Tiles

Tiles are the fundamental units of SotE's simulation and world, storing essential data that is used in the calculations of the higher levels of the simulation as well as representing small pieces of terrain. The SotE world is a 3D globe constructed of around 1.6 million square tiles. One of the most essential features of a Tile is its ability to be grouped into Provinces, which are the entities that the simulation operates on.

Resources Some tiles have resources. They can be mined, collected or extracted via other means by working POPs.

Tile size and quantity

Starting from 0.1, tile sizes were originally 65km^2. From 0.1 to 0.1.9 the number of tiles in a world could be customized by a slider called world size which could be a value anywhere between 50 and 512 (512 being an earth-sized world), yielding worlds with anywhere between 75,002 and 7,864,322 tiles. However, the primary size in which worlds were tested with was 256, with 1,966,082 tiles. Since tiles were always equally sized, this meant it's the world changed in size, with 512 size being Terran since the total surface area of 7,8 million tiles was around 511 million Kilometers at this time like Earth, while smaller sizes have land areas going all the way down to just 4.875 million square Kilometers at size 50, implying a world radius of around 622 Kms.

After 0.2 was released, the world size variable was erased and worlds were fixed at size 183 for a mix of performance and standardizing reasons, which yields 1,004,672 tiles. Since this was gonna be the only world size, tiles were greatly expanded to around 508 km^2 in order for the world to have the same land area as Earth, which made them around the size of Bornholm.

In the March 6th, 2022 test build, tiles were changed from being hexagonal (with 12 pentagonal tiles distributed around the world in an icosahedral fashion) to being square for performance reasons, with worlds now having roughly 1.6 million tiles, that were changed to be 350km2 in area (Similar to St. Vincent in the Caribbean or Ilha de São Sebastião in Brazil), in order for the whole world to remain equal to Earth in it's land area.

Tile size discrepancies Since SotE planets are a finite grid approximation of continuous elevation data, its important to remember that certain geological features are slightly too big or too small compared to their real world equivalents. For most of them, they fit within a 5% range of their real size. We do, however, consider some features (such as Sondrio type valleys) of outsized importance and as such these features are exaggerated in size to provide better gameplay experience. Many of these features present significant strategic importance, but would otherwise be smaller in size than a single tile.