How large is a hex, really?

[matiez]

In multiple threads I keep reading about how some people think the hexes are going to be ENORMOUS and contain a settlement a piece and ect. I want to get down and assess the actual size and complexity we can expect from a hex.

For starters, each hex is 1.2 km X 1.2 km (about 3/4 mi from edge to edge). While this may seem quite large, it's not. Looking at the Philedephia pic provided in an earlier dev blog, no city on the map can fit within just 1 hex. Likewise, comparing the Crusader Road map there's only a dozen or so towns currently on the map (and only 3-4 being considered so far).

This leaves the big question of what I'm getting at and what we can expect. We should be able to expect a single settlement taking up more than a hex. Also, hexes with settlements will contain little else beyond what goes into a settlement.

I would expect about 1-4 hexes minimum between settlements, to allow for settlement growth. I expect there to be large portions of the map dedicated to strictly wilderness, hideouts, and the occasional Inn. It should take 10-20+ minutes to walk from one settlement to the next.

Thinking about it in terms of Eve, not every node has a PoS. Typically, a PoS is set up in a protected area and used to harvest the surrounding nodes. I see settlements working the same way, with the ability to expand a settlement into adjacent hexes.

[Nihimon]

The current population of Philadelphia is 1.5 million. The estimated population of all of Europe during the Middle ages is 25 to 30 million. I think it's a mistake to think of population density in modern terms.

That said, Settlements are not Cities. They're not even Towns. Most will probably be like Villages. Go to maps.google.com and scroll in on France until the scale shows 1 km. Now look at how many named "settlements" there are on your screen.

Just because there is a Construction Site for a Fort/Settlement in each "typical" hex doesn't mean there will end up being a Settlement there.

Finally, Settlement "growth" of the type you seem to be envisioning will more likely come from the merging of existing Settlements, rather than a single Settlement expanding out.

[Fra Antonius]

In the middle ages, many villages (depending on the region of course) consisted of like 2-5 large houses, each home to a number of families.
So they were not even villages in the modern sense...

[Ryan Dancey]

OK, let's do a little exploring!

Open maps.google.com

Search for Pullman, WA

This is the college I attended many, many moons ago. It is roughly the size of a Hex. This town holds about 24,000 folks (Washington State University is 19,000 of them).

In Pathfinder Online, this would be the largest type of settled area. In the Crusader Road area there are no settlements this large, although Mosswater is an undesigned area at the moment.

Now go north of Pullman, to Garfield. This town holds about 600 folks. It's about the size of one of the three NPC settlements. It occupies about a 4th of a Hex. A very large PC Settlement would be something roughly this size. Garfield is a town that you drive through on your way from Seattle to Pullman and its the center of a large farming community so it's daytime population is higher than 600 residents, more like 1,000 people.

Now to give all that some scale, go west to Mount St. Helens. The mountain would fill approximately 4 Hexes (2x2). So you could have something the size of a massive volcano taking up just a corner of the map, and dozens of small settlements scattered all around it without feeling crowded.

[Gruffling]

Even at half a mile square, that results in a side of a little less than 8 football fields and a diameter of 15+. Throw in a 600ft mountain range (smallish), trees, rivers and streams, as well as a few bandit, orc, or troll lairs with a notice diameter of a 50 yards (purely hypothetical numbers here), as well as a couple dozen nodes of valuable resources... I suspect the size of the environment will be low on the concern lists. If anything seems like the player density might be such that encounters with real people could be quite randomly distributed, and rare.

edited: someone removed a post i was commenting towards... drat.

[Scarlette]

Goblinworks wrote:

The Crusader Road area is about 12 miles tall by 11 miles wide. It would require an hour of game time to walk a line from top to bottom—a few minutes less to go from side to side. There are 256 hexes in the area.

Doing the math a hex is 1/2 sqaure mile ? 12*11=132/256=.51

Ryan Dancey wrote:

Now go north of Pullman, to Garfield. This town holds about 600 folks. It's about the size of one of the three NPC settlements. It occupies about a 4th of a Hex

Now 600 people in 1/8 square mile ? To me, if I am seeing this right, seems a little crowded.

[Blaeringr]

Modern urban sprawl is a wonderful thing, is it not? In North America especially, towns and cities are geographical gluttons.

