PMTW 2.0 - new map thread

[zweihander]

One is Sachsen (Dresden), another still named Franconia.

Good. But how do you deal the the Saxony province on the original MTW map, as Sachsen is the German form of Saxony.

Ok, let's start with something easy: sea/ocean areas.


So far only two changes which are however very important:

Northern Baltic and Dutch Coast.

Would spliting the Baltic Sea also protect and give more advantage to the Livonian Order?
And as the screenshot show, are you also splited the Livonia province?

[cegorach]

Good. But how do you deal the the Saxony province on the original MTW map, as Sachsen is the German form of Saxony.

It was renamed. Rather lazily into Northern Germany or something like that.

As I've said Germany was never treated properly - we lacked someone who could deal with the subject properly.

Would spliting the Baltic Sea also protect and give more advantage to the Livonian Order?
And as the screenshot show, are you also splited the Livonia province?

Yes. Livonian wars are pretty important in the period so Courland was added.

I think that this way two of three provinces of the Livonian Confederacy are well defended (recreating the importance of Riga and Danzig and local trade). Estonia has to be treated differently.

The actual, main reason to do it this way is to give Sweden direct acces to Germany.

[zweihander]

It was renamed. Rather lazily into Northern Germany or something like that.

As I've said Germany was never treated properly - we lacked someone who could deal with the subject properly.

I suggest to name it 'Lower Saxony'.

Here is a a map of Imperial Circles in 1560:

[cegorach]

I'll show changes to land areas later, but one of them you should notice already - there is no Libya and no land contact between Tunisia and Egypt.

I wanted to stop land invasions of Egypt through Africa - very difficult in actual history and impossible without a fleet.

[western]

Can I make a couple of map proposals re Venice, one very simple and the other more difficult?

In PMTW, the odd border is closed for realism (mountains) or historicity - thus Moldavia to Poland or Bulgaria. This is a good feature which somewhat makes up for the lack of terrain effects on the 2D map.

I'd like to suggest closing Venice/Austria border certainly, possibly also Venice/Croatia and Venice/Tyrolia. Two reasons - having Venice besiege Vienna would be absurd and this encourages Venice to expand by sea rather than by land; also getting into and out of Italy wasn't easy, with the key routes passing through Switzerland (Grisons and Valtelline) and Savoy. Hence also the strategic importance of Milan. It also simulates a bit how hard Venice was to overrun and occupy (which no-one managed till Napoleon).

That brings me to my harder suggestion, which is a bigger Switzerland. The Swiss warred with ducal Milan (eg 1487) and also intervened forcefully in the Italian Wars. Enlarging Switzerland to touch Milan would be historical in this sense as well as in simulating its importance as a country of passage at least until 1648. That's the middle option. The biggest/hardest option would be to give Switzerland 2 provinces by absorbing most of Tyrolia - they could be the Swiss Confederacy and the associated Three Leagues to the south east (formed 1471 - there's a good wikipedia article on the Three Leagues). Re-using Tyrolia means that it wouldn't affect the province limit.

So there are a range of options there, from simple to hard, all with the same purpose. I'm reading Geoffrey Parker's massive Global Crisis on the 17th century at the moment, and that reminded me of his classic Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, which really brought out the importance of Milan and the Swiss passes throughout the 80 year Dutch Revolt.

[cegorach]

All useful proposals, but for now I'd like to finish the subject of sea zones.

So far - Prussian Coast (could be new or re-named Baltic Sea), Dutch Coast and Dalmatian Coast (different name?) which would also cover Venice.

Removed - the Sea of Marmara and the Ionian Sea + something else.


Any proposals? We could remove some areas just because they are no longer useful or because it helps the AI, but each such change would require other changes so it has to be done properly and for really good reasons.

[western]

OK Cegorach, if sea areas are the current topic, let's start with a couple of name curiosities. Looking at the map, the Spanish Coast should really be the Portuguese Coast, and Cadiz town would actually fall outside the Gulf of Cadiz and closer to Gibraltar.

That's not entirely a trivial comment because I wonder if losing the Gulf of Cadiz might give you the extra sea province you need - stretch Straits of Gibraltar to the Cordoba/Algarve border and move Spanish Coast south to start at the Leon/Portugal border, so it truly is the "Portuguese Coast"

I don't think you lose anything by no longer having a sea area at either end of Portugal bordering 2 provinces (Algarve/Cordoba and Portugal/Leon), because in each case those 2 provinces can already invade each other by land, so the ability to sea-invade adds nothing. A fleet coming from Atlantic Ocean would need to make a more definite choice between moving adjacent to either Spain or Portugal, but that is no bad thing.

Overall, Costa Verde, Spanish Coast and Straits of Gibraltar still connect with same number of provinces as now (3, 2 and 4), so hopefully it's a bit of keyhole surgery without major trauma. Cordoba's port would now enter onto the Straits, but that seems OK.

I hope that's as clear when looking at the map as it is in my head! I'm trying to be helpfully detailed but that just makes it sound complex.

[western]

One more idea since my brain has been on this track. I really liked the way 1.5 made the game seem bigger through representing off-map events/territories through buildings like Siberia, Songhai Empire, Portuguese Colonies etc. If you've got too many sea areas on your hands, they could be used as a one way valve for a similar purpose. So if Arabia ceased to a slightly nonsensical province and became a box representing the Egyptian interior or Yemen, for example, it could have a port on the Red Sea (those bits of the Red Sea shown on the map can be made a sea province) and manpower could flow from the interior/Yemen to Egypt, but not vice versa. Alternatively a box at bottom left corner of empty Africa could be sending empire resources via a sea province to Azores and thence to Portugal. If the sea province connects only to Azores, the box is unreachable. But if you want trade and not just manpower/revenue, the flow has to be two-way. (Call the box Guinea Coast then - France, England, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, even Courland all competed for control there.)

I think you have probably already re-used Arabia, and I am going well beyond the scope of 1.6, but since the topic is sea areas I'm just laying out the idea. The potential one-way property of sea provinces is a feature of the MTW1 engine that I've never seen exploited, and it could be. (And what makes it more exploitable is the way the game will recognise a port as serving a province without the port having physically to be in the province - though obviously it's preferable if the connection between port and province/box is visible and obvious to the player.)

Finally I made error in previous post - just to be clear Spanish Coast connects to 3 provinces now and proposed Portuguese Coast would connect only to 2.

[cegorach]

Could you post images how would you see those naval areas? Or is it just merging one area with another and renaming thing?

When it comes to the colonial thing every province entry is taken or will be by new provinces in other areas of the map so not even a single 'colonial' can be spared.

One way access is impossible in land provinces and results in CTDs - I have tested it 10 years ago when trying to simulate Skaven tunnels - not sure about sea zones, but I doubt it is different.