Distance from capital is for region control issues. Honestly, I preferred the older limit, given how eccentric many of the cities are placed, but I don't think it's a huge issue overall, at least compared to other factors.
At least that's what I thought he was talking about.
For unit penalties for being far from home, I'm not sure how they work anymore. If you take a region really far away, does that become close to home? In any case, I used to be opposed to changes for distance penalties due to it being primarily championed by stale coalitions that wanted to impose their hegemonies continent-wide. Things have changed, though, we no longer have enough population to populate 100% of Dwilight. Nor BT, and probably some issues in other continents as well. This shrinkage in terms of nobles has shrunk realms' ability to project power below what used to be the norm, when it has not literally shrunk the realms and created vast rogue spaces around them (see: Luria, Fissoa). Given this, I'm now in favor of reducing distance penalties, reducing mercenary setting cost inflation, reducing travel times, and reducing militia effectiveness.
But back to geography. Some ad hoc changes could do some great relief. It's not a permanent solution, nor ideal, but it could ease some of the worst cases. Removing doughnuts would be a start.
A good city distribution seems to be a (hex) grid with two spaces between every city. Most dynamic areas of the game seem to respect this rule. Most undynamic areas seem to blatently break it (or technically respect it only by considering vast deserts/mountains where travel times are atrocious).
The problem with simply plopping cities everywhere is food... Dwi was barely balanced for self-sufficiency back in the pan-colonized days. In this new sparsely colonized context? Hard to say what the situation is. On one hand, we can intentionally give cities half rations now. On the other, there's a ton of rurals that are now rogue, while most large cities remain colonized. Adding cities here and there could further disbalance the food situation.
It could be a quick fix yielding large gains for little dev commitment, and certainly could be worth doing, but I feel like BM's static maps are a structural problem that greatly contribute to it's decay.
Similarly, on the topic of migrations I brought up recently elsewhere, manually displacing (willing) realms could help some of the current distribution issues.
But it seems like too many realms are just content to entrench themselves as they continuously dig their graves, both their owns by themselves and the game's collectively. They just find themselves with little to aspire to. Heck, I partly fear having too much success myself, in Westgard. So what if we push off the hordes, and expand to 1 region per 2 nobles. Then what? Keep on expanding until the rogues hit us back, I guess? But what about the others who haven't dedicated their realm to this purpose?
If we could build cities and strongholds anywhere, then people would start being tempted to put some at the borders... and then others could get nervous or jealous by this, and then suddenly border disputes become alluring. Realms like Fissoa could decide to go build a city (ANYWHERE ELSE) and get a more central capital, thus allowing them larger growth while also bringing them closer to neighbors for potential border disputes. Etc.
