Well, keeping in mind that it is early days, as you say...
I think I can say that yes, we are looking at a settlement and region in different terms than before. So, the agricultural levels in the tech tree that you choose will actually change the face of the region on the camp map- which is nothing new, but we are also going to introduce villages into the tech tree in the same way. So that as your settlement becomes a city you can choose to develop villages and towns in the region which are represented as a construction in the tech tree giving you bonuses. The 'villages' wont exist like settlements of course, but will be mere representations and these may be able to feature both on the camp map within the region and also should be able to be seen in the battle map if you fight in the neighbourhood of these 'village' tiles.
Control Points in reality is something we wanted to keep quiet until we knew more, we now know a little more... Basically we are using permanent forts to represent the other important places within a region. We are planning aspects such as garrison scripts for even the forts, as well as a means of penalising the player when his enemies occupy these forts or siege them, via lack of income etc. We have also found a way to not let this scripting slow the turns down, which is a real victory but one which most of you won't know why! :hmmm:
We are aware that the player does not want settlements and forts all over the map so that Siege becomes the only way to fight, we are just trying to be more realistic in how we make our map. We are still working on the map, it will be very big, so the fact that we have 199 settlements plus perhaps 80 or so forts will not make it a siege-fest. You will just feel that each region is in fact a region and not just a pocket around a settlement.
One drawback of the permanent forts is that we are representing some places that were historically settlements, but since we cannot prioritise them in the top 199 we are forced to make them a military base. We are trying to keep the permanent forts to represent what were only military towns but it is not so easy, some people are bound to complain that 'Kalmar in Sweden was not a castle or fort but a town' and indeed these forts which are motte-and-bailey in the 1100s will look okay but in 1490 they will seem out of date, so we still have a lot of loose-ends and detailed research to do. Apart from all these compromises in historical realism and hard calls, we feel that we are still doing our best to represent a supermod.