Hello all!
In this developer update I wanted to give some insight into the next large item being worked on for Clockwork Dawn - expansion of the gameplay map to cover the Old World!
This is the first expansion of the map to allow playable countries outside of Europe and will drastically change the colonization/imperialism mechanics. Eventually, the goal is to also integrate the New World as well, fully flesh out the sea provinces, and add gameplay for arctic regions with unique fantasy resources, but that will most likely be farther into the future. For now, integrating the Old World allows creation of the new colonization mechanics and better tuning of gameplay for countries beginning in a less developed state.
Currently all of the new provinces are named, the terrain is has been chosen, and the starting countries occupying those provinces have been added. The existing state of starting countries has been modeled as closely to the actual state of countries in 1822. An interesting problem that has had to be dealt with is what actually counts as a "country" in the modern since at the time, and some liberties have to be taken to have the map make sense. For example, the southern Arabian peninsula and Balochistan at this time was largely made up of a collection of tribes and clans with varying degrees of urbanization and low amounts of centralization.
In general, the cutoff for what is an actual country and what is considered "uncolonized" land is a mixture of urbanization and technological progress. Less developed countries will have larger barriers to reach mechanized societies as first they will need to reach a level of development on par at least with Western Europe in 1822. Mechanized countries that colonize or annex undeveloped land will also need to put resources into developing them in order to be able extract resources or field any sort of power projection from them.
Because of the wider range of climates provinces now span, modeling of more diverse terrain will be needed - such as dense forest in Siberia or desert in the Gobi. For now, the landscape attributes simply model the topography of the area. In the future, province attributes will also include vegetation cover and overall heat or cold with associated gameplay effects.
Much work still needs to be done on the programming side to model all of the above better in-game and improve the AI to be able to handle an expanded map area. The usual target for large updates is about 1 month, but because of the size of this update, it will most likely be at least another few weeks until the update is launched. Thanks everyone for following along and hope to be back again soon with more news!