Location Density Advantages vs. Disadvantages

[pheonix_cruz]

While reading through the China Feedback thread, I came across a common argument regarding location density. This reminded me of others I've seen, and I wanted to outline the general points as well as my thoughts on this.
The main points of contention regarding location density are:
1) What should location density in the game be based on? Should it reflect historical administrative divisions, population density, or the relative importance/interest of an area? (See this previous post.)
2) Does a certain region give an advantage or disadvantage to countries located there based on the region's location density? That is, is the general power of a country higher than it otherwise would be given that the land it owns has a higher/lower location density?
3) Does, and should, location density give a bias in terms of power and/or focus to Europe in particular, while neglecting and underpowering other areas of the world? Europe definitely has the highest location density, and in EU4 density meant more power.

I mostly wanted to focus on contention 2) and 3) above. I think @JacceDON laid out the fundamental question/experiment of strength of location density well in his reply when he said:
"Have we seen the statistical difference in resource output and power of - say - a population of 10 million spread out over 500 locations compared to the same population in just 100 locations? Of course a location with more pops is better, but does it scale correctly compared to just owning more locations?"

Regarding contention 2), here are some thoughts I had for the Advantages and Disadvantages of Location Density:

Low Location Density Stronger:
1) lesser difficulty propagating control due to control loss moving from one location to the next
2) country can be well covered by forts more cheaply and defended by armies more responsively
3) economics of scale for your buildings, i.e. greater than linear growth of buildings based on population, as higher building levels are made available by high population provinces being able to supply the necessary labor
4) cabinet actions I believe work on a limited area at a time

High Location Density Stronger:
1) having access to a greater variety of recourses (not as relevant once you have so many locations that gaining more is mostly repeat resources)
2) your enemy has to conquer more locations
3) more places to build buildings with flat (not scaling with location population) modifiers like +50 manpower
4) the existence of some base (pop independent) production, possible less than linear growth of production with population, and possible cap on production where any higher population wouldn't give any benefits?
5) soft cap on location population capacity based on terrain/vegetation/climate, mostly relevant for population potential once the nation has become more developed and time has passed

I would be interested if anyone could provide more info on this topic, especially on the details regarding how population affects resource production. What are other ways that location density might be an advantage/disadvantage?

I don't want this to be a repeat of the location density post from February or lend too much focus to contention 1) above. I prefer locations to generally reflect historical administrative divisions, and I like that Europe's locations are denser. Shifting to contention 3), I was hoping to more so get at the question of does this make Europe disproportionately stronger than it otherwise would be, or should be? Let's say we agree that higher location density does give a power advantage, is this a good thing? If we wanted to mitigate this bias, we could ask for an adjusted location density distribution (as I have seen often and am not necessarily opposed to), or (my preference) we could find a way to dampen the density effects on a given territory by somehow addressing the advantages/disadvantages of density that I outlined above. Make it so that the example given by @JacceDON above yields two situations of roughly equal power, or at least one of them not being overwhelmingly stronger given a certain meta gameplay.


PS. After reading through comments and thinking about it more, I have a better guess as to how location density will be an advantage vs. disadvantage.

Early Game: I think that in the early game low location density will be stronger. Population is overall much lower in the early game, so having low density will lead you to having more of the scarce high pop locations. Control is much more difficult to come by in the early game, and as I identified that lower density makes control propagation easier, this makes low density stronger earlier on. Levies are seemingly only important early game, and your levy size isn't dependent on having many buildings with flat manpower bonuses in many different locations.

Mid-Late Game: Higher location density will be stronger. As nations and economies develop, especially the player's, population capacity becomes more of a constraint (an assumption). Regions with low location density will have locations hitting the soft caps on their growth curves earlier on, while high location density regions can continue to grow. Locations from low location density areas may also start hitting caps on things like industry size/level. Manpower becomes much more important with professional armies, and for a given total population, you can seemingly have more manpower with more provinces.

