Hello again Dawn,

I’d like to discuss a proposal for an extremely significant change to the game: a map crunch. A reduction in size, a smallification, a decrease in dimension, a smaller scale.

To explain why I feel this is important, I’ll give a bit of background. Back when we had the first map size poll I was a bit indifferent to the map size. I had not reached a decision on what would be permitted as ‘maximal expansion’, and few if any people had attempted what I’d consider untenable administrative feats.

Not only have both of those situations flipped to being commonplace instead of rare, I’ve also looked at the map a lot recently, like when I gave it more pixels (nine times as many!) And holy wow, Mary, Christ and Moses, there’s a lot of provinces.

A LOT of them. A great many. To the point where we’d need like two hundred and something concurrent claims to fill them. And whilst that would be cool beyond description, it’s also beyond the realm of plausibility.

Instead, we’re faced with large patches of the map that are white space, and much larger patches left in the fog, undiscovered and frankly likely to remain undiscovered not only until the Age of Exploration, but feasibly into the Modern Era, even for territories that are, theoretically speaking, the “Old World.”

Fog is not what we’re about. The decisions made thus far were intended to incentivize exploration, but haven’t quite done that. Why explore overseas when there’s so much unclaimed territory to explore and exploit right on Dawn? On the other hand, there is something I think would incentivize exploration: running out of space. Having actual, genuine competition for land. Can’t expand on Dawn? Go full war, or full colonisation.

To get a land-at-a-premium scenario going, one of two things would need to occur. I’d need to laxen expansion requirements, leading to nonsensically large empires that could never exist for more than a blip (sorry Mongols you are deadgone), or we can make the map smaller in scale, thereby making existing territory smaller and thus feasible expansion limits larger.

Were this to occur, here’s what it would mean:

• Each pixel would be decreased to X*Xkm, instead of the current 6km standard

• Maximal amount of territories will increase, according to (36/x^2), where a 5x5 scale yields 1.44x as many territories or ~7 per person.

• Explorations, wars, trade and other interactions become easier as distances between players are smaller by a factor of X/6, making the logistics 6/X times easier, in theory.

• Biotic and abiotic factors like bioregions, winds and ocean currents are assumed to remain the same, except as they would allow for the smaller variants of things to exist, i.e we assume that the world continues to work as it does now, only is smaller. Winds are the same, gravity is the same, pressure is the same. Everything besides distance and square-mileage remains Earth standard.

Incentivizing and allowing for greater player interactions is the primary purpose of this proposal, but it does also have one problem I consider particularly relevant. If the world is smaller and thus expansion easier, how do we explain expansionist states not having already expanded to their maximal administrative capacity? Simply put, we can’t. It would be up to everyone to explain that for themselves. For what it is worth, I’d permit larger expansions for a few weeks after the change to allow for the necessary retcons, if that’s the preferred route people take for explanation.

Anyway, with the explanation out of the way here is a poll

It is my personal opinion that this is not worth attempting unless we reduce to at least 4x4km, for anything less than this and we do not alleviate the problems of lack of land competition and incentive to explore, however I will remain open to the sub's opinion as this is ultimately a collective democratic exercise and not an autocracy.

Regards, Partial Steward of the Holy Wow Multo Biggo Mappo