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Regarding the Canadian Great Plains, this area is worse than Eastern Siberia. Temperatures have been known to drop to -60C. It took the hardiest of hardy Ukranian immigrants half a century to establish themselves here, and that was with railroads.

It is technically colonizable with the tech available, but the costs would be insane, the benefits few, and the failures many. The westernmost (by land) viable colony I see anyone establishing would be the Red river at best, in Canada anyways. In the USA I'd say Colorado would be your western limit, with the Great Salt Lake a very fuzzy maybe. The Great Basin is STILL basically uninhabited, and for good reason.
 
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Kasperus said:

I don't like the Tenochtitlan province... it might be historically accurate, but this is a game - not a historical atlas... and it's shape looks terrible. :p

Other than that, Mexico looks nice.
 
@MKJ
Well, I guess I can do the Rocky Mountains in the same way I did southern Andes, with strokes of impassable PTI area, especially between Snake river and southern Colorado. However, as every mountains, also Rocky Mountains have passes through it. And as I can see especially in the northern US states these were pretty much used, if not by colonists then by Indians of whom there seem to have been plenty in that region. So at least a more or less continuous land area between say Montana and Oregon seem appropriate to me and to that the southernmost Canada can be added. Dunno how you feel your winters there but seeing the climate maps your winters in south Alberta should not be colder than winters in, say, New Foundland or Acadie on east coast and warmer than in eastern Labrador, territories that were all happily added by pdox. Anyway, being hard to colonize I can always apply the strategy of poor, no-mp povinces with extremely low colonizing chance and 'Africa' rule on growth... On Great Bassin you have made me think though... there were also not that many Indian groups living here so I might make more PTI here than I originally intended.


@Hive
I am surprised you feel that way as I specifically made the borders as fluent as possible to 'fit' the paradox style... I could make the borders much more 'accurate' but that would make it imo much more of an atlas... I think my Mexico comes closest to how you did your own maps actually :p
 
Kasperus said:
@Hive
I am surprised you feel that way as I specifically made the borders as fluent as possible to 'fit' the paradox style... I could make the borders much more 'accurate' but that would make it imo much more of an atlas... I think my Mexico comes closest to how you did your own maps actually :p

Don't get me wrong, I like the general feel of your map. You aren't too obsessive with details and realise that for a game, it must have a level of simplicity.

But this particular province, I don't like. It looks like a gekko... :p
 
gekko.jpg



And seriously, I'll see if I can redo that province a little bit - after all, north America IS far from definitive. I might also still change names here :cool:
 
Kasperus said:
I am surprised you feel that way as I specifically made the borders as fluent as possible to 'fit' the paradox style... I could make the borders much more 'accurate' but that would make it imo much more of an atlas...

Yea, I think thats what I like best about your mapping, its true to the established style.
 
Here's hoping that the North America map will have a tad more relation to modern state or old indian borders then the confused mess that Paradox made up. :rolleyes: I'm from Missouri, and the standard province by that name is too far south and has nothing to do with the old French voyageur colony.

Bye the way, I think your doing a spiffy job, and I can't wait to get my hands on this thing!
 
Well, don't put your hopes up too high on that though, as I really don't plan to reproduce the separate US states borders on my map, as said earlier mostly because I prefer not to include a lot of straight lines (other than for country-borders), and also the big differences between sizes of various states and in many cases the inability to represent both Indian and Anglo-French-Spanish borders together with state-borders on the map without making provinces ridiculosly small. Therefor I generally put borders along rivers, even rivers which I do not actually represent as such on the map.

And as to Missouri: actually, if I purely look on their position on pdox map toward the rivers, the province is represented correctly if you take Missouri as the Indians known by that name (according to my maps at least). So I also don't think it is too far to the south, also as pdoxian projection of the map here is not mercatorian (and neither will be mine) meaning that all the territories in the middle of USA will be somewhat to the south in comparison to the coasts, with an additional skewe of some 20-30 degrees clockwise.

Anyway, as the weather is extremely nice here and my vacations just started this week I plan to spend most of my times biking rather than catching dust in front of my PC so for now not much of a progress. Rain is expected in the weekend so might be I will do some more work on it by then ;)
 
Kasperus, dont know if you check the subforum threads very carefully, but wanted to bring your attention to THIS

I want to get a working map mod up ASAP so I can design mods for it. Will do anything you need with the province.csv. I know how to alter coordinates because I have removed the strait images from the adjacent file before. And I have modded the province.csv extensively in other ways.
 
