How do you cope with the map?

[dogukan]

Heyo, loving the mod. I bought a new rig so ı can finally play this game, in fact with ultra graphics.

Anyways, although this is a vanilla problem ı am writing here since there are more EB minded people here.

Problem is, i just cannot immerse myself with the campaign map.
I love the visuals of it, no problem there, tho ı d prefer cities to be smaller...the problem is, CA when attempting to make the cities more unique ended up making them more generic.
Obviously their focus was the battle map(they have also ruined this with the walls only being at province capital) but on the CM where they matter, they lack character.

I simply do not get the feeling that ı am developing a civilization and improving my economy-society piece by piece slooowly. What gives character to a city is watching it grow after many many turns by your slow investments. It also helps me imagine the town a whole lot more and allow more roleplay.
Add the problem of the province system that makes you feel half when you dont conquer the whole province...maybe "my" civilization is meant to border somewhere else. Why do ı need those province collections?


Anyhow, this was the rant. Anybody feel this way? How do you get over it? What mind tricks immerse you more?

[AerionMagnus]

Cities are ridiculously big, it's so annoying and destroys both the immersion and strategy.

[Dresden]

I agree the city size is realism-breaking and strategically an issue. That being said, I actually like it - you get the sense of scale and importance of the city, you do get to see it grow as you develop slots and it expands. Little huts/squalor areas develop, etc. It could be even done better, but that part is there.

In DeI we changed the way cities look by culture to give them more unique feels. For example, in vanilla most african/arabian cities all look like generic eastern cities. In DeI, we change that so that they have some core parts that look like that but then have sprawl and other parts that have a nomadic feel. Another example is Illyrian and Dacia/Thrace, who have some hellenic elements thrown in. There are also other examples, but the idea is to make it so you see the culture in their cities reflected by how they look.

Some things I wish were in the game but aren't:
- Roads/trade routes developing as they exist longer into more permanent structures as they go, or at least roads actually changing based on the building you build. Its not well known, but there is actually "road" effects based on the main city building line and some other buildings like trade buildings, but its hard to really see the effect on the map.
- Smaller towns/cities represented a bit more (there are some there but its like 2 huts every now and then). There used to be a cool mod for this, not sure if its still out there.
- Maybe have more of the system from previous total wars where some buildings were actually separate "towns" in the region.

Obviously there are lots of other cool ideas that could have been done - unfortunately its just a pipe dream.

[Wallachian]

This is a massive issue for me too and really it's got to the point where I can't play the game anymore. I just can't take it seriously especially combined with the low number of building slots in non-capital provinces.