I think it is important that the affected regions are wastelands, not blighted. We do not want walls and bottlenecks. They should probably adversery effect joined regions as well, in order to discourage their use on own border regions.
It would be comparatively easy to add code that turns regions into permanent wasteland that can not be TOed, that is considered permanently in starvation (so travelling through requires food reserves) and so on. It would solve the bottleneck problem and we wouldn't have to redraw any maps.
I don't think we can use the unique item code. I'd rather go with something like magical monoliths. Rough cut concept:
- They spawn around the map evenly distributed.
- Every 3 days, they will move to a neighbouring region.
- If 2 of them meet in the same region, that region is turned wasteland immediately and one of the monoliths becomes inactive.
- After 30 days / 10 moves, any remaining monoliths will turn their current region into wasteland and go inactive.
- They will not move into wasteland regions.
- They will not move into capitals (no abusing monoliths to destroy realms).
- An interaction option is available for characters in the same region as a monolith. They can pick which region they want it to move to on its next move, and add "power" in some form yet-to-be-determined. Whichever choice got the most "power" contributed will win.
Those contributions should be something simple and available to everyone. The most simple idea is that every pick simply adds 1 power, so number of characters equals power.