Looks like I will not get my map finished till the end of july as I hoped. So I can for now only offer some more previews. North/central America, Mongolia/Manchuria/Siberia east of Yenisei and the starting point for Europe - British Isles.
Lacking server space to post Greenland as well, not that it looks interesting enough to bother...







As always, click on the images to see the larger (1:2) version.

Currently working on Transoxania/west Siberia and then only rest of Europe left. East Siberia is btw still open for modifications as I feel some more territory could be un-PTI'zed, need to count my id's though and as yet kind of lack decent sources. Any possible info, maps etc. would be appreciated.
 
It's looking good. I wouldn't put too many provinces in siberia as they are a pain to colonise and it was a crappy area. I would focus on Europe mainly. It is where the most action happens.
 
I'd say that Russians obviously though differently about Siberia then ;). Anyway, I regret mostly that I cannot put the sea's north of Siberia on the map. That would make life of Russian ai easier methinks, especially in regard to colonization of these area's (and give the inclusion of all these historical explorers who sailed there some actual meaning :p).

Europe is technically not that easy to expand (region limits and such), and also it is most prone to get a total change of balance while having the smallest changes on the map. Since I aim this map on the use with GC rather than any events-heavy mod like AGCEEP I must try to keep the balance of standard GC intact, at most improve the position of countries that underperform in it (like Denmark, Netherlands, Brandenburg, Portugal, OE and Muscovy). Which means in general I do not can or wish to add too many provinces here.

Anyway, I fail to understand why people want so much to emphasize the role of 'European action'. Imo Paradox did the best job on their map in Europe rather than anywhere else. And also the game-engine is most suitable and aimed for colonial playing, which therefor ought to be rather encouraged. :cool:
 
I mainly just want there to be the possibility of three German powers. :) This isn't really possible now because there's not enough provinces to make it viable even though Germany was a (fragmented) powerhouse.

I kind of disagree about the colonial side of things. It is a reasonable system, but it is definitely not one that promotes a lot of warfare unless it's for CoTs. However in Europe, everything is fair game (I am talking from an MP perspective here). A lot of provinces in certain areas can unbalance things, you're right there, but the province.csv is pretty resilient. Even if province amounts aren't quite right, you can still tweak things adequately to make it a non-factor. That's probably the thing I've found most with editing.
 
Chatga province next to Angara in Siberia looks weird. Just like Angara would override off the easternmost part of Chatga...
 
Well, I think North America looks great, esp. the Pacific Northwest, which was kind of a mess before. I'm completely ignorant when it comes to Siberia, so I won't comment there. Britain looks cool, any chance of dividing Wales?
 
Bocaj said:
I mainly just want there to be the possibility of three German powers. :) This isn't really possible now because there's not enough provinces to make it viable even though Germany was a (fragmented) powerhouse.
Dividing Germany somewhat is planned, though it is dangerous as it makes it tempting to include even more useless 1-prov minors which have oh such nice effect on balance in Europe :p What countries exactly you think of btw? Countries which could use more provs, other than Brandenburg, would be imo Bavaria, Bohemia, Austria and Saxony, and maybe even Hannover, which is more than 3.
I kind of disagree about the colonial side of things. It is a reasonable system, but it is definitely not one that promotes a lot of warfare unless it's for CoTs. However in Europe, everything is fair game (I am talking from an MP perspective here). A lot of provinces in certain areas can unbalance things, you're right there, but the province.csv is pretty resilient. Even if province amounts aren't quite right, you can still tweak things adequately to make it a non-factor. That's probably the thing I've found most with editing.
Well, I'm not sure if we understand eachother. What I mean is that open colonization favours the ai more than fighting in Europe for example. Unfortunately the current eu engine does not suit well colonial wars - ai cannot fight oversea well and will thus mostly fight in Europe. So better way to simulate colonial concurrence is by having simply more territory to colonize, as well as more countries being able to do it (having explorers/conquistadors and an actual colonial file).
Another thing is that Asia and most of Africa should not really have whiteman colonization irl, but tradepost system in eu is imo quite unsuitable (no refilling stations for ships, no forts in tp's) so colonies are required (eu-colonization system is quite unrealistic anyway and suitable only for penal colonies or military settlements like Siberian one's imo) and for that actual space is required, while leaving place for actual native countries in the area, which is what I attempted in India especially. A free colonial base is here also required if one wishes the ai to be ever able to conquer the other territories in India/Indonesia/Africa, without having to resort to province-seceding events.

