Why Russia Always Wins My Empire Sim (Empire Simulator 2.2)

Which capital locations produce the most powerful empires? In this update of my Empire Simulator, the focus is on power, conquest and the natural selection of capitals. For some reason, Russian cities always win...

Run the simulator yourself here: https://sundellviz.github.io/dataviz/...

If you have tried the old simulator, you might need to do a hard refresh in the browser to get the new files.

I mostly show simulations for Europe in the video, but you can try a lot of things out for yourself. Cities for all the other parts of the world can be loaded directly in the simulator. Comment what you find, and subscribe to support the project!

This took a really long time to get done. First I worked really hard on improving the performance of the simulator so it won't eat up all your processing power and RAM. Then I spent a lot of time trying out various logics for power that grows with territory without falling into weird cyclical patterns. Notable changes to the simulator since last version:

Better performance
Cities don't move
Real cities for the major maps pre-loaded and can be accessed from the Empire menu
Value maps automatically loaded when loading terrain
New cost slider for switching terrains (for instance moving from water to land)
Leaderboard
Land value discrimination slider (empires don't take land below the value)
Simulation only updates when it is run
Costs no longer capped at 10 (enter whichever number you want)
Land value maps updated with extra value on costs to account for fishery

Previous videos in the series:
Chapter 1:    • Change a Slider, Change a Country (Empire ...  
Chapter 2:    • This Map Draws Its Own Borders (Empire Sim...  

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:15 The Basics
01:09 Power Mechanics
01:37 Tweaking the Simulation
02:19 Conquest
02:47 Chaos
04:01 Simulation: Real Cities with Uniform Costs
05:19 Simulation: Varying Costs
07:58 Terrain Specialization
09:04 Takeaways

Music, in order of appearance in the video (all from Epidemic Sound www.epidemicsound.com):
Lofive - Fresh Pastries
Trevor Kowalski - Quartet Pizzicato
Amber Glow - Crystal Glimmer
ELFL - The Flux Beneath It All
Ben Elson - Chrome Dreams
Jon Bjork - Careful Consideration
ELFL - Dream of the Machina

Image credits:
Russian Imperial Flag: By TRAJAN 117This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Inkscape . - Own work, based upon [1] and using, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...

Spanish Empire map: By Ostiudo - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...

British Empire map: By RedStorm1368 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...

Dutch Empire map: By red4tribe - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...

Night lights map: By NASA Earth Observatory - http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP..., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...

Historical map of Europe: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...