If you’ve spent any time staring at a digital globe in games like Hearts of Iron IV or Victoria 3, you know the exact dilemma I’m talking about. You’re sitting there at 2:00 AM, looking at a geopolitical map, and you have to make a fundamental ideological choice:
Do you push for your nation’s clean, majestic, "natural" historical borders—or do you ruthlessly snip away high-value provinces to min-max your GDP, chokehold resource nodes, and turn your empire into an economic hyperpower?
It’s the ultimate clash between Aesthetic Nationalism and Technocratic Realpolitik, and honestly? It tells us a lot about how people actually view world politics.
So we have two types of players:
For a huge chunk of map-painting enthusiasts, the primary motivator isn't raw stats—it's cartographic aesthetics.
These are the players who will refuse to annex a province rich in rubber or oil simply because it creates a weird, jagged peninsular bulge on the map. To them, borders represent historical legitimacy, geographical logic (rivers, mountain ranges, coastlines), and cultural completeness.
The Mindset: It’s deeply rooted in every nations most significant point in history.For example in Europe it is based on 19th-century Westphalian nation-state idealism. "Greater Germany must look like Greater Germany," "France belongs on the Rhine," or "Rome must control the entire Mediterranean basin."
For this camp, *border gore* isn't just an eyesore—it’s a moral failing. Taking a landlocked enclave inside an enemy empire because it has a +10% steel modifier feels dirty. If a border doesn't follow a mountain ridge or a river line, it breaks the immersion. Which might make them leave insane amounts of economic output just so that the map will look clean.
On the flip side, you have the pure Machiavellian Min-Maxers. These players treat global geography not as a historical canvas, but as an optimization puzzle.
If grabbing a thin, ugly strip of coastal tundra gives them strategic naval range, a warm-water port, or direct control over a critical choke point (like Malacca or Suez), they will carve that map up like a Thanksgiving turkey without a second thought.
The Mindset: its Pure 21st-century geoeconomics and strategic realism. Borders are arbitrary administrative lines; what actually matters is resource security, power projection, and fiscal efficiency.
These players understand that in a system governed by state-centric anarchy, sentimentality gets you annexed. Why settle for historical borders when you can monopolize 80% of the world’s tungsten supply and force the entire globe into your trade bloc?
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When you look at how gamers actually play, most start out aiming for historical roleplay, but eventually succumb to realpolitik. The moment an AI rival builds a massive army right across your border, those nice, clean "historical natural lines" suddenly start looking like a defensive liability.
I'm definitly from the first camp that thinks gore borders are difintly a problem in war era but at the end of the day, both approaches reveal something about human psychology. Some people play strategy games to feel like a visionary statesman redrawing the historical map; others play to run a geopolitical hedge fund with a standing army.
It's clear to me that the second camp is the decision maker in this game..but who knows maybe in the future we can flip the table and agree to have majestic soothing borders that are similar to pre WW1 borders where empires were vast.