I am less convinced that a lot can be fixed by editting of province.csv. Actually ai-country with 4 poor province will still usually defeat a country which has just 1 or 2 rich one's. AI does not really seem to know that it is poor and it will build lots of troops nevertheless that it does not need to pay for much. Also one can only tweak taxvalues and not production/trade values, while the last are decisive during the endgame, while changing the former will only make ai go for different provinces without balancing stuff out much - a country with 1 rich province will be a prey for every neighbour...



Byakhiam said:
Chatga province next to Angara in Siberia looks weird. Just like Angara would override off the easternmost part of Chatga...
These parts were not edited yet. Essentially all parts that have the standard pdox shading are not edited yet. I am not technically able to rework the map as a whole and I have to work in parts (which is why I post previews of parts only). I needed to export more of west Siberia to finish that part west of Baikal lake to get the correct projection.



Celt said:
Well, I think North America looks great, esp. the Pacific Northwest, which was kind of a mess before. I'm completely ignorant when it comes to Siberia, so I won't comment there. Britain looks cool, any chance of dividing Wales?
Dunno, I honestly don't see a reason to do it. I don't think Wales ought to be independant at any point and then having it divided only grants England additional province with own culture/religion/shield. Making England even stronger and requiring me to 'fix' that by dividing rest of Europe even more than I planned to.
 
Kasperus said:
Dividing Germany somewhat is planned, though it is dangerous as it makes it tempting to include even more useless 1-prov minors which have oh such nice effect on balance in Europe :p What countries exactly you think of btw? Countries which could use more provs, other than Brandenburg, would be imo Bavaria, Bohemia, Austria and Saxony, and maybe even Hannover, which is more than 3.

Historically Saxony was more powerful than Brandenburg until about the great northern war, at which time BB inherited Prussia. IMO they should have Lusatia, Sachsen and Anhalt. I agree with you about the minors, most extra provinces I would advocate are in the major power area (Bavaria/Palatinate/Saxony/Hannover) that Paradox has somewhat neglected in favour of the later powers in Germany.

In my perfect map of Germany, Bayreuth and/or Thuringia, Lusatia, Nuremburg (the area not the imperial city), and Schleswig would be included. Baden would wrap around Wurttemburg so it didn't touch Switzerland or Austria, and Hannover/Oldenburg and Hessen would be reshaped to emulate their more historic borders (which may or may not require more provinces, either way that Kassel touches the Rhine isn't really ideal, and Hannover's borders were a lot more interesting than this).

In Bohemia, I think the only major change needed is to enlarge and split Silesia (is much larger irl than eu2 would let on), as it already is reasonably well off as far as I can tell. For Austria, in one sense I would not advocate adding provinces for strength, as the archduchy is already disportionately strong compared to Bavaria and the northern major Germans. However to fix its borders (splitting Tirol into Innsbruck and Bolzano would be a good step, and Carniola for a port(?) while still having Istria in Pula and the islands) it would be a good thing.

This is of course what I advocate, but whether or not it would be balanced with your changes I don't know. Food for thought maybe?

Well, I'm not sure if we understand eachother. What I mean is that open colonization favours the ai more than fighting in Europe for example. Unfortunately the current eu engine does not suit well colonial wars - ai cannot fight oversea well and will thus mostly fight in Europe. So better way to simulate colonial concurrence is by having simply more territory to colonize, as well as more countries being able to do it (having explorers/conquistadors and an actual colonial file).
Another thing is that Asia and most of Africa should not really have whiteman colonization irl, but tradepost system in eu is imo quite unsuitable (no refilling stations for ships, no forts in tp's) so colonies are required (eu-colonization system is quite unrealistic anyway and suitable only for penal colonies or military settlements like Siberian one's imo) and for that actual space is required, while leaving place for actual native countries in the area, which is what I attempted in India especially. A free colonial base is here also required if one wishes the ai to be ever able to conquer the other territories in India/Indonesia/Africa, without having to resort to province-seceding events.

I am less convinced that a lot can be fixed by editting of province.csv. Actually ai-country with 4 poor province will still usually defeat a country which has just 1 or 2 rich one's. AI does not really seem to know that it is poor and it will build lots of troops nevertheless that it does not need to pay for much. Also one can only tweak taxvalues and not production/trade values, while the last are decisive during the endgame, while changing the former will only make ai go for different provinces without balancing stuff out much - a country with 1 rich province will be a prey for every neighbour...

You're coming at things from an SP perspective, and I an MP one. Both have their merits depending on the target audience. You obviously are making your map with SP in mind, I just thought I would throw another angle in for you to perhaps look at.