Just as with cores and other parts of the game there is a great range of what those game features actually are supposed to be.
"Known provinces"
That reaches from the very generous thinking that a country should know everyrhing any of his people has ever heard rumours of (e.g. from "there be dragons" to the famous country in Africa that was run by Prester John that even today historians have a hard time to nail down and some guess it was actually the Il-Khanate - and just made up propaganda to give the christians at the time a hope to reconquer the Holy Land with an ally on the other side of the seemingly too numerous muslim invaders who recently took Jerusalem),
has ever - even 1000 years ago - had a merchant travel there (e.g. Venice should know China because Marco Polo went there, the Pope should too, because he sent some monks there),
has some private fisherman travel to the coasts of another continent for the fishing grounds (e.g. portuguese fishers without the fisherman realizing that the islands beyond their fishing ground would become America" and who were there, just as Leif Erikson, long before Columbus.
I tend to the other side and see known provinces very conservative. The world and most countries need more not known provinces in my opinion.
First of all because, starting in the early 15th century in the Grand Campaign we are at the end of the High or Late Middle Ages where most people didn´t know anything about anything and most peasants as the most numerous group of people hardly ever left their home village in their lifetime.
A province known means that a country is able to send armies there, if a capital to declare war or raise relations to perhaps exchange map knowledge, if a Center of Trade to send merchants there instead of slowly discovering the unknown (and I mean SLOWLY as it should be to get a feeling of former times) with the elements available ingame:
- with sufficient naval and land tech armies and navies can explore in the late game without the need of a Conquistador or Explorer,
- armies lead by a Conquistador and navies lead by an explorer an uncover the temporary terra incognita,
- by random event. Random events fire once per year and one of them gifts you knowledge of an unknown land or seazone,
- by stealing rutters in naval battles or looting the cartographers when plundering an enemies capital,
- by diplomacy first raising the relations and then exchanging map knowledge,
- even accidentally (e.g. Denmark is in an alliance with Sweden. SWE declares war on Novgorod that is (in my game) unknown to DEN. SWE asks DEN to join the war as ally, DEN agrees - and receives knowledge of NOV´s capital as the enemy.
- competing for a place with a merchant in a CoT and discovering the capital of a country you kicked out...
Currently known provinces are so extensive that Spain, instead of taking decades and making heavy use of Explorers, can use diplomacy to raise relations with a country on the far side of their known map, exchange map knowlege, does that 3 or 4 times and knows the way to the chinese Centers of Trade before the first portuguese Caravel has rounded the Cape Verde...
In my opinion we miss out if that is so easily possible. The world back then was slow and the discoveries too.
An additional - to me wanted effect - to lowering map knowledge is the return of the isolation penalty.
If a country knows less than 20 capitals then it gets a relative penalty to it´s technology cost - the less capitals, the higher the penalty.
Currently no european country suffers that penalty as everyone knows most of Europe, so definitely more than 20 capitals.
Ironically a lot of people complain that in the endgame, some of the better players even in the middle game, have maxed out all their tech research and are punished by only having minting left that raises inflation. Some have even suggested earlier start or later enddates - where players have even more time to max out technology and it would have been fully researched for even more time.
Starting with less known capitals slows down tech research and makes the discovery of capitals by event a far more valuable as suddenly techcosts are lowered and lowered with each capital discovered until you know 20.
So I would like to cut down knowledge of known provinces for most countries in the 1419 starting scenario over time, which raises the quesion - if they should know less, then what should they know, what are "known provinces" to a country.
My - conservative - take on that is:
A country knows all his national and claimcore provinces,
all provinces that border those provinces (usually that means the border provinces of other countries, but for some countries that only have a handful of cores we would need to change their cores - e.g. Golden Horde and Timurids start with very few cores. Reason was that in EU2 there existed only the full core that is in Ftg the national core and both countries are supposed to have unrest in most of their lands - which means that they could not get national cores. They could e.g. get claimcores or Casusbellicores on the rest of their provinces),
if a country has a port it knows the seazone bordering it´s shore,
all capitals of nations that the country historically since the inthronisation of the starting ruler had an alliance, royal marriage or war with.
