How Big Are the Islands?

How big are the islands exactly?  How much land vs. water is there?

Most beginners to Empires & Allies probably think the Central Island--the island they start on--is the biggest one.  How Home-Island-centric!  It turns out that the Home Island is the 2nd smallest one.  The biggest one is actually the West Island.

As part of a larger project, I actually measured how big each island is.  Here are the results, by decreasing size:

Island	# blocks	# cells
West Island	168	672
East Island	152	608
South Island	144	576
Central Island	138	552
North Island	132	528
TOTAL	734	2,936

A block is how big a house is.  A cell is how big one piece of road is.  A block is made of 4 cells.  In the counts above, I included only the blocks where you could actually build houses on.  Put another way, I excluded the shore.

Expansions

An expansion is 4 x 4 = 16 blocks, or 8 x 8 = 64 cells.  The game world has 196 total expansions.  You start out the game with 6 "expansions", and need 190 more to fully expand.  The number of expansions that include some non-shore land is 100, while 96 expansions are purely water/shore.  Thus, you need an additional 94 expansions from the 6 you start out with in order to cover all the land in the game.

To see how many expansions you currently have, use the table in my article on Expansions.  Keep in mind that "# Current Expansions" from the article does not include the original 6 "expansions" you start out the game with.  Your total # of expansions is 6 plus what you derive from the table.

Land vs. Water/Shore

As a bonus, here's the breakdown of the game world by land and water/shore:

Region Type	# blocks	# cells	%
Land	734	2,936	23.4%
Water/shore	2,402	9,608	76.6%
Game world	3,136	12,544

The E&A game world has 14 x 14 = 196 expansions, 56 x 56 = 3,136 blocks, or 112 x 112 = 12,544 cells.

The game world is 23.4% non-shore land and 76.6% water/shore.  The land % is higher than 23.4% if we include the shore. [Maybe I'll count the shore separately in the future.]  Taking the shore correctly into account, these percentages are not far off from the make-up of the Earth's surface, which is 71% covered by salt water oceans.

Maps

No, I didn't actually count all the blocks and cells one by one.  That would be a bit too tedious, even for me.  I actually mapped out the blocks in Excel and used a trick to count the blocks.

In the future, I may release the map(s) that I've made if I figure out how to present them nicely.

I mentioned above that this was part of a larger project.  I actually got sidetracked into all this counting.  Originally, I was trying to calculate the bonus effects of decors like Petroleum Refineries.  At first, I did the calculations on fake, square islands.  I thought it would be more accurate to create models of the game world.

I'm still in the middle of this project, but I'll try to write something on it later.  I'm sure there are other applications to all this work I'm doing...