river. Cities would be almost incidental, possibly nothing more than pockets of high population pixels, and place names could be reassigned arbitrarily or procedurally.

As fun an idea as it sounds, though, it won't happen because it would be hell on weak computers.