How to fix this: I think certain things need to have a way to scale with the actual size of locations or the total population of a given location.
1) Population Cap: This should in some way scale with the actual size of the location. If both a Chinese and a European location are flatland/farmland, and the Chinese location is twice as large, this needs to be reflected in the population capacity of that location. Additional, maybe less-than-linear, modifier to pop cap based on the size of locations.
2) Manpower Buildings: Needs a way to make manpower be more relative to the population of the province. No more flat manpower modifier that greatly advantages high location density regions. There are many ways this could be accomplished.
3) Cabinet Actions: Scale the time for actions with the population the action is performed on. Doesn't necessarily need to scale linearly. Could also scale with province actual size.
4) Forts: Not as significant with the others, but some scaling of the fort cost/maintenance with the actual size of the location. You shouldn't get extra coverage of your population and such just because the location happens to be larger.

 

[Chieron]

Further advantages for fewer locations (keeping same population):
- higher population per location means that you can get economies of scale earlier.
- buildings with scaling (percental) effects are more effective
- need for fewer buildings that are necessary but provide non-scaling effects (e.g. forts and control) - conversely, more workers available for advanced buildings

More locations:
- more base resource income from locations (this is just the tiny trickle that is pop-independent)
- potential for more smaller tags and more granularity when expanding (conquering and holding a single rebellious 500k pop location is likely daunting compared to conquering a few 20k locations a bunch at a time)

I suspect that there is an optimum density, where each location has a certain number of pops in the beginning that can be useful immediately and will usually grow to a good size over time while not running into capacities.
Too low populations will take ages to become useful past the minimal level.
Too high populations will run into popcaps when growing.

The mentioned resource variety also is not necessarily there. E.g., when splitting one fish location in two fish locations.. But of course, there is potential.
In any case, the markets are meant to smoothen the discrepancy here.

 

[Burkey123]

While reading through the China Feedback thread, I came across a common argument regarding location density.
The main points of contention regarding population density are:
1) What should location density in the game be based on? Should it reflect historical administrative divisions, population density, or relative importance/interest of area? (See this previous post.)
2) Does a certain region give an advantage or disadvantage to countries located there based on the region's location density? That is, is the general power of a country higher than it otherwise would be given that the land it owns has a higher/lower location density?
3) Does, and should, location density give a bias in terms of power and/or focus to Europe in particular, while neglecting and underpowering other areas of the world? Europe definitely has the highest location density, and in EU4 density meant more power.

I mostly wanted to focus on contention 2) and 3) above. I think @JacceDON laid out the fundamental question/experiment of strength of location density well in his reply when he said:
"Have we seen the statistical difference in resource output and power of - say - a population of 10 million spread out over 500 locations compared to the same population in just 100 locations? Of course a location with more pops is better, but does it scale correctly compared to just owning more locations?"

Regarding contention 2), here are some thoughts I had for the Advantages and Disadvantages of Location Density:
Low Location Density Stronger:
1) greater difficulty propagating control due to control loss moving from one location to the next
2) country can be well covered by forts more cheaply and defended by armies more responsively
High Location Density Stronger:
1) having access to a greater variety of recourses (not as relevant once you have so many locations that gaining more is mostly repeat resources)
2) more places to build buildings with flat (not scaling with location population) modifiers like +50 manpower
3) your enemy has to conquer more locations
4) the existence of some cap on or non-linear growth of resource production based on population?

I would be interested if anyone could provide more info on this topic, especially on the details regarding how population affects resource production. What are other ways that location density might be an advantage/disadvantage?

I don't want this to be a repeat of the location density post from February or lend too much focus to contention 1) above. I prefer locations to generally reflect historical administrative divisions, and I like that Europe's locations are denser. Shifting to contention 3), I was hoping to more so get at the question of does this make Europe disproportionately stronger than it otherwise would be, or should be? Let's say we agree that higher location density does give a power advantage, is this a good thing? If we wanted to mitigate this bias, we could ask for an adjusted location density distribution (as I have seen often and am not necessarily opposed to), or (my preference) we could find a way to dampen the density effects on a given territory by somehow addressing the advantages/disadvantages of density that I outlined above. Make it so that the example given by @JacceDON above yields two situations of roughly equal power.

Love this! I agree with everything you have outlined. I would love if maybe the devs could give some clarity because we always seem to be going in circles.

