The map of Europe in Infinitum is huge. It consists of 4000 x 4000 fields and contains 15k cities. We want to create an enormous combat zone and also include all of the European countries. The map spans from Island in the North to Sicily in the South, from the Atlantic coast in the West to the Ural mountain range and beyond. Of course your units are able to operate all over this map in real time. You can just say: “What the heck, France sucks, I’m going to Azerbaijan”. (Editor’s note: France is cool, actually; and yes, we have Caucasian nations!)
If you want to go from one end of the map to the other, it would take about 11 hours using the fastest available unit in the game. You might object, that this is far too quick, but hey, this is not a sim! Besides, things can get much quicker later: you can build an airport in a city to transport your units via air. Water bodies are also taken into account in transportation as they present obstacles for normal units. Only hovercraft can go over water bodies, so island fortress is a real possibility in our game.
One of the most difficult things was to choose cities for the map. We used geographical data to generate city names and positions, and statistical data on population to define significance or more precisely size of each particular city. Our goal was to create somehow even distribution of the cities in the map, but we found out that it is not going to be that easy! Most of western and eastern Europe is fine. But some parts of Europe, like in the north of Europe, in Baltic countries or in Russia. There are cities there, but in clusters with large areas of nothing between those clusters. Also some countries just do not have data about population for most cities. That makes difficult to automatically decide which city is large and which small.
As a result, there might be some funny city choices in the map. We sincerely hope you will be patient with us, until we figure this out. We certainly do want to make everything correct and plan to update the map so that it resembles reality in a way that a strategy game needs. Speaking of which, we won’t be able to do it by ourselves. We hope the players and our community will help us to point out some mistakes in this regard. We plan to publish a web based map browser for you soon. It will show all the cities. We hope you'll like it and point us to some omissions and glithes. Stay tuned, we’re looking forwad to your feedback.
You will be able to hold up to three cities, so make sure the ones you need are there! :-)