Edit: Beginning in FtG 1.3 MichaelM made it possible to use the area/region/continent names in the "known provinces" list of a country. So it becomes a bit easier as not every single province ID has to be listed, but e.g.
old
knownprovinces = { 291 292 293 288 298 299 300 303
gives exactly the same known provines as
new
knownprovinces = { Poland #"Poland" is a geographical area
"Known provinces"
That reaches from the very generous thinking that a country should know everyrhing any of his people has ever heard rumours of (e.g. from "there be dragons" to the famous country in Africa that was run by Prester John that even today historians have a hard time to nail down and some guess it was actually the Il-Khanate - and just made up propaganda to give the christians at the time a hope to reconquer the Holy Land with an ally on the other side of the seemingly too numerous muslim invaders who recently took Jerusalem),
has ever - even 1000 years ago - had a merchant travel there (e.g. Venice should know China because Marco Polo went there, the Pope should too, because he sent some monks there),
has some private fisherman travel to the coasts of another continent for the fishing grounds (e.g. portuguese fishers without the fisherman realizing that the islands beyond their fishing ground would become America" and who were there, just as Leif Erikson, long before Columbus.
I tend to the other side and see known provinces very conservative. The world and most countries need more not known provinces in my opinion.
First of all because, starting in the early 15th century in the Grand Campaign we are at the end of the High or Late Middle Ages where most people didn´t know anything about anything and most peasants as the most numerous group of people hardly ever left their home village in their lifetime.
A province known means that a country is able to send armies there, if a capital to declare war or raise relations to perhaps exchange map knowledge, if a Center of Trade to send merchants there instead of slowly discovering the unknown (and I mean SLOWLY as it should be to get a feeling of former times) with the elements available ingame:
- with sufficient naval and land tech armies and navies can explore in the late game without the need of a Conquistador or Explorer,
- armies lead by a Conquistador and navies lead by an explorer an uncover the temporary terra incognita,
- by random event. Random events fire once per year and one of them gifts you knowledge of an unknown land or seazone,
- by stealing rutters in naval battles or looting the cartographers when plundering an enemies capital,
- by diplomacy first raising the relations and then exchanging map knowledge,
- even accidentally (e.g. Denmark is in an alliance with Sweden. SWE declares war on Novgorod that is (in my game) unknown to DEN. SWE asks DEN to join the war as ally, DEN agrees - and receives knowledge of NOV´s capital as the enemy.
- competing for a place with a merchant in a CoT and discovering the capital of a country you kicked out...
Currently known provinces are so extensive that Spain, instead of taking decades and making heavy use of Explorers, can use diplomacy to raise relations with a country on the far side of their known map, exchange map knowlege, does that 3 or 4 times and knows the way to the chinese Centers of Trade before the first portuguese Caravel has rounded the Cape Verde...
In my opinion we miss out if that is so easily possible. The world back then was slow and the discoveries too.
An additional - to me wanted effect - to lowering map knowledge is the return of the isolation penalty.
If a country knows less than 20 capitals then it gets a relative penalty to it´s technology cost - the less capitals, the higher the penalty.
Currently no european country suffers that penalty as everyone knows most of Europe, so definitely more than 20 capitals.
Ironically a lot of people complain that in the endgame, some of the better players even in the middle game, have maxed out all their tech research and are punished by only having minting left that raises inflation. Some have even suggested earlier start or later enddates - where players have even more time to max out technology and it would have been fully researched for even more time.
Starting with less known capitals slows down tech research and makes the discovery of capitals by event a far more valuable as suddenly techcosts are lowered and lowered with each capital discovered until you know 20.
So I would like to cut down knowledge of known provinces for most countries in the 1419 starting scenario over time, which raises the quesion - if they should know less, then what should they know, what are "known provinces" to a country.
My - conservative - take on that is:
A country knows all his national and claimcore provinces,
all provinces that border those provinces (usually that means the border provinces of other countries, but for some countries that only have a handful of cores we would need to change their cores - e.g. Golden Horde and Timurids start with very few cores. Reason was that in EU2 there existed only the full core that is in Ftg the national core and both countries are supposed to have unrest in most of their lands - which means that they could not get national cores. They could e.g. get claimcores or Casusbellicores on the rest of their provinces),
if a country has a port it knows the seazone bordering it´s shore,
all capitals of nations that the country historically since the inthronisation of the starting ruler had an alliance, royal marriage or war with.
Edit: Beginning in FtG 1.3 MichaelM made it possible to use the area/region/continent names in the "known provinces" list of a country. So it becomes a bit easier as not every single province ID has to be listed, but e.g.
old
knownprovinces = { 291 292 293 288 298 299 300 303
gives exactly the same known provines as
new
knownprovinces = { Poland #"Poland" is a geographical area
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