 

[Ulfeldt]

More locations:
- more base resource income from locations (this is just the tiny trickle that is pop-independent)

This is a thing?

 

[Burkey123]

This is a thing?

Yea I believe so. Like stone, wood, and food

 

[Chieron]

This is a thing?

Afaik, yes. Just some tiny income of 0.01 lumber and other building materials if I recall correctly.

 

[Birchinjaro]

I mostly wanted to focus on contention 2) above. I think @JacceDON laid out the fundamental question/experiment of strength of location density well in his reply when he said:
"Have we seen the statistical difference in resource output and power of - say - a population of 10 million spread out over 500 locations compared to the same population in just 100 locations? Of course a location with more pops is better, but does it scale correctly compared to just owning more locations?"

We haven't seen the statistical difference, maybe Generalist Gaming mentioned something about it somewhere but we don't have anything solid AFAIK
That being said, since this complain has been resparked by the China feedback i want to mention that, to some extent, you don't even want to increase the locations in China as much as places like the HRE or Japan because that would make it unplayable
If you have a location with 50,000 pops splitting that location in two would mean that you have to pay two building until they reach their maximum employment to get the same output, this isn't a problem lategame and actually it would give you a pretty big advantage since thanks to population growth you can squeeze more buildings per pop, but for a place like China you're just going to suffer for that since you will have to micromanage thousands of locations just to make them as useful as they would have been were they slightly less dense, im also pretty sure that it's cheaper to upgrade one building to level 10 that to build two buildings at level 5 but honestly i don't remember exactly how building costs works
As China you're never going to reach a point in which your nation building gameplay loop is limited by the amount of locations you have because you're simply too big for that, even if you split China in many warlords i don't really see you running out of space to build unless you lose many wars in a row
There are problems with high location density places like Germany and Japan that i see especially when they are still split in many countries, which is that development and pop growth would be much harder to balance because of the cabinet interactions and parliament bonuses that are location based, and that kind of problem needs a specific gameplay fix, ironically once they are unified they would have the opposite problem of having too many low population locations compared to less dense regions
On the other hand places like Northern India are suffering from lower location density and can't keep their original population because of that, there just aren't enough locations to sustain such a big amount of pops which also needs to be fixed
I would say that making cabinet interactions weaker/ stronger by your country and pop size would probably fix many of the issues that location density has, for other places like India you simply have to increase density because of the soft population cap that is present in every location
For China i don't really see a problem in location density except for North Western China that has some gigantic locations which look goofy, remember that every added location is an extra location in which you have to build roads and buildings in to make useful, this isn't a problem for small countries or countries who slowly get bigger, but China is one of the few places which would actually suffer for this kind of high density location simply because it's too big to manage at such micro levels
The RGO issue is a valid one, though i don't know if the situation in China is bad, there needs to be a balance between locations that are dense enough to give the right amount of RGO's and building potential but also big enough where you can build multiple times in a single location without instantly running out of pops to employ, couple that with the micro management needed for the Middle Kingdom and you really need to make sure you don't go overboard like the HRE who's density is mostly given by the political fragmentation or Korea who's density comes (i think) from the assumption that you aren't going to expand much and therefore having low density would mean being unable to play in a tall fashion even when your country's circumstances want you to

 

[pheonix_cruz]

You bring up a number of good points. I'm going to try and respond to them and outline them to make them easier for others/devs to see. I'm ignoring some of your points, as although I think they are good, I think they may have been covered in my post or other replies already.

you don't even want to increase the locations in China as much as places like the HRE or Japan because that would make it unplayable
...
[as] China you're just going to suffer for that since you will have to micromanage thousands of locations

1) I totally agree, which is why I want to take the focus away from what the actual location density is and how to redistribute it, to talking about balancing the advantages/disadvantages of location density

As China you're never going to reach a point in which your nation building gameplay loop is limited by the amount of locations you have because you're simply too big for that, even if you split China in many warlords i don't really see you running out of space to build unless you lose many wars in a row

2) We will see. I'm not convinced about this, especially as we haven't gotten a great peak into the late game. Either way I think your point in 1) will be of greater importance.

