Quote Originally Posted by TuffStuffMcGruff
i like the idea of no provinces other than the ones set up by the player

totally malleable borders like a connect the dot system - i wish i could illustrate it

so that it wouldnt matter if you captured all of the cities in an area to get the province - there would be no real province of sorts - just your area and the area of everyone elseoutside - there could be cultural regions, but not conquerable ones

ie- like ireland - just one island - but because of the cities run by the northern irish/ brit govt - a barrier is formed with irregular previously undetermined borders

every time a city is taken, the area around the city becomes roman (like a perimiter in either direction, based on the influence of the city/fortress)

after the natural lines were formed based on acquisition, a player could add the newly occupied land to a previously created province - or make a new one - all of the values of liveliehoods, military and economy would be calibrated for the highlighted area



in essence, we form our own borders - sorry i couldt explain it correctly

i wish i could explain it better

www.knightsofhonor.com seems to be doing it i think
I think you're talking about something very much like the border system used in both Alpha Centauri and Civilization 3. There each city you own (found or conquer) exerts a certain amount of territorial influence around it. This represents itself by a dotted line, areas within the dotted line are considered your territory for economic, military and diplomatic purposes. The greater the 'culture' (essentially - importance, determined by what is built inside it) of a city, the greater the borders around the city. If two civilizations have adjacent borders, they can flux even without war if one civilization has greater 'culture' on their side of the border.

This could certainly be implemented into the Total War style... but we need to ask ourselves if we really want this. Do we really want Total War to turn into a Civ clone with realtime battles? This game series has always concentrated on being one of the best, if not THE best, in the tactical battlefield simulation genre. The world map is certainly needed to give a broader view of the world and overall strategy, but I fear that trying to put too much detail into the campaign map will simply result in moving Total War into the 'nation building sim' genre of games. This is an area where the Total War series would be seriously out-classed and I fear that it would detract from the quality of the battlefield game.