A New Way of Looking at the New World

Day 480, 03:59 • Published in Australia Australia • by Lee Deity

If there's one thing that the New World seems to need, it's Maps. It seems that once a week a new players have built a brand new, up-to-date map for us to peruse, or have built new map viewers with new features. This is perfectly fine, and I have no beef with this at all - The lack of a dynamic map means we have to make do with what we have.

But I've been wondering this past weekend whether the maps we build, based on the standard world map, are the best way of visualising the New World. Often these maps get the borders slightly wrong, or add regions that aren't there, or are otherwise misleading. Just looking at the borders doesn't necessarily get you what eRepublik actually believes the borders are under the hood.

So today, I'd like to bring you a slightly more... abstracted view of the New World, or at least our little segment of it.

Link to the Network view of South East Asia

This is the South East Asian map (with South Africa Included), without all the land masses, and treating all regions as simply abstract bubbles with all the borders rebuilt as links, very much like the eRepublik engine would build them. In this way, the borders of each region are much more clearly defined and visible. Also, it become much easier to see paths and "hinge regions", regions that are highly connected in a given area.

A few interesting things to note here is that South East Asia is not particularly accessible to the rest of the world - exactly four entrances in and out, that's it, and those entrances have only a single external region attached to them. It now is unsurprising that Indonesia has expanded to South Africa - by doing so, they now have control of three out of four entrances into the region. (The Phillipines control the last one, the route through China, and Indonesia's takeover of India renders that entrance under their control as well).

It should also be clear that Western Australia is an extremely valuable region, strategically. Controlling Western Australia means access to South Africa, the Indonesia Home regions, and of course the rest of Australia. It is little wonder that Indonesia has invested heavily in it's defense.

I intend to bring you a full world map in this style, however, Europe and Asia have extremely large numbers of regions, getting the system into a satisfactory condition is a long procedure.

For those interested in building similar maps like these, Cytoscape is the program I've used, and I've made the source data easily available for anyone who wants to have a go.