Map creation · Part 1 · About 9 minutes
What the map decides
Every other decision in this game can be revisited. A road can be widened, a line resumed, a toll re-priced, a city redrawn street by street. The map cannot. Twenty controls on one screen become the physical world that prices all of it — and you see none of the result until you press Generate.
The one-minute explanation
The creation screen looks like a settings page, which is why it is easy to treat as one. It is closer to a commissioning decision: you are ordering a country, and the order cannot be amended once it is placed.
Sort every control into three groups and the screen becomes far less intimidating:
- Permanent
- Seed, total area, terrain type, water, relief, rivers, vegetation, population density, settlement distribution, the initial number of provinces, what they are called, how many neighbours you have, and which side of the road you drive on. None of these can be changed afterwards.
- Still editable later
- Province boundaries, promotion of a large city into its own province, founding new settlements as your network grows, and every name and label on the map — including your nation's own.
Everything else in this article follows from that split. Spend your attention on the permanent group, and specifically on the one number inside it that prices the entire game.
Total area is the number that prices everything
Area is presented as a scale setting — Small, Medium, Large, or a custom figure between 30,000 and 3,000,000 km². What it actually does is set the size of a map cell, and the cell is the unit every distance in the game is measured in.
Read the label carefully: it is total area, land and water together. The country you end up governing is a fraction of the number you typed, and on a large map with neighbours it can be a small fraction — Part 2 works through where the rest goes.
The generator aims for a cell about 0.8 km across and sizes the grid to match, within limits: roughly 1600×900 cells at the top and 480×270 at the bottom. So the ideal cell size holds across most of the range, and only at the extremes does it drift — above about 920,000 km² cells grow coarser than 0.8 km, and below about 83,000 km² they grow finer.
The consequence is that area is not a difficulty slider in any simple direction. It changes the character of the problem:
Short links, cheap connections, an early network that is complete rather than skeletal. The challenge becomes capacity and pricing on corridors you can afford several times over.
Long links, expensive corridors, and real opportunity cost in every choice. Aviation and rail become structural rather than optional, and the challenge is deciding what not to build.
If you are new, the Medium preset (500,000 km²) is genuinely the calibration point — several of the generator's internal thresholds are tuned against it and scaled from there.
The other permanent choices worth deciding deliberately
Terrain type is a profile, not a filter
Coastal, Island and Inland are not three colour schemes over the same world. Each sets the continental shelf the land is formed from, and each carries its own legal band for water coverage — and the choice then constrains others: an island nation is forced to zero neighbours, and an inland nation has no islands at all.
It is also not purely your choice: the shelf value the generator uses is derived from the profile and your area together, so the same Coastal setting produces a more continental shape on a large country than on a small one. Part 2 takes this apart properly.
Traffic side is small, permanent and city-only
Right or left decides lane order and markings in the City Map, and nothing else — it does not touch demand, costs or any macro simulation. But it is fixed at creation with no way back, so it is worth one second of thought rather than zero. If you intend to design cities that read as British or Japanese, set it now.
Provinces: the count is fixed, the map is not
You choose between 2 and 30 province-level divisions and one country-wide name for them — Province, State, Prefecture, Region, County or Territory. That initial count is permanent, and so is the terminology.
The shapes, however, are not. Boundaries can be redrawn afterwards within a set of rules, and a city that reaches a million people can be promoted into a province of its own, which raises the count beyond what you set. See Redrawing province boundaries for both mechanisms.
What you are not choosing here
Two things people commonly re-roll the seed for, unnecessarily.
Your country's identity is generated, and entirely editable. The nation's name, its capital's name, its abbreviation, its domain suffix, its flag and its description are all yours to change once you are in the game. A map whose geography you like but whose name you do not is not a reason to generate again.
There is no starting network. Nothing is pre-built for you. Whatever the map's shape implies about where the first corridor should go, you are the one who builds it.
There is no preview — and that shapes how you use the screen
The creation screen has two buttons at the bottom: Generate Map, and Back. There is no thumbnail, no sample render, no regenerate-in-place. Generating the map is the only way to see it, and it takes you straight into the game.
That sounds worse than it is, because of one detail: your settings are stored when you generate, so returning to the menu brings the whole form back as you left it. The practical loop is therefore:
Set the shape
Decide area, terrain type, water, relief and density first. These are the parameters you are actually choosing, and they should not move while you are hunting for a good map.
Roll only the seed
Generate, look, go back, press Random, generate again. With everything else held still, the seed is the only variable — so what you are comparing is genuinely the same country drawn differently.
The mistake to avoid is adjusting three sliders and the seed between attempts. You will get a different map, learn nothing about which change caused it, and end up somewhere you did not choose.
What the map hands to the rest of the game
It is worth seeing the chain once, because it explains why this screen deserves more care than its position in the menu suggests:
| What you set | What it becomes | Where you feel it |
|---|---|---|
| Total area | Cell size, and therefore every distance | Every build quote, every travel time, every corridor's viability |
| Relief and elevation | Height differences along your routes | A construction cost multiplier of up to five, and fewer good sites for towns |
| Water coverage and terrain type | Where the coast and the lakes fall | Bridges and tunnels on land routes; whether water transport is possible at all |
| Population density and distribution | How many settlements exist, and where | The demand map you spend the game serving |
| Provinces and their name | The administrative frame | Regional reporting, provincial capitals, promotion targets |
| Neighbours | How much of the landmass is not yours | The size of the country you actually govern |
| Traffic side | Lane orientation in cities | The City Map only |
Two rows deserve emphasis because they are the ones players underestimate. Relief costs you twice — steep ground raises what a link costs to build, and simultaneously makes the surrounding land unattractive for settlement, so the expensive road has less to connect. And population settings are not a difficulty knob but a shape knob: they decide whether you are running a dense network of short high-volume links or a sparse one of long thin ones.
Practical habits
- Choose area first and consciously. It is the parameter that changes the game most and the one most often left on its default.
- Hold everything still and roll only the seed. One variable at a time is the difference between choosing a map and being handed one.
- Do not re-roll for a name. Names, capital, flag and description are all editable in-game.
- Set traffic side before you press Generate. It is trivial to set and impossible to change.
- Treat province count as a commitment, not a preference. Boundaries can move afterwards; the number cannot go down.
Common misconceptions
“I can adjust this later in the settings”
Nothing on this screen appears in the in-game settings. The only generated things that remain editable are province boundaries, new settlements founded through your own network, and names.
“A bigger map is just a bigger version of the same game”
It is a different game. Area sets the cell, the cell sets every kilometre, and kilometres are what you are charged for. Large countries make aviation and rail structural rather than optional.
“Neighbours are just scenery”
They are not trading partners — no economy, no network, no demand you can serve. But they are not free either: their territory is taken from the landmass you would otherwise own outright. Set neighbours to zero if you want the whole map.
“I'll generate a few and pick the best”
That is exactly the right instinct, but there is no preview to do it from — you generate into the game and come back. Your parameters are preserved, so the loop works; just make sure the seed is the only thing you change between attempts.
Continue the collection
Next: the outline itself — how the height field, the sea level and the coastline are actually produced, and why the water percentage you asked for is a guarantee rather than an approximation.