Your cities now know their region
Until today a city visit knew two things about where it happened: the name of the place and its country. That was fine for Hamburg. It broke down as soon as visits started counting villages from OpenStreetMap, because Germany has more than a dozen places called Neustadt and Ukraine has dozens of villages called Ivanivka. With only a name and a country, a visit to one of them counted for all of them.
Now every visit also stores the region it is in: the German Land, the Ukrainian oblast, the US state, the Japanese prefecture. The boundaries come from Natural Earth, which is in the public domain, and the file ships with the game, so nothing is looked up from another server while you fly.
What changes for you
- Places with the same name are separate. A town outside our list of big cities is now keyed by name, country and region. Neustadt in Rhineland-Palatinate and Neustadt in Saxony keep their own days and their own tiers. Big cities keep the key they always had, so your history there does not move.
- A new number to collect. Your profile and My cities now show how many regions you have visited, counting cities and airports together. The achievement Regional Flyer has tiers at 3, 10, 25, 60 and 150 regions, with 10 Tridents at the last one.
- Filter your log by region. On My cities there is a region row under the country chips. Pick a country first and the list narrows to its regions. Search also finds a city by its region name.
- Region names on your profile. The cities card shows "Bavaria, Germany" instead of just the country. Region names follow your language where Natural Earth has a translation.
Which level counts as a region
The first administrative level is the right size in most countries: 16 Länder, 25 oblasts, 50 states. In a few it is much finer than what people call a region. France has 101 départements, Italy 110 provinces, the UK more than 200 council areas. For those we count the level above: the 18 French régions, the 20 Italian regioni, England's nine regions plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The full list is France, Italy, Spain, the UK, the Philippines, Slovenia, Latvia, Ireland, Hungary and Portugal. Both levels are stored, so this choice can change later without losing anything.
Old visits
Visits from before today get their region from the centre of the city, after this release. A handful of places outside our list of big cities get the new three-part key in the same pass. If you were the mayor of one of them, the seat moves with it.
The city card on the map now says which region a city is in, under its name, in your language. The bell says it too when a visit lifts a city to a new tier: "Neustadt, Rhineland-Palatinate" instead of a bare Neustadt, of which Germany has several.
Airports take their region from where the airfield is, the same position that draws the visit zone on the map.
There are no region pages and no region mayors yet. If people use the count, those are the next questions.