There are problems with high location density places like Germany and Japan that i see especially when they are still split in many countries, which is that development and pop growth would be much harder to balance because of the cabinet interactions and parliament bonuses that are location based, and that kind of problem needs a specific gameplay fix, ironically once they are unified they would have the opposite problem of having too many low population locations compared to less dense regions
...
I would say that making cabinet interactions weaker/ stronger by your country and pop size would probably fix many of the issues that location density has

3) This is a great point that I didn't think to consider. As cabinet interactions work now, a lower location density would be much stronger.

On the other hand places like Northern India are suffering from lower location density and can't keep their original population because of that, there just aren't enough locations to sustain such a big amount of pops which also needs to be fixed
...
places like India you simply have to increase density because of the soft population cap that is present in every location

4) Can someone provide more info on this soft cap? This would be a crucial reason for higher location density being stronger.

The RGO issue is a valid one, though i don't know if the situation in China is bad, there needs to be a balance between locations that are dense enough to give the right amount of RGO's and building potential but also big enough where you can build multiple times in a single location without instantly running out of pops to employ

5) I didn't explicitly outline this in my post, but I do believe that RGO's generally benefit from higher location density while the inverse is true for production buildings. There do seem to be balancing factors for low vs high density in multiple aspects. I have seen others say that there's some optimal level of location density for maximum power, however I worry that one or more of the effects we've mentioned will be overpowering and lead to some large bias.

 

[Raftz]

4) Can someone provide more info on this soft cap? This would be a crucial reason for higher location density being stronger.

Every location has a baseline population capacity based on its climate. Generalist gaming made some charts outlining all the data neatly, but it consists of the info given here in Tinto Talks 45
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-45-8th-of-january-2025.1725373/

For instance, every grasslands location has a pop cap of 50K, Every farmlands has 100K, subtropical locations have that doubled, while arctic locations have it halved.
So while one subtropical grassland flatland location will have a base pop cap of 100K, five will have 500K.

High development and generous application of the farmlands terrain are how China and India have been given the population capacity to support their starting population. It’s unclear how difficult the pop cap is to actually reach or to raise further.
A fear of mine is that every location in a dense region like South Germany can somehow hit this cap fairly easily and supercharge it based on the arbitrary factor of location count, similar to the dev issues in EU4.
I also trust things like the epidemic system, food production, and importance of buildings can keep it in check, but it’s all a matter of balance.

 

[Ulfeldt]

Yea I believe so. Like stone, wood, and food

I thought it was population based, not location based

 

[Daniel the Finlander]

This is a thing?

I thought it was markets themselves that had small base production of some basic goods, not locations

 

[pheonix_cruz]

I thought it was markets themselves that had small base production of some basic goods, not locations

I'm not too sure myself, but IIRC, either way this base production is pretty small and wouldn't be a significant factor in a place like China.

 

[pheonix_cruz]

Every location has a baseline population capacity based on its climate. Generalist gaming made some charts outlining all the data neatly, but it consists of the info given here in Tinto Talks 45
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-45-8th-of-january-2025.1725373/

For instance, every grasslands location has a pop cap of 50K, Every farmlands has 100K, subtropical locations have that doubled, while arctic locations have it halved.
So while one subtropical grassland flatland location will have a base pop cap of 100K, five will have 500K.

High development and generous application of the farmlands terrain are how China and India have been given the population capacity to support their starting population. It’s unclear how difficult the pop cap is to actually reach or to raise further.
A fear of mine is that every location in a dense region like South Germany can somehow hit this cap fairly easily and supercharge it based on the arbitrary factor of location count, similar to the dev issues in EU4.
I also trust things like the epidemic system, food production, and importance of buildings can keep it in check, but it’s all a matter of balance.

