I have been in Elgea for a bit over a month now, so I feel like I'm starting to learn a little, but you will have to forgive me if I don't say anything particularly novel.
Elgea is big. Really big.
I'm still struggling to comprehend quite how big it is. I played a lot of Civilisation III, in which the largest default map size is 180x180, and that is huge, but less than 1% the size of Elgea. It's really easy to spend time just in your little corner of the map and not realise how big the world as a whole is.
Thinking about how far a medieval army could march in a day, I decided that one square was roughly equivalent to one furlong [1/8th of a mile, ~1/5th km] in distance. This would imply the following, in real-world units.
Size of Elgea = 250 miles x 250 miles
Distance travelled by a messenger in one day = 150 miles
Area of one square = 10 acres
Area of Elgea = Area of England and Wales = Area of the US state of Georgia
10 square rule = 1.25 mile rule = 2 km rule
Speed of level 20 caravans = 5 mph or 8 kph
And in this huge, mind-boggling expanse one can only have 10 cities, severely limiting the impact that an individual player can have on their own.