Back to the split region world

The original plan for the world was to have it split into many regions, each being its own large open world. Then the player would select and load into the desired region from the world map. The past few months I've been looking into how feasible it is to have everything as a single huge mega-world, making quite a bit of progress with multiple approaches while also discovering many limitations of doing this. I've now decided to go back to the original plan, because the time and effort spent getting a world like that to run well will not be worth the additional freedom it provides compared to the region approach. I'll spare you the technical details, but as an example one issue is that just the world terrain itself would likely be many 100's of GBs of disk space in the packaged game, ain't nobody got space for that. In some ways, the region approach actually serves the gameplay better.

Apart from being easier to implement, regions give a lot more structure to the planned strategic elements in the game, such as conquest, diplomacy and kingdom building (obligatory disclaimed, this is still very much in the planning phase). Each region is a 32x32 km landscape (plenty of space to fly around) that contains a fortified regional capital along with its surrounding towns and villages, as well as wilderness and things to discover. Regions are managed by lords, who in turn are vassals of a faction (so a kingdom would be a collection of regions). They produce resources and manpower based on the tiers of the settlements, which can then be turned into soldiers and other assets. Armies on the world map can move between regions and automatically besiege the capital if it belongs to a hostile faction, or enter a field battle if the region is fortified with another army. Regions are captured by gaining the allegiance of the lord, either by forcing their submission by taking/burning the capital, or through diplomacy.

Another thing that makes regions appealing is that they make it easier to progressively build the world and game. For example, in the first build the player will be able to fly around in the first iteration of the starting region, which then gets filled with more content in subsequent builds, until it finally has most of the planned functionality of a region. Then a new region can be worked on and included in the next build, and so on, progressively building more regions instead of making everything at once.