The rules of this IOT were more inspired by Civ4 than other IOT's, so...
In Civ4, your culture tiles expand like a circle, right? When you think about it, the tiles are spreading out to only the tiles that connect to tiles already owned. That's where the expansion idea came from.
Similar to the war idea. In Civ4, you could really take a group of horses and move them to really anywhere on the map you wanted, and attack that spot. Kind of like in RFC where most players would take a warrior they get in Egypt and use him to take over China's capital city.
Did you also see that the idea for making a new city was the same concept? The NPC did walk far over to the north beside Dhooms UAE and put a city there. Its the same in Civ4, when you can really take your settler and plop him wherever you really feel like it. Of course, the problem with that is the maintenance costs...
...which I didn't put in the IOT. I knew people would soon begin to take advantage of this ruleset by raging wars on the other side of the continent if the path was clear, or they had open borders with nations. The revolution and culture idea was made to counter this long distance warring as cities captured or planted far away from a countries main area will probably be very susceptible to foreign culture or foreign attacks. If a player decides to fortify this province by expanding to the tiles around it for defense and increasing it's population to prevent revolts, he will leave his homeland very weak to attacks. Personally, I find that the system is pretty balanced already.
