Europe Map Post Mortem

One of the maps I am certainly most excited about is our Europe map. This map was one of the last to be completed for the game partially because its size made it complicated but also because the research would be easy. The map is 260 hexes wide by 180 hexes high. It includes all of Europe with the exception of Turkey. This size gave us a scale of 18km per hex. The research for this map was actually spread over two years in a sense since every region on this map with the exception of Switzerland exists in a submap. When it came time to create the Europe map, it was needed as the second map in the campaign for when the player has completed the submap. The fact the game engine supports grouping regions together meant that we could build the map using our maximum of 31 players and then group the countries after. We actually went with 30 players as that covered most of the regions nicely. They are as follows;

Ireland
United Kingdom
Portugal
Spain
France
Italy
Germany
Poland (includes Kaliningrad)
Benelux
Ukraine
Belarus
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
Finland
Greece
Bulgaria
Romania (includes Moldova)
Austria
Hungary
Czech Rep
Slovakia
Lithuania (includes Latvia)
Estonia
Switzerland
Slovenia
Croatia
Bosnia
Serbia (includes Montenegro)
Macedonia
Albania

Since these existed in submaps, we where able to take the data form those and reuse it to create each of the countries in the Europe map. Each of the countries was given it’s starting units and balanced the same as the region in the submap.

The strongest players are certainly France, Germany and the United Kingdom, but Italy, Poland, the Ukraine, Switzerland and Sweden are reasonably strong as well. The number of players also allows for a large amount of diplomacy to affect the outcome. I expect this to become a common multiplayer map since human players can play the first 16 regions in the list and this also leaves lots of AIs to interact with. It’s also interesting to try some of this map’s smaller regions. Playing from Denmark is certainly a challenge but you begin in contact with only two other regions so the threats are at least minimized. Even countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic have an impact by the raw materials they can sell, or not sell, to the other regions. Geography also plays a part in the naval strategies since the French and English share control of the English Channel, the Spanish own the Straight of Gibraltar and access to the Black Sea requires passing through Greek waters. Some countries certainly cannot survive alone in a military campaign, but the right set of allies can make even regions like Estonia or Albania military or technological significant. Its just takes some work.

-- Chris