In this installment of Cuius Regio Developer Notes I’ll be talking about the evolution of the Cuius Regio map.
We started off with several key principles – we wanted a map that covered the area where the fighting and campaigning of the Thirty Years War in the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) took place, the key population centers needed to be represented as focuses of supply and political influence, and we wanted the geography to encourage the flow of operations in historical ways.
To cover the area of the conflict we settled on a scale of about sixteen miles across a hex (or about 250 square miles per hex). This allowed us to design a map that covered an area from north to south of about 750 miles, and from east to west of about 500 miles. Since we were looking to capture the operational movement of armies, this turned out to be a great scale. It allowed us to set the time scale to yearly turns during which armies could be activated several times to accomplish strategic goals or respond to developing situations.
Europe in the 17th century, while not as densely populated as today, was a pretty complete network of settlements, towns and cities. This led us to a map that could be traversed almost anywhere, albeit with some additional wear on armies in rougher or more remote terrain. We also found that using the great rivers as the most significant obstacles gave us a natural flow that helped replicate the movement of the armies during the period without unduly constraining a player’s options.
To determine which cities we wanted to represent we gathered data from recent studies on population during the period and binned areas into regions with small, medium and large population densities. Once we were able to do that, we found what was (usually) the largest named city at the center of those densities, and used those cities to represent the urban areas on the map. So, when playing, think of the map’s cities as representing the political and urban centers of a region, along with that area’s the key infrastructure, rather than as an actual city itself.
Another challenge was setting up the provinces for the map. The political map of Europe in the HRE during the Thirty Years War was a confusing, ever-changing pattern of holdings. That does not lend itself to a playable map. As a result, we opted to divide the map into regions that roughly aligned with the predominate political, religious, and cultural ties of a local area and call those regions provinces. The resulting “provinces,” along with the terrain and the cities, provides a geographical canvas on which the game’s armies can maneuver. It also nicely supports the game’s underlying diplomatic and logistical model.
A note about the art work and naming conventions on the map. Once we had the elements of the map established, the next was turning them into a game map that was both evocative of the period and easy to play on. With the help of the talented Nicolas Roblin, the map’s artist, I believe we have done that. Nicolas’ ideas for shapes and sizes of city icons and his use of color have resulted in a map that is both visually appealing and easy to play on. Design decisions, including the spelling of some location names and the layout of text of province names, were made based on some archaic spellings of place names and on maps from the period. While this may be jarring to some at first, we believe that the decisions we made are evocative of maps of the period, and hope it encourages some immersion in the game.
Author: Mike Sigler
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