Goblin Squad Member
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So somewhere from 7-7.5 minutes between 'city limits' depending on how big the settlements are.
For trade, that sounds about right: for normal consumables you'd use the local market, for major purchases you will shop around. Hopefully that will lead to regional trading hubs but not monopolies.
Bulk goods routes atm seem just a bit too long for fun, but that depends on caravan speed on/off roads.It also means that faraway settlements are sufficiently far away that roads will be used for almost all long treks.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I have been thinking about trying to calculate how the play-area would have to expand, based on increasing subscriber numbers and based on what we currently know about settlement hex-density.
I would take a rather arbitrary number of 300 members per settlement average, which may be too few. I guess some of this depends on how ftp characters will be handled. There may be hundreds of thousands Ftp characters at one point that are member of a settlement, but hardly ever log in(alts).
But if we would take subscribernumbers i.e. amount of characters actually accumulating xp that would probably work well to calculate playerdensity.
I am mostly curious how much of the actual River Kingdoms the game could cover when we reach Eve-like subscriber numbers, which is around 500.000 I believe. I am also curious if the World Wound could be reached with such subscriber number, if GW is allowed to expand beyond the River Kingdoms. All conjecture, but fun to think about. It could be that settlements need a much higher membercount for the "game of settlements" to reach critical mass, so lots of unknowns, but still.
The above is off course nothing less then a brandnew "Summon Nightdrifter" spell, I hope it works. :)
The way it was explained to me is that, like in EVE, each Hex has its on shard/server. Last time I really checked in on EVE there were like 7900 total systems. So if you want to go with that as a similar point of reference, there will be 4,092 Hexes at the beginning of OE on the "more detailed map."
But, I don't know if a system in EVE equate to a Hex in PFO.
Maybe that will you figure out those numbers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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An image from the blog entry Beyond this Hill It Floods Rays of Hope shows an image of several hexes including a Settlement Hex. I think that a settlement may take up most of a hex. If so, then the travel time city wall to city wall may be as short as 5 minutes real time.
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Goblin Squad Member
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An image from the blog entry Beyond this Hill It Floods Rays of Hope shows an image of several hexes including a Settlement Hex. I think that a settlement may take up most of a hex. If so, then the travel time city wall to city wall may be as short as 5 minutes real time.
In that case ya it'd be 5.1 minutes, but then the settlements would be huge. It'd be completely impractical to defend the walls of a settlement the size of a hex as the wall would be 2.3 km long (~1.47 miles). It'd take troops from the center of the hex from 76.6 s up to 88.4 s (moving at full speed) to reach the wall depending on what part of the wall they're going to.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I have been thinking about trying to calculate how the play-area would have to expand, based on increasing subscriber numbers and based on what we currently know about settlement hex-density.
I would take a rather arbitrary number of 300 members per settlement average, which may be too few. I guess some of this depends on how ftp characters will be handled. There may be hundreds of thousands Ftp characters at one point that are member of a settlement, but hardly ever log in(alts).
But if we would take subscribernumbers i.e. amount of characters actually accumulating xp that would probably work well to calculate playerdensity.
I am mostly curious how much of the actual River Kingdoms the game could cover when we reach Eve-like subscriber numbers, which is around 500.000 I believe. I am also curious if the World Wound could be reached with such subscriber number, if GW is allowed to expand beyond the River Kingdoms. All conjecture, but fun to think about. It could be that settlements need a much higher membercount for the "game of settlements" to reach critical mass, so lots of unknowns, but still.
The above is off course nothing less then a brandnew "Summon Nightdrifter" spell, I hope it works. :)
Duration of a summon spell is 1 round per caster level. ;)
Not enough time to actually count hexes east of the river, but we can ballpark it as something less that 3538 (using my maximum hex estimates and noting that the river cuts into the max east-west distance). So let's call it ~3300 hexes east of the river.
300 players per hex would be just shy of a million players. I'm not sure what the relation between peak number online and total accounts is, so it's hard to estimate the number online of those million.
300 players per settlement is trickier. From the smaller landgrab map the settlement hexes are something like 7.5% of total hexes on that map. This is a poor estimate as the area is the starting area and contains 2 NPC cities and so that 7.5% could vary by several percent over a larger area. With 3300 hexes that's about 248 settlements. With 300 people per settlement that's 74,400 players. That gives a player/total hex density of 22.5 (ignoring the river and everything west of it).
At 22.5 players per hex you'd need ~22,222 hexes for 500,000 people which is a square of 149 hexes by 149 hexes. Take the map east of the river and increase each side to 2.5 times it's current number of hexes (so total area goes up by a factor of 2.5*2.5) and you'd get a rough ballpark of that area.
Edit: Using the maps here, the area in Lee's bigger map is roughly twice as big per side, so ~4x the area of the red square in the 2nd map on that page showing the River Kingdoms. It's hard to ballpark by eye, but I don't think that 149*149 hex map would reach the worldwound. If we went for a rectangular map that purposely extended north and in no other directions then maybe but then only a small portion of the map would actually be in the River Kingdoms.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Those are awesome numbers, thanks a lot, Nightdrifter.:)
When I look at those numbers I think 300 member per settlement may be too low of an estimate. I think 248 settlements is already a huge number and this is for a subcriber base of "only" 74000 players.
I looked at the River Kingdoms map and that area is *huge*: River Kingdoms is big!
I do not think we will be covering the entire River Kingdoms soon, then again, we are here to make our own stories in this corner of the land and not on a Lotro-style road-map to cover the entire lore of Pathfinder.
I am awestruck once more about the scope of this game: 248 settlements vying for military and/or economic power, with a sub base of 75k.
*primieval outcry*
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Goblin Squad Member
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Which is probably why nightdrifter was just ballparking. :)
That and I don't expect massive changes to the numbers. Changing the normal movement speed by 20% is reasonable and would still leave the above results in a roughly correct ballpark. Changing it by 600% between now and release seems pretty unlikely. Besides, all of these calculations are just rearranging speed=distance/time or the definition of density. Nothing difficult or time consuming.
And most importantly: it's a distraction from my work code which isn't functioning properly for unknown reasons. *shakes monitor*
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Goblin Squad Member
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Which is probably why nightdrifter was just ballparking. :)That and I don't expect massive changes to the numbers. Changing the normal movement speed by 20% is reasonable and would still leave the above results in a roughly correct ballpark. Changing it by 600% between now and release seems pretty unlikely. Besides, all of these calculations are just rearranging speed=distance/time or the definition of density. Nothing difficult or time consuming.
And most importantly: it's a distraction from my work code which isn't functioning properly for unknown reasons. *shakes monitor*
The pesky comma, or worse, the unbidden space.
Persevere, Nightdrifter!