Greater Earth Map Initial Preview
Technically you can play currently shattered world but it is untested and has had no flavor added.
Updated for 1.7
Welcome to our world as you’ve never seen it before. Over the last few months I’ve been working on creating a Greater Earth world map for Imperator. As far as I know this is the largest map ever created in a Paradox game. The vanilla map dimensions are 8192×4096 pixels. This map is 16,384 x 6,144. The vanilla map has around 7,900 provinces while this map has around 16,000 provinces. For reference, EU4 has 3,773 provinces and HOI4 has 13,233. The goal here is to create a base world map that the modding community can use to make new mods. Whether it’s a historical mod set in the Victorian era or an alt history spinoff of a Viking colony in North America, this mod should serve as a solid foundation. I’ve written several python scripts with several more under development to generate mod files dynamically so people don’t have to spend a lot of tedious time cross referencing files. Currently it’s possible to paint a country on a bmp file and generate all of the provinces it owns as well as fill out the country setup. This functionality is being extended to province histories including terrain, trade goods, culture, religion, population, etc.
The province distribution in GE is significantly different than in EU4. While EU4 is understandably eurocentric (it’s in the name) this map seeks to create a compromise between a region’s historical population potential and its political integrity to allow for the broadest possible mod spinoffs. By this I mean that provinces were initially distributed based on region fertility and historical population and then refined based on the historical political landscape. An example of this Europe and the continental US. While the US Midwest is incredibly fertile, it did not (and still doesn’t) have the population density of Europe or Asia. Similarly, Japan has a higher province density than China, not because it was richer or more populated, but because it was more fractured historically than China. And even when China was broken, the pieces of China were larger than many European countries. The same applies to regions within Europe. While France was historically far richer and more populated, Germany has more provinces to allow for a more accurate representation of the Holy Roman Empire.
So if this map has roughly 4x the province count of EU4, where have all those provinces gone? Europe in GE has about as many provinces as the entire EU4 map but doesn’t have a four fold increase in provinces across the board. Atlantic, Central, and Eastern Europe have roughly triple the provinces. Greece and Anatolia have a six fold increase. China also has a six fold increase while Japan only has a three fold increase (still 150+ provinces) because going any smaller makes provinces ridiculously small. The truly big gains however have come in the new world. South America has almost 10x the provinces it does in EU4 (2500+). This along with the map projection means South America is represented far more realistically than it was in EU4. It’s not scrunched up and shifted north the way it is in EU4.
This map also features fully navigable rivers across the six inhabitable continents. These are made navigable in a new way that to my knowledge has never been done before. River provinces are overlaid on top of natural rivers, creating river provinces without gouging the heightmap down to sea level. This works especially well with Imperator because ship models are automatically shrunk (fully moddable) when they enter river. These rivers are especially important in the new world where the Louisiana and Amazon river basins are fully navigable, and the paths through the Amazon follow the navigable rivers.
This project is still a long ways away from completion, but the more help there is the faster it will go. If you’re interesting in joining the project or just want to use it as a base for your own mod when it’s more completed, feel free to join the discord. https://discord.gg/vtFGCdH
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
