Is it me, or is the map a little bit small? I mean, on the legend, the bar indicates 10 km of space; most towns have about 5-10 km between them, and most maps in game have like 5 km^2 on them. Basicly, these towns are smushed right between battlefields, where you can see half way across the map. Boggles me mind
The stability of the region makes little sence with the smallness of the map as well, whats stopping a blitzkreig kind of suprise attack when it takes so little time for ships to mobilise?
Map size:
Each quadrant is about 60 km long and 50 km wide. Using the pithagrean theorm, the longest straight line on the map from Fairgar in the Anglean Republic to Bedcomb east of the Guild is about 230km.
A squid moves at ~47m/s at top speed, which equates to 169km/h. It would take about an hour and 20 minutes to go across the whole map.
For a galleon, who's top speed is 27 m/s (97km/h), 2 hours and 20 minutes is the time it would take to traverse the whole map.
I guess what I'm saying is that, although the distances between settlements makes sence for ground based habitation in peace time/part of a single nation, based on the current technologies developed since the Icarus, I would expect to see fewer factions, more no-mans-land, or larger distances on the legend. In my mind, I multiply the distance give on the map by at least 5, to make the Abyssial Gulf almost as big as Lake Erie.
Pardon my meandering rant, I realize that the devs probably will make /have already made the map bigger :p
EDIT, little derps