Has anyone considered trying to implement mutable regions?
For example:
* All regions start as Mountain or Other.
* Mountains can not change and have set stats like today.
* All other regions have six sets of base stats, one each for Badlands, Rural, Woodland, Townsland, Stronghold, and City
* The climate, location and "wetness" of a region as well as some potential random factor create it's base type
* A region, without player effort will slowly revert to it's base type
* The further a region is taken from it's base type the more effort it required to maintain it at it's new type.
* All regions start as their base type but can be changed by player action
* This way a Bad Land or Wood Land can be made Rural and Rural could become Badland or Woodland
* A Rural can also be converted to a Townsland or Stronghold and a Townsland can become a City.
* Likewise a City can become a Townsland and a Townsland or Stronghold can revert to Rural which can then become Badlands or Woodland.
* Actions could be introduced that players can use to change region types but some changes might be secondary in nature (overpopulate a Rural while not importing enough food will cause it to become Badlands for example)
I think that the main benefit to such a system is that players can then combat and create geographically advantageous positions without much dev intervention. Also, the dev's can make adjustments if needed in a fairly unobtrusive way: Too many cities in one ares? Don't blast the city off the face of the planet, just change that regions base type. The player can still keep their city if they are willing to put the work into it and even if they choose not to the city will slowly change to it's new base type giving them time to adjust.
Of course, this would be a major change and would require a library of "maps" to create the entire map and a single content's region information database would become five times as large as it is now. Just thought I would throw the idea out there though!
