Most tbs games have very odd ways of controlling borders, and this is a major flaw in many tbs games imo. Yet I don't know of any undeniably better way of doing it.
Common methods:
No border. Many games, very realistic but unimmersive and boring.
Culture/Influence spreads in circles from cities. Civ 1-4, GalCiv. Unrealistic, but easy to steer.
Regions. TW, EuUniversalis(only played the first though), HoI, and a bunch of others. Realistic, yet unchanging and limits the timeframe. Suddenly capturing 200sqkm of land is also iffy.
Culture/Influence spreads gradually to the land that is the easiest to capture. Civ 5, from what I have seen of it. A bit realistic, yet why does it depend on culture? Can't you take land? And can you with diplomacy trade land?
If anyone can think of others, please do add them.
How it works in real life: (From what I have grasped fro history.)
Zones of control are divided into several things:
Military control: Ie whose army has the most bang, this is something every leader considers yet they are free to act.
Domestic control: The land in which you are the financial leader, everyone buys your goods, reads your books, yet this doesn't directly change politics.
Political control: National borders. This is my land, this is my rock, that will be your rock. Etc. Derives from what you army can protect and how well communications work. This has nothing to do with who has the best artists or the best polished cities.
Cultural control: Who dictates the general thought, how you should live, how you should eat, and this only affect where everyday communication can reach.
Games tend to go for option nr 4 while 1,2, and 3 are even more important in reality. Military might, commerce, and politics should say more in how borders change than point 4.
About the problems with putting it into a game:
Regional control is fine to a point, and reflects reality much better, yet it limits the timeframe heavily, since region games don't want to change or add new regions. In a way all gridbased games are regions, but it always swings around the cities. Only 1/10 (give or take a lot since I pulled this out of my elbow) of the people lived in cities at the start of the 19th century. And while those do affect more than any one tenth of the country, they do definitely not solely decide a nation. You have far from lost if you lose a city in real life. You have lost if you lose your army.
I did a sketch on a way to make tbs games more realistic without going HoI, yet I can't find it now. It would still be boring in many aspects. For one, you wouldn't chose what to research until mid game, everything would be breakthroughs and technology diffusion from distant lands. Yet on many aspects it would still be a game, a prefectly playable game that would have immersive qualities as the world would grow by itself, you would be tending a nation, isntead of a bunch of cities.
Snipping from other thread, I mainly talk about Elemental but most of it applies to non-regional TBS games in general:
The thing is, Elemental is very limited in what it can do with influence due to the nature of it being game. In reality, nation borders are weird, except for purely geographical ones (coastlines, etc.). Elemental just has tiles that radiate around the city. And, it's much better off doing it uniform (meaning, it expands evenly all around the city), than trying to come up with how it would make sense to increase your influence by one tile in a specific direction.
The other issue is, real nations don't play to "win" as such, there's no accomplishing goal that ends the game. Elemental has victory conditions that emphasize military, diplomacy, etc. So while real nations have to juggle everything at once, we as players don't really have to. If I'm doing a Conquest victory, it's really not that necessary for me engage in politics/diplomacy, since all I'm doing is training guys to go kill other guys. Granted the average player is likely to dabble in a bit of everything (depending on the real depth of the final research trees, I suppose), but in general the system therefore has to remain fairly neutral and lenient since one path is meant to be as feasible as any other.
This more or less leaves us with a system that has to be fairly independent of the core paths and facilitate most kinds of average play. Which is why it sort of just comes down to cities. If you build a city, you'll need resources. To get resources, you need territory. In keeping more or less neutral, it's a fairly logical link to tie the cities themselves to border expansion. I do think it would be interesting if, say, there were military improvements that you could build that expanded your influence, or if you could negotiate for a wider border (though the practical use of this remains in question), but given that Turn Based 4X games are traditionally "play however you want", I don't think it would be a good idea to tie up all the various paths into this core mechanic.
I in fact are also a friend of regions (which is a good representation for the political control you spoke of).
Historically the idea of cultural and domestic control hat not much influence on how borders were drawn. Most borderes really were generated by Military and Political control. In medieval times it was (at least in the holy roman empire) not a question of influence or whatever, but really a question of personal possession or land beeing tied to a title. There in fact each piece of land (which would be a very small region, but was geographically mostly unchanged during the centuries) was "owned" by some noble guy. Changing "borders" was often a result of inheriting land or dividing the heritage or, here we get to the military aspect, winning a battle and getting the land of the looser (which then usually did not really change hand - at least not in large amount, but the winner would also become the ruler of this land. E.g., if the King of Bavaria conquered Bohemia those lands would not be thrown together but he would become King of Bavaria and Bohemia, and might lose the one or other at a future date).
Considering regions in computer games, i really like the EuropaUniversalis Approach on conquering those. You there do not simply march into a region to controll it but you have to first conquer it, and gain control (economically speaking) only by signing a peace treaty. This makes conquering much more real. Consider all those european wars were only small parts of land changed hand.
On the other hand conquering often worked not on cities but really on complete nations. This is as GoaGalneGbilski already mentioned due to the fact that by really winning a single battle and defeating a nations army within that battle the whole nation is conquered by the winner.
The fact that i found really intriguing is that historically those conquered nations (ok it was more kingdoms than nations) were really governed by a small number of people from the side of the winner. Take for example a look et the mongolic empire. The mongols themself were not many people, but they still ruled most of Eurasia. Thsi was done more or less by simply assigning a ruler (most of them of Ghengis Khans family) to each conquered land. Quite unbelievable how that worked from todays persepective.
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