THE MAP
A hex board sized to the cast, land-dominant and resource-rich, where the only thing that matters about a tile is what you can build on it.
GEOMETRY
A flush hexagonal honeycomb — pointy-top, odd-r offset — where each tile borders up to six neighbours. The board wraps east–west (sail off the right edge, arrive at the left) with hard poles north and south, so there is no safe corner to turtle in.
BOARD SIZE
The board is sized to the number of players rather than fixed: roughly 30 tiles per player, laid out at a 1.5 aspect ratio. A fixed board large enough to seat six would let two players spend an entire match without ever meeting.
| BOARD | CAST | DIMENSIONS | TILES |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 2 | 9 × 6 | 54 |
| Medium | 4 | 14 × 9 | 126 |
| Standard | 6 | 17 × 11 | 187 |
Continent shaping, inland seas and resource clustering all scale with the area, so a small board is a proportionally shaped world rather than a cropped corner of a large one.
TILE TYPES
| TYPE | HOSTS | NOTES |
|---|---|---|
| Water | Nothing, until Reclamation | Oceans and inland seas. Impassable and unbuildable until researched. |
| Fertile | Agriculture Hub, or any generic hub | High food trickle when left rural. |
| Mineral | Extraction Hub, or any generic hub | High materials trickle when left rural. |
| Arid | Any generic hub | Baseline trickle. Useful ground, not valuable ground. |
Only two hubs care about terrain: Agriculture needs Fertile and Extraction needs Mineral. Manufacturing, Scientific, Data Centers and Military Bases go on any land — so an Arid tile is never worthless, it is just never special.
DISTRIBUTION
The world is deliberately land-dominant: about 14% water, and the land splits roughly 42% Fertile, 42% Mineral, 16% Arid. Fertile and Mineral tiles are seeded in clusters rather than scattered, which is what creates regions worth fighting over instead of an evenly good board.
Players are placed with a minimum separation from each other and a small home radius of owned tiles. Everyone starts far enough apart to develop, close enough to eventually collide.