First, we need to have a criteria for what provinces we have and what provinces we don't have. That will always be subjective, but I prefer a relevancy system: Jan Mayen is not more relevant to Sweden than St. Barthelemy potentially is. So that went out in favor of the later. But there are other examples of that. Melilla is actually smaller than Ceuta, and somewhat less (or have the same relevance as) Ceuta, but only Melilla is in. To fix that, I repurposed provinces from Greenland and Siberia. In Ceuta, Tranquebar and a new Treaty Port in China.
The provinces in Northern Siberia that have small villages founded in the end of the 19th century were not very useful nor they did see a lot of action. Conversely, Greenland had 4 provinces for what's in the game Arctic terrain. Ideally, I wanted it to be only one, but the engine doesn't deal with that very well so I'm stuck with 2 provinces. You can see all the details on what's repurposed on the changelog.
Sometimes reshapes in states need to be done to deal with mechanics/events. China got a little bit of that to work with the Treaty Ports:
Sometimes, the reshape is made to so the game can work better with historical borders, like the Ottoman Empire after the treaty of San Stefano.
There are more reshapes, especially in the USA. They allow for more historical Texan claims and the possibility of a straight 36" parallel claim by the CSA. Reshapes in Estonia and other provinces too, as always, the changelog will have everything and it's not all done.
Sometimes, the reshapes need to be done to better represent a province terrain and LR. For example, old provinces in Egypt bordered the Nile. They were 98% desert, but they needed high LRs to stimulate growth and allow armies to go through then and their terrain couldn't be desert - even if desert is the dominating terrain - so we could build railways. The only solution was to reshape so desert is in desert and fertile plains around the Nile are fertile plains around the Nile. Egypt is an exceptional case, and maybe Sudan needs the same treatment.
The final category of map reshaping is to fix plain bugs. A lot of one or two pixels got lost - or they connected where they shouldn't - and the result is ugly.
While that can pass sometimes and just bother someone a little with knowledge of geography (or with a good eye), sometimes the "bug" affects gameplay. We have several examples on the islands of Zantes, Vancouver or Japan. These islands are connected to the mainland and don't province any bonus to defending armies. But they are islands and are even named so in some cases. So they need to NOT be connected to the mainland.
These are noticeable. A lot of the small aesthetic bug fixes are really not, some I didn't even write down, most will not even be noticed. Still, if I'm going to fix what's wrong, I need to fix even the small things that don't affect gameplay.
Finally, I want to improve the terrain system and the representation of terrains in the map. Somalia, Sonora and Namibia are just a few of the obvious places that terrain is completely wrong. Entire deserts missing. The other problem is that pops take into consideration where they will move by looking at terrain. They don't like deserts too much, but they treat plains in France the same way as plains in Micronesia - completely disregarding size or accessibility. To fix that, a new terrain type, to represent small islands (around 500 km2):
I didn't get to establish what terrain will change - added, removed or repurposed - and I didn't finish the general coastal fixing and province reshaping. This is just a milestone release that fixes a lot of things and there's still a lot of things to do and fix. I will go over each coastal province to look for glitches and represent it the best the game can.
Anyway, here is the changelog: Pastebin.com
It's quite big and not everything is related to the map. The next update will take quite a while and it will still have more map related fixes.
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