I wonder if elves could be able to colonize wastelands. This is inspired by a bit in the Realms in Exile mod where some land is empty (it's been depopulated in lore) and some factions are able to recolonize it. It's represented as a holding with blockers. When you colonize it, you spend resources to remove the blocker buildings (predatory animal caves and so on) and expand the settlement.
#Colonization
shy spruce
raw viper
The difference is that uncolonised land in realms in exile is land with potential to be used, while wasteland is really unusable due to it being a desert or high mountains or only ice and snow. Aditionally some wastelands like mountains are to hinder unit movement and thus making it colonisable would remove that ability (otherwise we cant conquer those) and that would remove a lot of defensive capability
ebon kayak
the emptied land in RiE has been colonized before and is suitable for human habitation.
Wasteland in vanilla map is not suitable for it on a big enough scale for that
shy spruce
Hm... I wonder if land could be reduced to such a state... Maybe Spark sorcery, some kind of magical disaster... Maybe Dark Elf atrocities?
ebon kayak
that could work. If Dev reaches a negative threshold it could become wasteland but the coding would be soemthing to behold
raw viper
I mean maybe you could add the northern parts of russia. but i dont think the time this would take to add would be better spend somewhere else