Developer Diary 13

This developer diary was first posted in the M&T forum here, and team members answered some questions in the thread. It was further posted on the M&T subreddit here, and team members also commented there.

Dev Diary #13 - Cartography (part 2)​
With 3.0 steadily redrawing many regions to best use the new map projection and new data, Anatolia joins Europe, China and more with a new redraw and reprojection of all provinces in Anatolia.

The new province layout leans on a lot of the similarity between the historical divisions of the Beylik era, the Ottoman provinces and the modern provinces in Turkey today. In particular, the internal composition of many modern Turkish provinces shares a lot of similarity with many of the various province divisions created by the Ottomans. We lean heavily on the situation of 1356 and have made sure our borders align with the Beylik divisions yet have taken a ‘fuzzy’ approach with exact borders to ensure better compatibility with Ottoman era divisions, as well as the geographic and population realities of the area. The new heightmap as well aligns more closely with geographical, natural borders in many areas without intending by nature to the sources used.



Additionally, some new provinces have been added to the region. Uskudar in the Bosphorus Strait is one of the most notable divisions, providing new possibilities for aspiring conquerors and separating a key city of the Strait along with its surrounding dense population.



It also provides more fidelity for culture/religion, as well as economy simulation. The Bursa/Iznik reshuffle joins a similar role in fidelity yet also gameplay, providing a shortcut path for movement and CE. In Eastern Anatolia, Muskara adds detail to the Eretnid/Karamanid conflict, while Silifike has been reworked to improve historical accuracy and provide more detail to the frontier Kingdom of Cilicia.



Another major change is the addition of more natural features of Anatolia in general. The remade heightmap used across the world already assists significantly, by restoring full fidelity to Anatolia’s coastline and general shape, as well as accentuating natural mountain ranges and the rough highlands overall. Accompanying this is many new rivers, especially added along the coastline. These increase the difficulty of combat and movement along Anatolia’s shores, while adding missing detail to various regions. One of the biggest changes is adding Anatolia’s lakes and salt pans as wasteland provinces, adding some notable detail in central Anatolia. Thanks to the reprojected province map, the new borders align well with the natural mountain ranges of Anatolia, including the hinterlands and valley of Cilicia, the coastline of Trebizond and the outer borders of Antalya.



Accompanying all of this is a rework of the Culture and Religion setup of Anatolia, the largest change being the end of the Turko-Byzantine culture group, split instead into Hellenic and Oghuz. An intermediary culture has been added in the form of Anatolian Hellenic, already Sunni, representing the distance that has emerged given hundreds of years of separation from the rest of the Roman world, and the heavy influences that have been adopted from their Turkman, now Turkish rulers. By 1500, this Anatolian Greek population historically would be Turkish, and leaving only the coastline as Rhōmaîoi. This has been expanded to a rework of cultures in Eastern Anatolia, all nomadic/tribal data, as well as religious work with the addition of the Alevi’s in eastern Anatolia.





While we were in the area, Georgia and the Caucasus got a fresh coat of paint using the nation borders and the administrative divisions of the kingdom of Georgia as basis.

For the cartography of Georgia and its neighbourhood, we used a XIII century duchy map for the projection rework. We added a dose of 1380 Caucasus map and a dose of 1490 map to tweak those borders. Add a sprinkle of terrain and province density... shake and bake, and we get a framework to model the border changes of the centuries following game start..



A big thank you to @ccgamer for supplying some of the source material i used to make a number of border changes.