The Reach of Civilization

Hi there.  It's certainly been awhile since I've written a post.  Once the heavy lifting of the region was done it didn't seem worth it to just give either small posts or something akin to session notes.  Suffice it to say, the game has been going strong, mostly on the back of Doodle for helping 6 adults coordinate when they can play (mostly on weeknights after the dads have put their kids to bed).

But I had occassion to dig back into GIMP and I thought I would share.

The Problem

(I know I use this heading a bit, but it seems to be the nature of worldbuilding)

The original region map I made was a little too cramped.  Part of it is a combination of my own laziness: I didn't want to have to make a world map so I just made an extra large regional map.  Part of it was overcorrecting.  In my last ACKs campaign, I made the players journey for months just to find a Class III market.  Since they were going to be starting higher level, and since the initial conceit of the campaign was a cosmopolitan port city, I knew I wanted it to be Class II.

Everything was all fun and games, placing cities hither and yonder on the map, usually at points where rivers met or at likely portage sites.  Then it came time to figure out which hexes were civilized and which were borderlands.  This crashed pretty hard up against the rules, and I want to give you the minimum background possible to understand how I ended up with this map.

So, the core rules for mapping recommend a regional map and a world map.  The regional map is usually about 30 hexes by 40 hexes.  The hexmap I chose is a little bit bigger than that, it's the one that has 24 mile hexes overlayed on top of the 6 mile hexes.  It's like an extra large region map.  So when the base worldbuilding advice recommends ignoring class IV and smaller for the world map, and ignoring Class VI settlements for the region map, neither was a good fit.  I decided my map would compromise and include class IV settlements, but not V or VI  (if you're looking at the image too, be aware that some castles/forts are shown as well). 

Green is civilized. Red is borderlands

The issue, however, is that class VI markets are still considered sufficient to affect the civilization level of surrounding hexes.  every single settlement on my map would stretch out civilized area 8 hexes, and borderlands another 8 beyond that.  The end result is a very crowded map that's essentially already almost complete claimed by the existing powers. not much room for founding one's own realm if the time arrives.

You'll notice that I even cheated a little bit.  In order to have some semblance of interest, I blocked civilization from continuing into the mountains.  All that's really left is a block of desert and scrub beyond the mountains.

The Fix: Proportional Reach

Over on the main Autarch forums, people continue to react to the fairly lengthy Let's Read: ACKs Core over on RPGnet.

Over particular note to me was a suggestion Alex, the game's creator, came up with for this dilemma of cities having remarkably large reach.  Now, I'll start by saying the real problem is that I didn't fully think out my demographics and, this being a region that was substantially less inhabited until about 3 centuries ago, I probably should have just assumed there would be no large markets.  But this little tidbit proved to be the fix to save me from having to throw out a region we're already playing our campaign in:

Since Every Campaign is a Law Unto Itself, you can, of course, assume a smaller radius of civilized and borderlands territory if desired. An approximate downward limit of size that an urban settlement can control is a number of hexes equal to (urban population / 31), based on a 10:1 rural:urban ratio and an average population density of 310 families per 6-mile hex (50 per square mile). London would need 145 6-mile hexes or 4,500 square miles just to feed itself and the peasants who feed it, excluding any smaller towns in its orbit. Anything less than that and you get into bad simulation - where does the food come from?

With this suggestion of population creating proportional reach, I was off to the races.

I'll spare you the nitty gritty details and just hit the big points:

• Settlement sizes: 
• My largest settlement, Sapphire Bay, is a Class II market.
• 4 other cities: Emerald Crossing, Port Cerulean, and the capitals of the other two realms in the region, are Class III
• Every other settlement actually drawn on the map is class IV
• Size mapped to the new method.
• A the smallest possible class II is 5k to 10k, or between 161 and 322 hexes
• Class IIIs are 2500 to 5k, or 80 to 161 hexes
• Class IVs can range from 625 to 2500, about 20 to 80 hexes.
• Rings of hexes
• Most people are probably familiar with the single ring of hexes count 7, the original hex and all of it's sides.
• A few people might know a region of radius 2 in hexes would be 19 hexes.
• The pattern is roughly that a hexagon is surrounded by 6 lines of length N (equal to the radius in hexes).
• Converting area of hexes to radius of hexes
• Class II markets will have a radius between 7 and 10 hexes
• Class III markets will be from 5 to 7
• Class VI markets will be from 2 to 5

For my purposes, and because my stated goal was to increase the amount of unclaimed land, I decided to go with 7, 5, and 3, and then assumed borderlands stretched the same number of hexes away from the civilized land.

Ok, whew! With all those calculations out of the way, I went to meticulously counting and filling in hexes in GIMP.  I was hoping by now Worldographer would be in a better state, but before doing this in gimp I tried to work in what they are calling their release candidate and it did not go well.  GIMP may not be specifically geared towards working with hexes, but I may have to learn to make do when I end up needing to expand.

Without further ado, here's the final map with the new method.

There's so much more room for activities!

Note: I made a few mistakes down by New Turath, but most of the activity in the campaign has been around Sapphire bay so we'll be ok for now.