Map creation · Part 4 · About 10 minutes
Where the people go
Everything so far has been geography. This is the part that becomes gameplay: the settlements the generator places are the origins and destinations you will spend the rest of the game connecting. You are not choosing a population figure — you are choosing the shape of your demand.
The one-minute explanation
Two controls decide the human map: population density and settlement distribution. The first is a multiplier, the second a preference. Neither is a guarantee, because both are filtered through the land you generated in Parts 2 and 3.
The generator works in three passes:
Score every cell
Each piece of your territory gets a suitability score from its height, slope, moisture, rivers and proximity to water — weighted according to the distribution profile you chose.
Decide how many, and how big
Counts per size tier come from your territory's area, how much of it is habitable, and your density setting. Population ranges per tier are scaled separately.
Place from the top down
The largest tiers claim the best-scoring sites first, subject to minimum spacing. The capital takes the single best site on the map.
Population density scales two different things
The five presets — Sparse, Low, Moderate, Dense and Very Dense, labelled with real countries — are a multiplier from 0.3 to 2.5. It acts twice, and the two effects are worth separating:
Population ranges per tier are multiplied directly. Dense does not only mean more towns; it means the towns themselves hold more people.
The count is scaled too, though less than proportionally — density raised to roughly the power of 0.85.
Your total area scales settlement size as well, and this catches people out. Populations per tier scale with area to the power of about 0.45, measured against the 500,000 km² reference. A large country does not merely have more towns of the same size — it has systematically bigger ones. Doubling the area raises typical settlement populations by about a third.
Relief cuts the count again
Part 3 said relief charges you twice. Here is the second charge, quantified: the number of settlements is scaled by how much of your land is habitable and reduced by up to half as mountainousness rises. A mountainous country generates a visibly thinner settlement pattern at the same density setting — fewer places, further apart, with the expensive corridors of Part 3 between them.
If you want dramatic terrain and a network worth operating, raise density to compensate. The two settings genuinely pull against each other.
What each distribution profile actually favours
Distribution reweights the suitability score. It is a preference, not a command — every profile still respects terrain, water and spacing — but the weights are strong enough to change the character of a map completely.
Weights moisture heavily, and treats the coast as neither prize nor penalty: its preferred depth into the interior drifts across the country instead of tracing the shoreline, so towns no longer line up parallel to the coast. A deliberate share of settlements — a little under half — is placed close enough to open water to build a port, and the rest sit in habitable interior country. A large lake that would otherwise end up with no lakeside town still receives one as a deliberate top-up where the quotas allow, so lakeside towns cluster in a spot instead of ringing the water.
Rewards proximity to the ocean directly, and weights height more strongly so the sites chosen are low coastal ground. Produces a rim of settlement around the country's edge — and a natural coastal trunk corridor.
Actively penalises the coast rather than merely not rewarding it, with an extra penalty inside about 70 km of the sea, and rewards distance from water of every kind. The interior fills and the shore stays empty.
Weights rivers far above everything else and adds a strong lake bonus, so settlement follows the drainage network. The most legible pattern of the four, and the one that makes river crossings strategically important.
These are transport decisions dressed as geography. Coastal hands you a natural ring or arc to serve; Inland gives you an interior web with a long empty edge; Waterways strings settlements along corridors that your roads must repeatedly cross; Balanced spreads them, which produces the most even and least directed network problem.
How places are actually placed
Best sites first
Cells are sorted by score and consumed from the top. The capital is placed at the single best-scoring site on your territory, then each tier from largest to smallest takes what it can. Small towns get what is left — which is why the rural pattern often looks more random than the urban one. It is.
A cell is only eligible if it and a small pad of surrounding cells are all your own land, so settlements never end up on a shoreline sliver or a two-cell spit. Narrow peninsulas and tiny islands stay empty even when they score well.
