This post is part of a series describing the procedural distribution of infrastructure and facilities in a pseudo-medieval TTRPG setting. If the reader hasn't read the prior posts, may I suggest starting here and reading in advancing chronological order?
There's an aspect of Alexis' infrastructure distribution system that has remained a niggling worry for me and following this step I will see whether that concern was justified. The worry is this: infrastructure "points" distributed at 18-mile hex level (or 20-mile, strictly following his technique) are based on population, but only loosely in that the points aren't "conserved." What I mean is that the initial "seeding" of the infrastructure points has a direct correlation to population, but the "spreading influence" part can result in different total numbers depending on the terrain and thereby breaks the correlation with the population total. As long as these are treated as relative numbers rather than absolute, that's no problem either, however they do have an absolute meaning to the 6-miles hexes which thence have specific population meanings when there isn't a settlement within the 6-mile hex. I think that this will end up no jiving with the starting population figure. Maybe it won't be significant, maybe the "play" in the 6-mile hex type population implications is large enough to accommodate a wide range of terrain effects on the infrastructure. That's the disconnect in my understanding of how Alexis intended the system to work and what I think it will end up doing, anyway.
This is the first step where there will be randomization involved in building the data behind these maps, so we could rerun this step several times and get different results each time although I will employ a randomization seed in the program I write to do this so that I can repeat for specific results when desired (typically to troubleshoot misbehavior).
The technique includes mapping steps as well as the data generation part in which I'm interested. I'll skip directly to the "Hex Type" section of the procedure. Hex type is a categorical description of the level of civilized development to be found in the 6-mile hex, where type-8 is complete wilderness and type-1 is highly developed. The infrastructure points of the 18-mile hex are randomly distributed to the 7 hexes entirely contained by it to designate the level of development within each of these smaller hexes. It takes 64 points to make a type-1 hex, 32 to make a type-2, 16 for type-3, 8 for type-4, 4 for type-5, 2 for type-6, and 1 for type-7. Any settlements within the 18-mile hex, however, get the most highly developed designations automatically. The technique leaves undesignated 6-mile hexes at each of the 18-mile hex's vertices where only a third of the area falls within the 18-mile hex. These "gap" hexes are handled handled after their surrounding hexes have all been designated whereupon the average of those surrounding hexes is used to set their value, with fractional results providing a proportional chance of landing at the integral values on either side of the fractional value.
Because I'm doing the entire domain at once automatically, I'll be making a minor modification. I won't leave any gaps. Instead, as each 18-mile hex distributes its points, the fractional hexes will have a 1/3 chance of getting a point as well. Only the 7 hexes entirely contained by it, however, may be used in the type-swapping step to ensure that settlements within the 18-mile hex get the most civilized hex type available there.
I ignored whether or not any landmass actually existed in the 18-mile hexes while propagating the infrastructure points, but at the 6-mile level of detail the numbers have specific meaning and so those hexes without any land to develop will not get any infrastructure points. I had a vague notion that the number in 18-mile sea hexes might lend some sense to port traffic or piracy, and that is still at the back of my mind, but at the 6-mile hex level this doesn't seem helpful. There is a question in my mind as to whether the infrastructure points at the 18-mile scale might be prorated to the number of 6-mile hexes of the 9 within it that have at least some land. On one hand, concentrating infrastructure at the coastline seems like it would happen naturally from this, but on the other some hyper-concentrated development could result. For the first pass, I'll go with my instinct and prorate the 18-mile hexes' points before distributing them.
The end result in the most civilized part of the domain came out like this. Each six-mile hex shows the hex type as a Roman numeral and the specific infrastructure points as a smaller Arabic below it. I'm unsure about the level of civilization. Intuitively it seems high, but I won't make a judgement just on that basis. First I want to analyze what all this civilization adds up to in terms of population totals.
Fortunately I can run this entire process all the way through in under five minutes, so experimentation won't be terribly painful.
At the start of this exercise the 18-mile hexes were "seeded" with 2,831 infrastructure points distributed according to the total population of the notable settlements within each of those hexes. After being propagating points outward from these hexes to influence the development of civilization outside those settlement, there were 36,105 infrastructure points. Many of those were in the ocean however, and after dropping points proportional to the number of non-land 6-mile hexes, the total came back down to 5,761.
At this time Alexis has defined the Type-7 hex, but not the more civilized on his Wiki, so I have had to make assumptions. The Type-7 hex has just 1 infrastructure point and a population of 50 - 80, averaging 65. Using the final infrastructure points as a basis for calculating population, however, the implied population outside the notable settlements is somewhere between 288,050 and 460,880. The notable settlements themselves add 63,583 so that is about half of the population I wanted to end up with.
I think what I'd like to do is normalize the infrastructure points at the 18-mile hex level after the propagation step. Since the final population is intended to be about 735,000 outside the notable settlements, the total number of infrastructure points should be about 11,300, almost double what I have. Scaling the infrastructure after the propagation step will get the right number, but may result in less spread than might otherwise occur. On the other hand, scaling the starting number will likely increase the spread of civilization over a great distance and make a larger final number.
One possibility is to scale the starting points iteratively until the solution converges on the desired final result. While that is probably the best option, I'm going to start smaller and simply scale the final number at the 18-mile level and see what happens. Having the infrastructure more tightly consolidated seems like it might be a good choice in a dangerous world anyway.
This will take some experimentation.
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