More of a brainstorming than a feature request, to see how, if at all possible, such a transition could be possible.
I've said it many times and I still stand by the belief that the maps are largely suboptimal from a gameplay perspective. It didn't matter as much when every continent was overflowing with nobles, but that's just no longer the case, as we have less players who, on average, I suspect play less characters. This results in some completely uninhabited zones between realms (eastern Dwilight) at the extremes, and realms with difficulty to project power to neighbors in the rest.
Some of these problems are caused by the bodies of water. Short of redrawing the maps (an idea which in some cases might be worth considering), there's not much to do about that. But a lot of problems are due to city placement, given how only cities and strongholds can be capitals and cities concentrate the wealth needed to run realms. Dwilight is the worse for this, but it's not the only one. Clusters of cities make it hard for them to be ruled by multiple realms, and in the cases where it happens, it makes war between those realms unthinkable. Look at Madina and Fissoa, it'd be ridiculous for either one to turn on the other, any sign of betrayal would result in both realms being unable to ever leave their capitals ever again, out of fear the other would lunch a sneak attack and destroy their realm. Same in Luria, the two economic powerhouses are tied with a ferry route, they can't afford to not be on the same boat, and while the rest of the cities in the region could theoretically have made other independant realms, they'd just stand no chance before the might of Giask+Askileon.
And then you've got the deserts, figurative when not litteral. Palm Sea and Desert of Silhouettes means there has rarely been any meaninful interaction across them. Add in the mountain ranges in Swordfell, in Westgard, and you've rarely seen any interaction across those either. That was kind of the point, at first, to have a supercontinent that consisted of potentially largely independant subcontinents, and that'd all be fine if all of these subcontinents were filled with realms and lots of players, but that's no longer the case, ain't gonna happen either.
Pre-blight BT had a fairly good geography, but that's no longer the case. EC and FEI are very linear. Colonies barely has any cities at all, it's basically always been one-city realms which have pretty much always had the same borders, more or less.
That's not to mention the problem that have been had, and that are likely to be re-had, with colonizing regions where the population is at 1/1000000, and where production will be at 0% for ages.
So what kind of overhaul would be possible?
We could keep the regions as are. Same region ID, same locations, same connections. Only exception would be to reshape doughnuts out of the game, to have them become townslands next to cities instead of around cities, but that should be done anyways, without regards for any of the rest of this.
But we modify the attributes. Each region gets a "Habitability", "Resources", and "Fertility" score. These can be derived from the current stats, by dividing region max population, gold production, and food production by total area. Preferably, some region borders would be modified so that cities are no longer tiny regions and that the huge regions are somewhat less so (without changing what regions border which). We then also add a "region type" attribute: "Mountain, badlands, forest, plains". With dynamic maps, it'd be fairly easy to make it possible to switch between forests and plains through player actions, but we don't even need to go there, this still works with static maps like we have now. Then, you add a settlement attribute: "rural, townslands, city, stronghold". This requires a simple map change, presuming we finish the redrawing of the maps in the AoW editor: simply delete all of the mills, cities, and strongholds from the map, and render them as icons on top of the map IG (like flags are rendered on the original "dynamic" maps). And finally, add a final "development" attribute, which can either use numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, 4) or descriptors.
With the proper conversion factors, every existing region could be converted to the new system with barely any stat changes, if any. What it would change is the possibility to modify these in the future.
Lords would gain the ability to invest in their regions to make it grow. Or to invest to shrink them, turning a part of the population into something mobile to move elsewhere. Or to loot other realms for different results (ex: slavery, to bring back population to their own realm).
Region outputs would be relative to the interaction of their outputs. For example, max pop would be habitability multiplied by area multiplied by development (which would probably use an exponential growth). Food output would be use production levels multiplied by fertility multiplied by area multiplied by development (using a logarithmic growth), while gold output would use production levels multiplied by resources multiplied by area multiplied by development (using exponential growth). The more population a region has, the more food and gold it would produce, but the more gold/peasant and the less food/peasant it would yield. This would apply to all regions, be it mountains, deserts, or cities. So people could decide to build up rurals to become agricultural power houses, for example, or mountains to develop the mining riches. Then, you have the ability to build mills, which is required to then build a stronghold or a city, if either is desired. Building the mill gives all of the benefits of a townslands currently has, such as building fortifications. But it also costs a lot to build, adds a multiplier to max population in the region, and also a multiplier on the food and gold output. However, to avoid realms spamming them in every single region, it also inflicts a penalty when a townslands is too close to another townsland (including cities), perhaps if there are 2 or more other townslands within 2 region's travel (or using specific bird flight distance), due to competition between them for raw ressources. The same mechanics then also apply for turning townslands into either strongholds or cities, except strongholds would a lower multiplier (or none) while cities would add a much higher multiplier on max pop, gold output, and food penalty. These can be done in any region type, so a city in the mountains will yield very high gold/peasant, but due to low habitability score the total gold output may still remain modest as a whole, depending on the base stats.
On the whole, this means that safe and established realms can choose to invest to increase their economy past their current limits, smaller colonist realms can decide to just use small settlements to progressively carve their way into rogue lands, and all realms have much more say in their food and gold situation, so realms like D'Hara could choose, seeing as how Dwilight no longer has all the breadbasket realms it used to have, to settle with smaller cities that require less food to feed and to heavily invest in their few rurals to maximize the food they can pull out of them.
Change would not be limited to growth, however. By being raided for slaves, by purchasing colonist caravans (very expensive), or by closing down settlements (less expensive, large penalties for region pop being superior to max pop), regions could be intentionally depopulated and forcefully migrated. So say realms like Madina and Fissoa realize their inevitable destruction by the rogues, and decide on their own to pack up before being actually reduced to nothing (one can dream; I know nobody abandons ship on time, the glaciers proved it), or just about any group of colonists sponsored by a realm get their eyes on a new location, well they can shell out the big bucks, carry tens of thousands of peasants with them in colonist caravans, and then when they finally arrive at their target location and do their (colony?) takeover, bang, they deploy their colonists, and their new regions have the necessary backbone to start growing and offering a viable realm. This also applies to human conflicts. Westfold gets defeated? Pick up their colonists, head out elsewhere safer, and bang resettle. The winning realm gets the effect of having killed off the enemy realm (practically), and the losing realm needs not be completely removed from existence (realm destruction often results in player loss).
Above just giving realms more say in their economies, there's the huge gameplay gain from the geostrategic change. Capitals can only be in cities, and their current placement makes for natural realm capitals and natural realm borders. Look at Arnor, it has two choices for a capital, either a very remote city or a somewhat central stronghold. If that stronghold was ever taken by another, they'd be forced to Springdale, and thus insignificance. Fissoa? Stuck into a corner by Madina, if they could settle a city further East, then they could finally have had meaningful interactions with Luria. The North-West? There's only the excentric Darfix that's too far from everyone to be meaningful, and Gaston, which has a RURAL DOUGHNUT, which is the worst thing in the game, the city itself being poorer than many townslands. Especially with the newer lower distance from capital restrictions, it means many realms have a hard time holding onto more than one city at a time; Gaston ain't that far from Gelene, and yet it causes anarchists to prosper. In the maroccidens, the cities are all in a straight line, forming a circle, with only rurals and a river in the middle, it's fairly ridiculous.
If realms could settle literally anywhere, then at least realms that are currently in dead-end locations could choose to try to migrate to somewhere more fun, and realms that want war but find themselves surrounded by friends could choose to go develop elsewhere.