Minimum spacing
Placement enforces separation, scaled by tier, on top of a base of roughly 25 km:
| Between | Minimum separation | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Any two settlements | About 25 km, rising with tier | Sets the natural length of your shortest links |
| Two cities of tier 4 or above | At least 70 km | Major centres are never adjacent — inter-city links are always substantial |
| A large city and the capital | At least 90 km | The capital always has real distance around it |
This is why you can never generate a map where two million-person cities sit thirty kilometres apart. The spacing rules guarantee that your major corridors are long enough to be worth pricing, and that rail and aviation have something to do.
The middle is favoured over the edges
Scoring also leans against the geometric edges of the map. Sites out at the extreme corners of the country, and sites within about 30 km of a land border, carry a penalty that scales with tier — strongest for the capital, weakest for small towns — so the capital ends up with real country around it instead of pressed into a corner or against a neighbour. Two deliberate limits keep this from distorting geography: the corner penalty only starts beyond the radius where most of the coastline already sits, so a coastal metropolis remains perfectly possible; and a sea border is a coast, not a border, so island and peninsular countries are not pushed inland.
Every province gets something
Placement is balanced across provinces: each province is entitled to a share of the national count in proportion to its habitable area, and placing beyond that share is penalised and eventually capped, so one lucky province cannot absorb the whole map's settlements. On top of that, any province that still ended up with nothing receives a small settlement at its best available site. Provinces are therefore never empty — but a province that needed the backfill is telling you something about its terrain, and it is usually the one that later looks starved of service.
What each settlement arrives with
Settlements are not blank. Each is generated with resource attributes — freshwater, vegetation, minerals, energy, climate, human capital, technology — drawn from its surroundings, and initial development levels derived from those resources plus its tier.
Two consequences for how you read a fresh map:
- Bigger settlements start more developed. Development rises with tier, so the capital is not merely populous, it is more capable across every field.
- Where a settlement sits decides what it is good at. A place with strong minerals and energy starts with higher industry; one with climate and human capital starts stronger in commerce and tourism. This is the beginning of the chain in GDP, population and development.
Initial development is deliberately low across the board — the early game is meant to be poor. What varies between settlements is the balance, not the level.
This is your demand map
The point of the whole exercise. Travel demand is generated between settlements as a function of their populations, their development and the service between them. So the settlement pattern you generate here decides, before you have built anything:
- How much demand exists at all
- Population totals set the scale. Sparse on a small map is a genuinely small game; Very Dense on a large one is a genuinely busy one.
- How concentrated it is
- A few large cities produce heavy flows on few corridors — rail and aviation country. Many small ones produce diffuse flows — road country.
- Where the natural corridors run
- The distribution profile decides whether the obvious lines follow the coast, the rivers, or nothing in particular.
If you want to know what a generated map will actually play like, read the settlement pattern before the terrain. Beautiful geography with three towns in it is a short game. Travel demand, traffic and capacity covers what the model does with them.
Choosing deliberately
- Decide concentration before quantity. Few-and-large or many-and-small is the choice that shapes your network; total population is downstream of it.
- For a metro-scale city, buy area, not density. The largest tiers are gated on territory. Density alone will not produce one on a small map.
- Compensate mountains with density. Relief cuts the settlement count by up to half; if you want both, raise density.
- Pick distribution for the network you want to build, not for the picture. Waterways and Coastal both hand you an obvious trunk; Balanced deliberately does not.
- Remember it is your territory being measured, not the headline area. Neighbours reduce the country that all of these rules are applied to.
Common misconceptions
“Dense means more towns”
It means bigger towns and somewhat more of them. Size scales directly with the multiplier; count scales more slowly.
“I'll set Very Dense to get a huge capital”
The largest tiers are gated on the area you govern as well. Very Dense on a small map gives you a crowded small country, not a metropolis.
“Coastal puts every city on the coast”
It reweights a score. Terrain, spacing and habitability still apply, so inland sites still appear where the coast is unsuitable.
“Doubling the area doubles the number of towns”
It does neither exactly. Count grows sublinearly with area, and settlement sizes grow with it too — a larger country is bigger in both senses at once.
Continue the collection
Next, and last: the recipe. What a seed does and does not guarantee, the parameter file you can export and share, and why the generation version behind a map matters as much as the numbers you typed.