Rebalancing regions

[Constantine]

So, this suggestion was sparked by a discord conversation pertaining to OI.

The idea would be to decrease difference in value between regions across the board, not just OI.
In other words, I suggest that we avoid having regions that are basically uninhabitable. Because what's the point?

[Zakky]

I believe this was denied multiple times.

[Constantine]

After the discussion an admin specifically asked me to start this topic. Perhaps a time has come to rethink the policy?
Your comment is totally non-constructive, Zakky! Let's discuss this in earnest.

[Lefanis]

Agree that there are indeed some regions that would be well served with a rebalance of some sort. These are roughly the 15 trashiest regions you can get on EC. For a lot of the other regions, there is a fair balance between the food/gold value. Rurals may be gold poor, but food rich- with notable exceptions like Skezard and Zamor. Mountains offer the option to build palisades, and a lot are pretty rich- exceptions being Bursa, Ar Raqqah, and Bastad. Cities, gold rich, food poor. Woodlands seems pretty middle of the road. Badlands on EC, on the other hand, seem to catch the worst of all worlds, with the notable exception of Perdan Mines.

I guess the balancing for the OI regions and other regions like Dayr happened during Bad Tidings. However, particularly in the current state of the game, this creates a situation where those regions are simply not attractive anymore, and consequently don't generate much conflict and player interactions. Short of these regions not existing or changes to the map, it would be great if the gold/food values could be tweaked for some of them on a case by case basis. The OI badlands, for instance, are in a volcanic weather area. Why not a multiplier for the food production here? They should be highly fertile. This makes that area suddenly valuable, and a realm there an important player. I know that hinterlands will take away from the need to abandon such regions to rogues in order to meet density limits. However, a rebalance will make these sorts of choices far more interesting, and in my view create more interaction.

[Constantine]

I think the most important concern here is not region wealth per se but relevance. We don't want to have regions in the game which people simply shun because of the tweaked realm size rules. Or entire swaths of land in the middle of the map when a realm is supposed to flourish but we actually see wasteland.
The "players should know when to kill the realm" does not solve anything because those lands will still sit there as a prop instead of being a part of the game.

OI regions do need an economic boost to be relevant again. But Bursa, for example, is a strategic region and people want to own it.
Then again Dayr and Caqueta are so poor and so poorly situated that they will normally be ignored even though they are coreland regions for their respective realms.
I think the logic here should be not just to balance resource production but to make the map make sense as if we were playing a war board game.

[Zakky]

I am surprised that devs are willing to go through the numbers. They didn't want to do it for a long time. Guess even they recognize the need finally. That is a good thing.

This game only uses 3 indicators for what each region is worth. Population, Gold and Food. Of course there is another indicator outside of just pure numbers like 'strategic importance' but we will leave it out for now since we got three numbers to discuss first.

When Tom originally worked on the region rebalance, he made cities extremely rich while making them very food dependent. So cities couldn't survive without food. Rurals produced mainly food and little gold. I think he did it to encourage region lords to actually trade with cities. Townslands were somewhat balanced. They still produced quite a bit of gold but had just enough to feed themselves.  Badlands and Mountains produced a lot of gold while very little food.  Woodlands were probably the worst under his system since they just didn't have neither gold nor food.

Then Anaris rebalanced the regions again after Tom's departure which made cities produce a bit less gold but also much more food. Rural regions in general either got buffed or nerfed. But the regions that suffered the most were badlands. They went from producing a lot of gold to producing nothing which made them completely worthless. Of course not all of badlands were good under Tom's revision but under the current one, they are mostly worthless. Not to mention most of badlands are located in remote parts of the maps, making them strategically useless as well.

There are few things we should consider.

1) During BM's time line, most people lived in non-city regions. Only 10~15% of people lived in cities while the rest lived outside. BM should perhaps follow this as well. If you look at War Island for example, over 50% of the population are living in cities, townslands and strongholds. Less than 50% of the population are living outside of fortified regions.

-Reduce fortified region pop overall. So at most only 20% of total pop live in fortified regions. (for example, only 120k pop should live in fortified regions on SI not 310k)
-Reduce gold of Fortified Regions. No FR should produce more than 1500 gold.
-Increase pop of all non-FR (for example, on SI, non-FR pop will be roughly around 480k)
-Increase gold and food of all non-FR. (like by a lot. Will see regions where they produce over 1k gold and 1k food even. Probably want to avoid regions that have both high gold and high food except for few exceptions which will be mentioned below)

2) Well connected regions should probably get more gold and perhaps more food than other regions. Meuse on EI is probably a good example.  Well connected regions can be attacked from many sides, making them a good target which may encourage people to fight over a region like that.

3) Perhaps addition to the above, maybe geography should be considered a bit as well. Regions that border rivers and sea zones should have slightly higher distribution of gold or food?

[dustole]

Some areas just shouldn't be taken by realms.  Don't want to be dirt poor?  Don't build your realm on top of a badlands or desert.  Look at the Desert of silhouettes or the palm sea on Dwilight.   Never intended to be a region in a realm.  They were meant to be a limiting terrain. 

OI is irrelevant because they chose to build their realm in a !@#$ty place.

[Zakky]

Anaris had an interesting idea few years ago.

He wanted to turn some regions like mountains, deserts, and badlands into not occupiable regions. You can still traverse through them but can't take them over.

Maybe he can use this to lower the number of regions we currently have since we actually have too many regions for our current population. That may also narrow down regions he needs to work on.

[Constantine]

Some areas just shouldn't be taken by realms.  Don't want to be dirt poor?  Don't build your realm on top of a badlands or desert.  Look at the Desert of silhouettes or the palm sea on Dwilight.   Never intended to be a region in a realm.  They were meant to be a limiting terrain. 

OI is irrelevant because they chose to build their realm in a !@#$ty place.

From a utilitarian point of view, regions like DoS or Palm sea make perfect sense as buffer zones between kingdoms.
Regions like Skezard on the other hand currently serve no purpose at all.