About 6 minutes
Redrawing province boundaries
Province boundaries are generated with the map, but they are not fixed. You can drag territory from one province to a neighbour, subject to seven rules that keep the administrative map coherent.
Entering boundary editing
Open the Provinces panel. Alongside the province table it holds three controls: a Show province names toggle for the map, Edit province boundaries, and Reset province boundaries to default — the last is disabled until you have made at least one edit.
While editing is active the province list is hidden and the panel shrinks, leaving the map clear. Leaving the mode restores the panel.
How a drag works
- Start on an internal boundary. The drag must begin near a seam between two of your provinces; the game looks a few cells around the press for such a seam.
- The province under your cursor gives up territory. This is the direction convention worth memorizing: you drag from the giver, and the province on the other side of the seam receives.
- The brush follows your drag as a band roughly 2¼ cells wide along the path, up to a maximum of 600 cells in a single drag. Longer reshaping is done as several drags.
- Watch the fill colour. Green means the change is valid and will apply; red means it is rejected. Release on green to commit.
A rejected drag changes nothing — there is no partial application. If a long drag turns red, shorten it: transferring a smaller piece often satisfies the connectivity rule that the larger one broke.
The seven rules that reject a change
| Rejection | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not an internal boundary | The drag must begin on a boundary between two of your own provinces. National borders and coastlines are not editable, so a drag that starts there finds no province pair and does nothing. |
| Same province on both sides | The cells under the brush all belong to one province, so there is nothing to transfer. |
| Not adjacent | The territory being moved must touch the receiving province. Detached pockets cannot be created. |
| Special province | Provinces created by promoting a city are fixed. Neither side of the edited boundary may be one of them. |
| Capital in the transfer | The national capital and any provincial capital cannot change province. Move the boundary around them, or change the province capital first. |
| Province would be emptied | A province cannot be reduced to nothing. Some territory must remain on the giving side. |
| Province would be split | Both provinces must stay in one connected piece after the change — the giver and the receiver. This is the rule that most often blocks a long diagonal drag. |
Connectivity is checked on both sides: the province giving territory must remain in one piece, and so must the province receiving it.
How edits persist
- Boundary edits are stored as overrides on top of the generated map and saved with the game, so they survive reloading and any regeneration of the underlying provinces.
- Reset is not undo. Resetting boundaries to default discards every override you have ever made, in one action, and regenerates the original layout.
- Promoting a city to province level takes precedence over an older ordinary edit covering the same ground.
- Applying a boundary change also re-evaluates which provinces count as coastal, which is what the maritime milestone tests. Redrawing a coastal province can change that milestone’s progress.
Promotion: the other way to change the map
A city of at least 1,000,000 people can be promoted to province level, creating its own province around it. Cities below the threshold show the control disabled with the threshold stated; existing provincial capitals show no control at all. Dissolving a promoted city returns it to its surroundings and makes it eligible for promotion again.
Promoted provinces are the “special provinces” that boundary editing refuses to touch — plan ordinary boundary work before promoting, not after.
How a promoted city then grows — service scores, accessibility and metro clustering — is covered in Settlements, transport service and metros.
Related reading
- Settlements, transport service and metros — how settlements score, grow and cluster.
- Map creation parameters — how the initial province layout is generated.
- Capital, provincial capital and city labels — how administrative roles appear on the map.