A tiny little thing about the map and suggested borders....

[AnataraCentara]

Can we please, for the love of Mars, have borders that fit along the Rhine/Danube and borders that snuggly fit the coastline, not going way into Russia and/or Africa? Think about it?

[Xerrop]

Just curious, what exactly is wrong with the coastal provinces in Africa?
There were none in EB1 going deep into the Sahara desert. All of them had only small coastal areas while the interior was filled with other provinces.

[Lugh Lamhfada]

Well thats exactly the opposite of what EB is about. You seem to want to restrict the game and the peoples/nations contained within to a nice Roman centric map. The game is amazing because it includes those areas not usually looked at.

Anyway whats wrong with North Africa?? It was historically very important.

[Arthur, king of the Britons]

Yeah, leave North Africa alone, brah.

[Mr Kriegtooth]

I dont even know what this is about. Can you explain better?

[Artorath]

....just because Caesar didn't conquer it doesn't mean it didn't exist......

...besides, everyone knows Mithra could eviscerate Mars any day.

[AnataraCentara]

Well...How do I put it...

Lets say a provicne has the Danube in BETWEEN it.

What I'm proposing is that the Danube IS the border between two, not part of one.

[AnataraCentara]

Just curious, what exactly is wrong with the coastal provinces in Africa?
There were none in EB1 going deep into the Sahara desert. All of them had only small coastal areas while the interior was filled with other provinces.

Actually, you are pretty right. The borders there are pretty rad, actually.

[bobbin]

Well...How do I put it...

Lets say a provicne has the Danube in BETWEEN it.

What I'm proposing is that the Danube IS the border between two, not part of one.

The thing is plenty of peoples held territory on both sides of a river, so when we make a province based on their territory we have to include all of it, not just the bit that would fit into a neat border.

[Rinan]

There is something to say for both sides in this debate. On the one hand, having the province borders as the OP describes them gives the possibility to make a more historical Roman empire. Besides that, rivers are natural boundaries and are logical to seperate teritories in the first place. On the other hand, it is right and it is good that EB focuses not only on Rome, and if people inhabited both sides of a river it should be portrayed.

One way of 'roleplaying' it out is establishing forts at the river (establishing the limes) and seeing anything on the other side of the river as client states/foederati. The Romans did try to subjugate both sides of the Rhine after all, and even though they failed, I think they might have made some alliances with tribes on the other side of the Rhine?

[XSamatan]

Rivers weren't factional borders in most times, better think of them like trade barriers and toll lines rather than a border in 'modern' fashion.

[Cyclops]

Rivers weren't factional borders in most times, better think of them like trade barriers and toll lines rather than a border in 'modern' fashion.

IMHO rivers as borders is a convention of map-obsessed nationalists.

Sure there's the odd case of river borders in classical times "don't come north of the Ebro, Hannibal!" "don't come east of the Halys, Croesus!" but bodies of water like lakes and seas were more often pathways for communication than barriers.

Various kelts spanned the channel. The Scotti came to span the Irish Sea. Later the various unwashed germanics (Angles, saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Norse, Danes, Oraniens, Hanoverians) had settlements around the North Sea, just as earlier they grew up around the Baltic and Skagerrak.

Hellenes and Phoenecians speckled the medditeranean littoral, the Egyptians ran up both banks of the Nile (cataracts were the barriers, not rivers). In the Archaic period the first civilisations almost invariably grew in river basins (Sumer, Egypt, indus, Hsia/Shang/Chou etc) that is they began around a river, they didn't terminate up against it.

The Black sea is the watery highway par excellence: Olbia was closer to Athens than the steppe, culturally speaking. Until the Romans fortified New Rome, did anyone actually stop at the Hellespont? A settlement on one side of that seaway brought the other shore into intimate contact as sure as night follows day. This is true for rivers and lakes as surely as it is for seas and oceans.