Dev Diary #173 - The Map of China

Good day, everyone! I'm Cordelion, one of the many Game Designers currently working on All Under Heaven, and today I'm going to be taking you on a short tour of the geographical side of our upcoming expansion - specifically, China!

The following dev diaries will have a stronger mechanical focus, but since the map extension is essentially the foundation for this new expansion, we thought it best to give you the overview first to better familiarize everyone with where all the new action is taking place and how we’re approaching that. Something I want to make note of: we're currently experimenting with several aesthetic aspects of the map while also iterating on feedback we've received from our extremely helpful beta testers, as well as external partners and consultants, in order to ensure that our map expansion is as faithful to the period as possible and feels authentic to those whose history is being depicted.

Your thoughts and opinions are extremely welcome and will absolutely be taken into consideration as this process continues: we’re starting this dev diary cycle earlier than we have for past DLC in order to broaden the window available to integrate your feedback.

As a result of this, please be aware that what I'm about to share is a work in progress, and a great deal of what you're about to see is still very much subject to change, and will not necessarily be exactly what will appear in the expansion on release. I would have liked to have also been able to show you the distribution of faiths and cultures today, but they are not quite ready to be shown at this point, but we’ll be happy to give you a more detailed look in a future dev diary.

A Brief Word About Projections​

For those who might be unfamiliar with them, a map projection is essentially a way to reconcile the fact that the Earth is a sphere, but maps need to be able to be displayed in a flat, two-dimensional form. You may have heard of the Mercator projection, for example, to name one fairly widely known.

[Various map projection examples. Pick your least favorite and share it below!]

This inherently always results in distortion: there is no way around that. For this reason, there are many map projections in existence, each with differing degrees of distortion in different parts of the world. You can't avoid the distortion, you can only choose where it's distributed.

The map projection we used when originally making CK3 was a custom one, tailored to meet the limits of computer monitor’s standard resolution as well as the game's general needs at the time, which unfortunately did not include most of Asia. The projection is inherently imperfect: we adjusted it as best we could for All Under Heaven, but we can’t replace it entirely - at least not without starting over and remaking all of the game’s maps.

This will result in certain parts of the map, when compared to others, having a scale noticeably different than that of reality. The Chinese province of Shaanxi is, in reality, the size of Great Britain, but due to distortion and compression appears smaller in-game than the similarly-sized Korean peninsula, while eastern Siberia occupies significantly less of the game’s map than it would realistically.

We know that to many, these differences may stand out compared to what you might have expected: I just want to clarify that those differences are not because we preferred that it be this way, but rather to explain the process that produced them and why.

Heaven Has Not