Thank you, I had forgotten about the whole population capacity mechanic. This seems to make having a high location density much stronger, or at the very least gives high density areas a much higher potential population and therefore power. To somewhat realistically and fairly simulate population in European and Chinese provinces, either the whole population capacity mechanic is going to need some additions, or they are going to have to redistribute the location density. They could also just leave locations as they are, and balance terrain/vegetation/climate of these locations until the desired population outcomes are reached, but I would rather have the terrain/vegetation/climate be as accurate to reality rather than arbitrarily modified to try and get realistic outcomes.
Then again, if the population cap is rarely reached as you mentioned, this will be of less importance, at least to the outcomes of ai countries. I still think it will matter a great deal to player-controlled countries, as I imagine that the player will much more often be able to hit the population capacities, and that a player-controlled Germany+Italy might be as populous as a player-controlled China.

 

[Burkey123]

Every location has a baseline population capacity based on its climate. Generalist gaming made some charts outlining all the data neatly, but it consists of the info given here in Tinto Talks 45
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-45-8th-of-january-2025.1725373/

For instance, every grasslands location has a pop cap of 50K, Every farmlands has 100K, subtropical locations have that doubled, while arctic locations have it halved.
So while one subtropical grassland flatland location will have a base pop cap of 100K, five will have 500K.

High development and generous application of the farmlands terrain are how China and India have been given the population capacity to support their starting population. It’s unclear how difficult the pop cap is to actually reach or to raise further.
A fear of mine is that every location in a dense region like South Germany can somehow hit this cap fairly easily and supercharge it based on the arbitrary factor of location count, similar to the dev issues in EU4.
I also trust things like the epidemic system, food production, and importance of buildings can keep it in check, but it’s all a matter of balance.

Do we know how close any location is to there pop cap? Taking into account all the factors we already know. Is any location in danger of hitting it right when the game starts?

Looking at China could we use there real world growth to see if the would surpass the pop cap in a given location? Maybe pick one that grew at a consistent level.

 

[pheonicia]

If it were up to me I would be perfectly ok with splitting up large low population density locations into enough small locations to make them economically unproductive.

 

[Burkey123]

If it were up to me I would be perfectly ok with splitting up large low population density locations into enough small locations to make them economically unproductive.

That isn’t really necessary. Low population locations on there own aren’t very productive. That is just adding more locations for the sake of adding more locations and we should avoid that.

 

[pheonicia]

That isn’t really necessary. Low population locations on there own aren’t very productive. That is just adding more locations for the sake of adding more locations and we should avoid that.

It makes the military side of things more interesting. When locations are large, it takes longer for troops to move, there's less options on how to move them, and a single fort can lock down an entire border. If both cases are equally economically unproductive, I'd rather have the one that's more interesting to play with during war.

 

[Burkey123]

It makes the military side of things more interesting. When locations are large, it takes longer for troops to move, there's less options on how to move them, and a single fort can lock down an entire border. If both cases are equally economically unproductive, I'd rather have the one that's more interesting to play with during war.

Places with low population and low density are areas like in Siberia, the Sahara, and the amazon rainforest and they really don’t need thousands of locations. Most of the fighting is going to take place in areas like Europe, the middle east, India, and China. These areas are considerably more dense than other areas and more population.

Also adding more locations in those low population and density is probably going to slow down movement if anything and increase the amount of annoying forts that never existed in those areas.

 

[pheonicia]

Places with low population and low density are areas like in Siberia, the Sahara, and the amazon rainforest and they really don’t need thousands of locations. Most of the fighting is going to take place in areas like Europe, the middle east, India, and China. These areas are considerably more dense than other areas and more population.

Also adding more locations in those low population and density is probably going to slow down movement if anything and increase the amount of annoying forts that never existed in those areas.

You are talking about areas that already are covered with wasteland though. Those don't need locations because their locations are already small because wasteland covers most of it. But areas like eithiopia or Manchuria aren't uninhabitable wasteland, and they deserve to be interesting to play in.

 

[pheonix_cruz]

Do we know how close any location is to there pop cap? Taking into account all the factors we already know. Is any location in danger of hitting it right when the game starts?

Looking at China could we use there real world growth to see if the would surpass the pop cap in a given location? Maybe pick one that grew at a consistent level.

Reading your comment, I'm now wondering how the game models population cap over time. I would guess and hope that they have some sort of way for the cap to grow as time progresses. We know that food production and the economy generally will scale with time, and therefore population, but I don't think I've seen any info about population cap regarding this.