And why not begining with a big landscape? That woud have the same effect without coding anything more.

Well, the suggestion does have one advantage: if you generally outperform, outgrow and out-tech all your opponents, then you can have a new lot who you don't dwarf.

Although you should probably be playing on a higher difficulty setting anyway.

This sounds pretty cool but i foresee a few problems. First of all, if you had managed to defeat your enemies, you probably were getting close to maximizing your spell research or whatever else there will be to research. So once the cataclysm comes, you won't be able to get much stronger. You'll already have uber powerful dragons and stuff, and that might take some of the fun out of it. It would just be a matter of who could build the biggest army fastest. I suppose you could say that the cataclysm that open up the new continents caused your wizard to lose much of his research or something....

If it could be made to work it DOES offer some interesting ideas though. You would have to watch how you spend towards the end. Let's face it, once we control 75% of the map and victory is pretty much inevitable, who bothers to keep upgrading newly conquered towns and stuff? This way you would always have to watch what you do right up to the end because as soon as you "win", you'll be facing enemies just as tough and developed as you are.

I don't think the spells destroy the world so much as they modify... you would destroy a piece of land to create a gap in order to force an attacking army to take a detour as opposed to completely annihilating the continent that your enemies are attacking from. Stuff like that.

I think this is a good idea... It would be like several small states fighting it out, one becoming the victor and then the victor goes on to challenge other nations instead of a states. These could be specifically laid out as a certain mode of play so the rate of research is modified to accomodate a really vast campaign of sorts. Perhaps after you conquer your continent, you could then face off against other continents... Only if there was a dimensional rift border plane of existence that could connect two worlds... then you could face off against other worlds.

good idea, but not so good if you are starting on already large maps, like others have said; you would probably have max tech and large armies. it would simply be a production contest.(considering the economic complexity of the game, however; you might still be able to reach even higher tech levels than before the expansion, and the whole experience could be somewhat end-game-apocalyptic if you play your cards right.) However, for the most part, the game would be dull, and an epic steamroll if you could beat other factions to the chase(the production chase, that is). The idea is innovative to say the least if you start on a small scale, and if the tech levels were ever expanding, then larger maps could work with this system as well...

Map expansion could be pretty fun. Although, if you're playing at the right difficulty on a very large map it should achieve similar results. After all, if the AI is good enough/cheats enough to present you with a challenge all the way through the game, by the time you've become a truly massive empire, chances are you won't be the only one.

Nonetheless, it would be a fun option. Maybe it would have to be an option you choose ahead of time. That way it can generate a very large map ahead of time, but start you out in one small region of it. Once you take control of your whole region, it would expand and generate opponents at a similar level to yours, and so on. One downside is that it would kind of force your kingdom to be very square-shaped most of the time... 

On the other hand, I remember one of the devs saying that the random map generator can use a preexisting "stamp", or piece of a map, and incorporate it into a random map. Given that, and if they want to include a map expansion feature, then it should always be available upon victory. It could just generate a new, larger random map with the original map as a piece.

If the GC2 campaign had worked along the lines the OP describes, I'm sure I would have played it through. And if sandbox mode could somehow support a "put me in a bigger world and let me keep going" command, how could that *not* add appeal to the game? I'd probably start all my GC2 games on Tiny maps if that were possible, and I've never made a serious try at any GC2 map smaller than Medium.

Because teching up is half the fun.

What I would like is a system like this for a semi campaign mode. Let's say you start on a small map with up to four expansions possible. Thus tech and spell research is restricted to a fourth of everything before the first expansion. After each map expansion, another fourth of all technology and spells becomes available for research. Enemies newly appearing on the new map parts should have all or most of the old technology allready researched and have a functioning empire.

Map expansion could happen after certain specific goals are reached, like conquered half of the map, defeated two of three enemies, a certain amount of cities owned, etc.

Thus you would always get new adversaries with a similar strength that you could fight or befriend.

(Though I would guess that's it too late for such a feature. But it would be nice to have, together with changeable difficulty settings during the game.)

If they make AI difficulty tweakable in-game, I hope they include an option to prevent you from doing it. I, personally, have no will power and I don't want to be tempted to lower the difficulty if I'm in a pickle.  

see thats why I want to support opening new worlds rather than expanding maps.  Because that could be a problem for sure.  (on the other hand, you don't exactly build very secure boarders in MoM or anything like that.   And it wouldn't be too hard to ensure the newly spawned armies don't find your capital cities before you'd have a chance to get back to them.   Also, you really shouldn't strech out so thin.  You should have had a 2nd army in production back on your 'secure' boarder already.  If you didn't, it probebly wasn't that important of a location.

I really don't understand why the whole square map with 'safe' inpenetrable boarders still exist.  Back in the day I played a game called "enemy nations" with a completely wrapping map.  I 'knew' that almost all strategy games would be that way by 2005.   That being said, I was wrong since almost no strategy games since have (civilization being the only one that comes to mind with such an option.)

@Landisaurus: It doesn't even seem like it would be a technical feat to perform... just not being a lazy developer. Hopefully Stardock will have such a thing!

MoO3's worst problem was overlapping their own buzz. Sooo many years in development, suuuch a craptastic outcome...

Another good way to do this would be when a small or tiny map is generated, in reality a max size map is generated (gigantic/huge) and only a small-map sized chunk of the top left hand corner is initially available for play.

Result? The game expands naturally once you "win" in the small scale, no compex map modification code is required and the landmasses all make perfect sense rather than looking a bit odd at the borders between the old small map and the larger new one.

The thing to remember about this is that plenty of gamers have a sentimental side. Sure some people who play 4x games are robotically logical but me personally... I get attached to my kingdoms, my heroes and my cities, and it's always with a touch of sadness I leave them for the next, bigger game.

If you can just keep expanding you keep your old kingdom intact as the core and expand outward. The strictly logical gamer is probably neutral about that, but the fluffy bunnies will love it to death. Then you've got your roleplayers who will also dig it. End of game / new game mechanic without even bending immersion, let alone breaking it? Priceless.

I absolutely think any kind of campaign should operate this way, and it would be great as an option to random map games.