Infrastructure Development Re-examined

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?

This is a short one, as I just re-visit earlier work after some experimentation.

In the previous post I mentioned that the population implied by the level of infrastructure development was out of line with the desired population total. Specifically, I wanted the population total to be approximately 800 thousand but the 5,761 infrastructure points distributed by this technique implied, with that of the notable settlements, a population of only about 440 thousand. The solution I settled upon was to normalize the infrastructure points after their distribution amongst the 18-mile hexes based on the target population over the implied population. This had the effect of scaling the infrastructure points up to 12,163, implying a population of about 791 thousand.

Below is an image showing the most highly developed, Type-1, hexes in white, the completely undeveloped are black with no outline, and the shades between indicate intermediate levels of development with the lighter being more developed. The light blue pentagons represent the most populous settlements, those over 4,000, the red diamonds are settlements with 1,000 or more, but fewer than 4,000, and the grey circles are smaller settlements which qualified as "notable."

For reference the terrain is shown below.

I think that this has worked well and the answers have an intuitively correct feel to them. I have found anomalies at the 6-mile hexes on 18-mile hex intersections where they have been allowed to keep higher infrastructure totals than I would have allowed them manually because their higher total clearly should have been attributed to a settlement within one of the 18-mile hexes but was not because the program is operating with the myopic constraint of looking at each 18-mile hex group independently. Conveniently, the anomaly had a counter example nearby illustrating why those intersection hexes are exempt from the infrastructure point swapping step in first place.

The thing is though, this method has produced a picture of civilization that is merely punctuated by small areas of wildness and that's not as dangerous, superstitious, and parochial as I want my world to be. By shortening the "distance half life" from 18 miles to 12 miles I achieved what I think is a categorically different result.

Here humanity and the wild hold more equal sway. Humanity can be seen to have gained and lost ground against the wild. This is the sort of world I want my players to face.