mlangsdorf wrote:You're still using 6 miles across hexes for this? Because that makes your 1000 hex kingdom roughly 200 miles by 200 miles (ideally, it could be 150 by 240 or whatever) which is a not insane number for a small kingdom.
Well, I'm going metric so those are hexagons that are 10 kilometers across the short way and 11.5 kilometers across corner to corner. But yes. And yes, that means that your typical 1000 hex basic kingdom is slightly bigger than Ireland. The actual Republic of Ireland today is 846 hexes and is made up of 26 Counties. The
island of Ireland is 32 counties and 1,013 hexes. Honestly, that seems about right.
But a kingdom that spans 40,000 square miles still really cares where its forts and major roads, because that determines where you can quickly and easily move large masses of troops and defend against invasions.
I'll grant that you care what
County the grand temple of Lolth is in. And you care where the major cities are. And you care which counties you can lose before your strategic access to black lotus is cut off. But I submit that if you are managing a kingdom then the exact placement of roads and towns and minor forts and shit can and should be abstracted. Your kingdom is going to have various assassin cults and barrel making guilds and shit all over the place, and it would be
really boring to try to track it all on a per-hex standpoint.
If the Evil Centaurs are charging up the through the Sylwood and your nearest fortifications are 50 miles away and the closest metaled road doesn't come within 30 miles, then you're probably losing all your Sylwood borderland hexes because the centaurs conquered them before your troops could make an effective defense. Where when the Bad Dwarves march out of the mountains to your border fortress that is supplied by a major road, they pretty much have to stop there and besiege it, even though the garrison isn't large enough to defeat them in an open field battle.
On the county level and below, you are welcome to care about how close the road passes to the Sylwood. At the kingdom level, you are essentially dealing in big damn hexes that are like two and a half thousand square kilometers instead of 83. On the Imperial map, individual kingdoms are divided into provinces.
Now it's important to be able to generate this shit if for some reason we start zooming in on a particular Barony and people start wanting to fight hex by hex again. Which could totally happen, because it's a role playing game. And you'd do that by looking at the county's defense and development level and figuring out how close they have some kind of fort to the Sylwood. If it's a high defense level, you probably have watch towers all around the Sylwood and those centaurs are going to provoke warning signals being sent along the towers before they even leave the shelter of the trees.
The PCs in my fantasy Mass Combat game control 75+ of my game's zone of control hexes (which are 50 miles face to face) and a major issue in the game right now is that only avenues of attack for enemy forces is across a pair of heavily defended river crossings, and thus the enemy is having to put his assault plans on hold while he extends a road to the point where they can outflank the river defenses without starving. But the enemy also has forts on their ends of the crossings, so the PCs have to figure out a way to break the strategic logjam before the enemy completes the road in a few months.
The problem I have with hexes that are 80 kilometers across is that the distance from London to Windsor Castle is roughly half of that. If your hexes default to 5000 square kilometer things, then they are pretty much useless for actually placing things in relation to each other.
The second and perhaps equally important issue is that infantry typically travels at 30 kilometers a day if they have roads or trails and less than half that if they going cross country. If you have to track where armies are in hexes because it takes them three days or more to cross them, then you might as well have smaller hexes. Indeed, you basically
do have smaller hexes, because otherwise how do you go about figuring out where people are or how they get anywhere?
10 kilometers is a good amount because it means that infantry travels 3 hexes per day in good conditions, 2 hexes in poor conditions, and only 1 hex in very poor conditions. But each day of troop movement ends with the troops in a different hex. Also good for the exploration game, because the player characters are again camping each night in a different hex.
I think you're losing track of important details 1-2 levels of zoom too early.
I could certainly be persuaded to that effect.
But let's do a thought experiment: you own the county of Tookenshire, a primarily Halfling county that is mostly agrarian. At the hex level, it is a total of 40 hexes, 8 of which are wilderness and the other 32 are partially or fully cultivated. It has fifteen thousand farms in it. Are you honestly telling me that you think that the villages and small towns of the Tookenshire should be itemized when figuring out the tax revenues and investments of the county?
-Username17
