What happened to Mutsu and Dewa?

**Kraxis** · March 22, 2011, 08:33 AM

Ok, I know what happened, but I think it is still think it is a question worth asking.

For some reason CA decided to go with the Meiji provincemap, rather than the provinces for the time.
Now I perfectly understand that both Mutsu and Dewa are far too big for a 3D map. Anyone owning those provinces would be very safe from invasions. And it would be wasteful of precious mapspace.

However, Shinano was also too big, and CA did the right thing, and merely cut it in half. It was pretty much not a functioning province anyway. Similarly Mutsu and Dewa were also criscrossed with clans, if somewhat less than Shinano.

I guess the decision to go with the Meiji provinces is based on the fact they didn't have to name either province North, South, Middle and whatever and rather use real names. Problem is that they are more than badly anachronistic.

A compromise could be made in naming the split provinces after the main castles the various clans used. Like Mutsu Sendai for the main Date province for instance. It's a simple thing. I suppose I am just rambling, but it did grate me a bit.

**Abriael** · March 22, 2011, 09:13 AM

Actually the map has MUCH less detail that it could have had. The choice to split in provinces in itself contributes to make the game too linear. They could have taken advantage of the fact that Japan is small to make a map in a much bigger scale, splitting every province in several areas around a village (siege in the sengoku era were quite rare, and battles were fought mostly village by village).
That would have achieved multiple goals, primarily:
1) Each clan would start with multiple regions, avoiding extremely premature clan obliterations because they lose a SINGLE battle, that contribute to make the game much less varied and much more dull.
2) the whole campaign would be much more fluid, with armies going back and forth between multiple regions instead of fossilizing on artificial frontlines simply because there's no way around an overly big region
3) The campaign would remain fun much longer, instead of becoming dull and repeatitive as soon as the majority of clans are eliminated

if they gave us a chance to mod the map, we could solve this ourselves, like it was done, for instance, with Medieval 2 and Stainless Steel (the map is a masterpiece of variety and scope), unfortunately that won't happen.