Intro

Please note that this is just a sub-post covering only a puzzle-piece of my Land-Speculation.

To start on the "Front Page" or to return to the Overview-Post please click on the picture below:

So without further ado, here are my thoughts about the topic:

As you all know Splinterlands-Land will be seperated into:

• Praetoria (consists of 150 Regions)
• Regions (consist of 10 Tracts)
• Tracts (consist of 100 Plots)
• Plots

And according to some Eye-Candy we were presented in a Town-Hall quite some time ago it should look like this:

The category "World > Praetoria" on the top suggests that there might be even more continets coming in the future.

__

When looking at Stronghold now they divide it a little bit further:

Basically there are a bunch of different servers. Like Continents in SL (Praetoria being one of them):

• World
• Asia
• Europe
• German
• ...

They all basically look like Real-Life-Maps and they divide Land in (Example below):

[German Server ]

• Country (Austria)
• Province (East Austria)
• County/State (Lower Austria)
• Parish (Kleinzell)
• Village (However my Village is named)

Basically its just a little more detailed breakdown. For most of my comparison I use my villages on a german server, but to make it a little easier to understand the world map I used the USA-Server cause I guess most readers are more familiar with it. So to make SL comparison a little easier its save to just use the following Division in Stronhold aswell:

Thats the farthest you can scroll in. To view your village you can double-click or enter the village-view to see and manage your village buildings.

And here is already my first speculation. As you can see in the picture above, the different Villages (Plots) in Stronghold are visualized by small village icons. These Icons get bigger the more the buildings within the village are levelled. So you start with just a little hut-icon and end with a whole city.

I am very certain that Splinterlands will follow a similar approach. So that you can scroll in for only a limited amount and after that you have to enter some sort of plot-view. In my opinion showing the plot-level-progress with corresponding icons on the world map is a great choice to make the differences between certain plots more distinguishable.

What I actually don't know is whether this shared eye-candy below is already the final plot-view or merely the Plot-Summary in Card-Form you will find in your inventory.

So here are my thoughts about that:

Somehow I would hope to see a different Plot-View and I think we will get one. The reason for me to believe this is that the above artworks are in portrait-mode meaning if you think of that on a full-screen i am not sure how it would be displayed, plus proportion-wise the font on the bottom would be huge. So I think those are actually just the Plot-Summaries in Card-Form we can look at in our inventory or maybe as an easier way to differentiate Plots on the non-card-market (cause Land will get its own market-tab) whereas the Plot-Overview will offer more information and a full-screen artwork. Maybe featuring some animations of our land and workers. But that is really just a random thought I had when seeing these "plot-overviews" above.

I also stumbled upon that Eye-Candy that was shared with us by Nate.

So with that screenshot I assume that the Plot-summaries in Card form will be accessible through the Card-View Button on the top right.

So I opened Photoshop again and I think that Card-View could look like this (Not much variation in the Plot-examples but I think you get the idea:

I guess though that they will add some more filters to this page, like "by building type" or sort by "production outcome highest/lowest). Additionally a nice-to-have would be some sort of Plot-Management-Overview. Like a table showing you different stats of your plots, which would be a nice overview if you manage a great amount of plots (Maybe thats the function of the little Quick-Manage Button we could see in the picture)

But now back to Stronghold :

Stronghold also uses a banner-system, meaning every player can create their very own banner to make themselves easily recognizable.

So when you are on the world map and hover over a certain village it automatically shows you the banner of the owner plus all other plots of that player get highlighted aswell. So in the picture below I can easily tell that the village my cursor is on belongs to a player who has 5 villages within that tract.

You might have spotted that there is another banner in the picture, just above the village with the name "Heppner". This village is actually the "Parish Captial" (just like a keep in SL) and the banner above shows which player within the parish (Tract) is its steward and has therefor the control over different options. [More about that in my Post about "Castles & Keeps"]

So that "Banner-System" could also be implemented within Splinterlands using the avatar-pics. However for that to work we would need a little more than the 13 Avatar-Pics we currently have

A great opportunity for a voucher store perhaps? I mean you could easily do every card artwork as an avatar pic resulting in over 450 Avatars. Still dreaming about my own "Grandmaster Rathe" Avatar as I had the privilege to be this cards creator 😊
Wouldn't that look great?

So yeah, I would love to have the ability to recognize different players even when just scrolling around on the World-Map of Praetoria. That brings me to another point
-> Making Guilds recognizable within the map.

Maybe you already spotted in a picture above that Parishes and Counties (Tracts/Regions) can have different colors. As seen below:

In Stronghold there are 20 different Houses:

As a guild you can decide to join a certain house and fight together under its banner. So the colors above represent the different influences of certain houses within that area. As Stronghold is mainly PvP driven these houses are in constant diplomatic change. War/Peace/Truce/... Sometimes several houses unite to fight the most powerful house and so on. Its really fun.

I can see that also happening in the distant future so several guilds can "fight" under one banner.
Basically this is kind of already happening and will probably increasingly do so in the future.

And maybe there are some game-elements where guilds and players can fight over influence over Praetoria resulting in different rewards or benefits. Would be a way to implement a PvP system that is not "aggressively fighting each other" and provides some further incentives for guilds.

Another great addition to the world-map of lands would be to be able to differentiate between the different guilds or maybe also houses showing their influence and control over regions/tracts.

So in my opinion Land could look a little like this:

(And yes I was too lazy to photoshop the whole map 😂 But you get the idea)

So either you see a guild having ownership of the region or an individual player portrayed by his avatar.

But how do you get to be the "ruler" over a Region/Tract? I dont think it would be a good idea to just give the player owning the one plot where the keep or castle is located automatically full control of the region or certain options.

Thats why I think there will be some sort of voting system to elect the ruler of a keep or castle to govern the whole region or tract.

In my post "Castles & Keeps" I will play around the idea of such a voting system.
So if you are interested in some more thoughts around land (and comparisons with Stronghold Kingdoms) you can either hop over to the next post "Castles & Keeps" or return to the "Overview" Post by clicking the pictures below:

Either way, thank you so much for powering through the post. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Maybe you also have a particular game in mind or maybe just a particular mechanic you would like to see in Splinterlands.

I would also love some feedback so I can improve my posts so feel free to leave those aswell.

Thanks for the support

Yours, Moriarty (THE GRANDMASTER)