[DeciusBrutus]

Europeans think 200 Kilometers is a long distance. Americans think 200 years is a long time.

[Gruffling]

DeciusBrutus wrote:

Europeans think 200 Kilometers is a long distance. Americans think 200 years is a long time.

when you're on foot, one might seem like the other.

[matiez]

Ryan Dancey wrote:

Search for Pullman, WA

This is the college I attended many, many moons ago. It is roughly the size of a Hex. This town holds about 24,000 folks (Washington State University is 19,000 of them).
...
Now go north of Pullman, to Garfield. This town holds about 600 folks. It's about the size of one of the three NPC settlements. It occupies about a 4th of a Hex. A very large PC Settlement would be something roughly this size.

Now to give all that some scale, go west to Mount St. Helens. The mountain would fill approximately 4 Hexes (2x2).

Pullman appears to be about 2km x 5km in size, making it roughly 10 hexes total. Garfield is 2km x 1km making it roughly 1-2 hexes in total. Mount St Helens appears about right, depending on how you encompass it.

And this is my point that Hexes are sounding larger than they really are. It sounds like a settlement should take up the majority of a hex. This leaves very little room for anything besides.

Also something to keep in mind: When America was first settled a typical family of 5 needed 40 acres of land just to survive. And they weren't even self-sufficient; they still had to trade to get materials and food they didn't produce. To put into context, 40 acres is 2 hexes.

[Klaus van der Kroft]

1,2km x 1,2km is actually enough space to fit most medieval settlements, particularly frontier ones.

Take, for instance, the cities of the Crusader States: Acre, one of the great ports of Outremer, was barely 800 metres wide at the time of its conquest, while Antioch, the most impregnable city of the Near East and housing a massive 20.000-big population, was at most 2,5kms wide.

Also, consider the distances: In the central Holy Roman Empire, for instance, lots of settlements existed within very short distances of each other. When your fastest mean of transportation is a cart pushed by sick mules, 1km feels a lot longer.

So while having a settlement per hex seems too much, it wouldn't be at all unreasonable to have some areas tightly packed with small towns and villages within a few hills of each other.

[ispq]

The most recent blog post outlining 15 secs real time to 1 minute game time and characters in game moving 4x faster than you would expect has the actual effect of shrinking each axis of movement across the map by 1/4. This makes each hex actually 300 meters from edge to edge.

[Colgrym Stoutmug]

The hex size sounds great to me. I live in a town that is approx 4.8km x 4.8km and we have a population of about 30thousand. If you look at it on the map the center of town is barely 1.6km both ways and then a lot of people in the outlying area that still say they are from that town. Most towns in fantasy settings are similar they have a small town square with an inn and several apartment buildings with multiple housing options and store fronts, then the farms and a lot of people who associate with the town live on the outskirts of it. Not to mention this is just for launch of 4,500 people as the game population expands so will the amount of hex' in game.

[Nihimon]

Ryan Dancey wrote:

Search for Pullman, WA... It is roughly the size of a Hex.

Now go north of Pullman, to Garfield... It occupies about a 4th of a Hex.

matiez wrote:

Pullman appears to be about 2km x 5km in size, making it roughly 10 hexes total.

Garfield is 2km x 1km making it roughly 1-2 hexes in total.

I think it's obvious there's a disconnect somewhere :)

[Vic Wertz]

The area of a hex is very close to .5 sq. miles.

According to the US Census Bureau, the area of Pullman is 9 sq. miles, and the area of Garfield is .7 sq. miles. The area of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument is about 172 square miles, but that includes more than just the mountain.

[Mark Kalmes]

Keep in mind that we're probably not going to have villages with literally hundreds of houses that players would have to walk through. It's just too boring to put a completely realistic scale on a village. So all settlements in the game will be smaller than a comparable one in real life.

It's similar to how Deadwood is presented in the TV series. Almost everything happens in the town square. It would be boring to present the hundreds of shacks that should actually surround that square. And it would be even more boring to constantly walk through them in order to get to the tavern or chapel in the middle of the village.

[Thorkull]

Also keep in mind that it's a virtual *economy* and adventure game not a virtual population simulator.