[paradoxharbinger]

@ drP
this is one of the features that i want to put in, but, rather than looking simply at altitude, terrain types will be placed by proximity to water, which really just ends up going a step beyond looking at altitude. the thing i've been struggling with is how to implement it in a way that users can modify. i was playing with the idea of using cubic splines to describe the probabilities of terrains being placed with respect to water proximity, but i've been coming to realize, that it would probably net little gain, and would be quite difficult to implement and also would slow things down quite alot, not to mention that it would be fairly complicated for the user who had no idea what the hell i was talking about with splines.

anyway, i like your idea with the three groups of terrain, close-, mid-, and far-proximity could work out pretty well and i think would be a good compromise to the exactness that splines offer. the only extension would be to define how close each of the thresholds are.

so, here are some thoughts on how this might work out:

farm close:high chance, mid:medium chance, far:low chance
waste close:low chance, mid:medium chance, far:high chance
forest close: medium chance, mid:high chance, far:medium low chance
plain close, mid, far:high chance
swamp close:high chance, mid:medium chance, far:very low chance

@gandalf

im not sure what you mean by surrounded by castles, but i see your meaning with the one entrance (neighbor?). this might work once i get impassable borders going with small mountain ranges (not large enough to contain a province) and rivers.

i think that i would like to keep caves in the map, ie not putting them off to the side, maybe cave provinces could be borderless, and just have an icon on the map representing the entrance and possibly closer cavern provinces could be considered neighbours. this could mean that caverns are not dependent on a special case of mountainous terrain, which would present it's own special difficulties in determining where they occurred and forcing them to occur so that there are caves. this might be worked so that based on how close the cave entrance is to normal province borders will determine which provinces may be entered from the cave. so that if a cave entrance sits right on a junction of three borders, an army within the cave may enter any of the three provinces. on the other hand if it is to far within the borders of some province, an army in the cave may only enter that one province. going this route could present problems with caves that do not have exits to above ground, though. perhaps, it might be necessary to have an entire second layer to the map for the underdark.