How far east will the map go?

[Nameless One]

Wow! First off, I just read about this game because it was mentioned on a forum...I am so excited about the potential on display here! The ancient Western World (along with Egypt and Persia) is my favorite historical time period, so it's awesome to see a non Total War game set in the era! Also, the turn-based gameplay looks superb. It seems like a REALLY clever, well-thought design is on display, merging some of the best aspects of Civ and Total War into a unique experience of its own. Can't wait until this is out!

Anyway, I was wondering: how far East does the map go? It looks like it only goes as as far as Asia Minor/Syria, which would be a bit of a let down...The Seleucid Empire was still a major player in this period, and one of my favorite factions of the time; their empire stretched all the way to the fringes of India. Furthermore, if this is indeed the boundaries of the game's map, the entirety of Persia is completely left out.

So... in the videos and screenshots, is that the extent of the map, or will it extend farther to the east to include Persia, Bactria, etc.?

[Pavel-Ku]

Hello Nameless One ;)
thank you for your interest, we really appreciate it!

Regard to the map size - you are absolutely right about the Seleucid Empire and this region in general but this is always a tradeoff.
We are big fans of having detailed and big maps but we had to set certain threshold of the map size considering the playability and the length of one game.

Both north and east direction of the map would be great to extend but we basically had three options:

• Extend the map (either to north, east or both) and lower the map scale. This would lead to losing the details and that's something we really didnt want to.
  
• Leave the scale untouched and increase the map size. This would lead to an extremely long games and the playability would also be disturbed a bit.
  
• Focus on the Mediterranean and make the map detailed.

We decided to go for the third options for more reasons.
The game already takes now couple of days (fulltime) to win. This seems to be long just about right considering that player is able to play all 20 factions and we hope that he will not stick to just one of them. The reason is simple - the experience of playing each of these factions is very different and you really need to use different strategies for each of them.
The campaign map is "focused" on Ancient Rome expansion. That is the name of the game after all. Roman expansion was focused for centuries on the Mediterranean region only and once this region was conquered, Roman empire was already hegemony of the world. I am talking about this just to explain that even we had a bigger map, once would Rome conquered this area, it would be very difficult to defeat it if you played for a state located in Bactria for example.
The game also offers customized (generated) worlds, which many of our testers enjoy a lot so we didnt want to focus on "one huge map only".
The game fully supports customized player maps and even mods. I am sure that if there are players like you wishing for huge maps, soon or later will be some created.
We already have one tester who decided to create his own map and mod focused on the roman conquest of Holland. It is a very nice mod and also very well done! This tester is also a fan of huge maps and he created a map of a double size of the campaign map. I am not sure if anyone already won the game due to its enormous size:)

[athelasloraiel]

You could think about DLC/ extensions for the persian world....

[Pavel-Ku]

Postat inițial de athelasloraiel:

You could think about DLC/ extensions for the persian world....

Right now I can just say - Ancient Rome is not the only empire in history;)