Thanks guys, I'm glad there is general excitement. Answers to a couple of questions:
1. The number of hexes in a territory vary quite widely, but it tries to be never less than about 10. Let me elaborate:
- There are some very large bodies of water that have "however much water is all connected together, plus any little tiny islands that are <= 10 land tiles" all as one big (or several big, most of the time) territory. That can have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of tiles in on territory, depending on if you are playing islands or lakes or continental or just how the map generates. However, NOBODY can own these territories. These are "neutral waters."
- People can build seaports on the edge of neutral water territories and attack across great distances to adjacent districts to the neutral waters (making adjacency to those both dangerous and powerful), and you can go out there and fish or gather resources or whatever. And the Yali tend to live out there, rarely owning any territories of their own. They might own a territory if they happen to be living at least partially in a pond that's small enough to be part of a larger land-based territory, but that's it.
- The other territories are usually around 150ish tiles each, but it varies somewhat by map type, and of course map style. Islands has smaller territories, whereas Mars or Europa has larger ones. Territories are funky-shaped, but usually follow natural boundaries like mountains and so forth, and then expand onto the mountains so that each adjacent territory is capturing part of the mountains, or one territory gets all of it. So it tries to have a good size of normal usable tiles within a territory (150ish) before it starts adding in less useful things like mountains or ponds. Well, "less useful" is not completely the right term, but at any rate "not as useful for building plots of main city."
- The game tries to then condense the normal (non-neutral-water) down to some number of territories based on the map size. On huge I think the number is 85, on standard I think I put it at 70, and I think tiny was 60. So, it takes the smallest-possible territories and combines them with the smallest-possible neighbors first, trying to not make mega-territories when it can avoid it. But some will inevitably be 300+ tiles on a standard map, which is okay with me -- think of it as Asia.
- But then you have some other leftovers that simply cannot be combined (like islands of size 11+) and thus are tiny little Madagascar entities, and then you also have those kind of midsize leftovers that were created usually because of terrain features like mountains and water blocking them off, which are in the 30-50 tile range, and those are a bit more like Australia. Or Mordor, depending on which version of Risk you're playing.
- The net effect is that there are usually only a few tiny territories (11-30 tiles), a bigger handful of midsize ones (30-99), a majority of "regular" ones (100-250 tiles depending on map size), and then a few mega territories that are 250+. Not counting neutral waters in any of those, as those are typically mega territories but actually could be as small as a 15+ tile lake. IIRC that's the number.
2. Pollution generation is planned to still work the same, as is crime gneration, except crime prevention and pollution cleanup would both shift to being territory-wide. So, just as you were guessing.
