All BM maps are horribly designed. Everyone knows that. EC was never meant to be used for a game like this. It was for Spellmaster RP not to be a standalone. It just turned into one.
Dwilight is even worse. This game is very heavily focused on cities yet distribution is horrendous. The biggest issue is, it takes too much work to rework the map. Maybe less now since Anaris has all the maps now. But if he adds new regions or swap out existing maps, he will have to redraw the border and roads as well.
Dwilight is big but that isn't its biggest issue. Dwilight is pretty much nothing more than 2 EC put in one map and EC is not the best map. All these mountains that divide realms look cool but they pretty much cripple any realm that form in Flowertown. Cities should be replaced closer to each other and they need to be closer to the inner sea zones.
Reducing the distance limit won't do much since the actual distance is what cripples Dwilight. No small fixes will fix Dwilight. It needs some major changes otherwise it will just suffer continuously. It is simply not designed for the current player count and nothing will fix that without pissing everyone on Dwilight off. I don't think this game can take anymore of realm wipes like the dev did with monsters and ice age.
To be honest, maybe forced relocation is better at this point. Manually pull realms down in the south up. Add more cities in the northern half closer to the sea zones and in the middle of large planes. Cities needs to be distributed better to allow people to conduct wars more efficiently which should help people fight each other more enjoyably. I don't know why distance limit is still a thing. All the examples are from like 2006-7. We are not playing the same game from 10 years ago unfortunately.
AT/BT, pre-blight/glacier, was fine imo. It had some geographic barriers (central mountains, north-eastern lake, south-eastern bay) but they did not seem sufficient to stiffle conflict. There were SOME natural capitals, and on both maps major realms mostly sat in the same power regions, but the borders were much more fluid and there were a lot of opportunities for conflict.
What did that map have that stands out? A fairly circular map with fairly evenly distributed cities. Colonies also has that, but Colonies also has an incredibly low number of cities. That said, despite being turtle pace, it does seem like it had a fairly dynamic history?
Dwilight's concept might have worked if, instead of being two parallel ECs, as you put it, it'd have been two parallel ATs. The fact that realms have a hard time waging wars across the sea was never a concern in my mind, the problem lies rather with their difficulty to wage wars on their own halves.
With dynamic demographics, at least realms could take it upon themselves to fix their !@#$ty geography at the local level, taking their capitals out of these isolated corners (ex: Flow, Fissoa) and into more meaningful places, while those wide open spaces between the subcontinents could see the rise of new cities for new realms (or old realms that migrate).
I give mostly Dwi examples because I'm most familiar with it, but short of actually redrawing maps I think other continents could benefit from this as well.
