First draft of start locations

This is the first draft of the start locations. Be prepared to test your ability to differentiate shades of gray.

There are a few problems. There turn out to be exactly 171 supply centers, which means it's just right for 57 3-center starting positions. Currently I've got 49 teams listed on the roster. So we need to either

• recruit more players, or


• redistribute some of the center distributions below by assigning some players extra centers. Along these lines, we could
  • give some countries fourth supply centers in remote places on the board, which would give areas near those units the advantage of having a relatively easy-to-get-at center, or
  • we would assign a fourth, more relevant center nearby to a nation that currently looks underpowered

Unfortunately, the way I went about populating this map means that any changes we make at all are going to involve a lot of shifting of other stuff around--so I'm not going to work on it any more tonight.

However, you can help me by giving me feedback about where you think the problematic areas of this setup are, or giving advice about which centers should become single-unit desperados and how to reorganize the other nations around it, or which centers are unpowered.

Important note: I think that I'm going to preset starting units in addition to starting locations (rather than beginning with a build phase) because I don't want there to be any diplomacy before those builds, for game balance reasons (I think we might be able to prevent too-early screwings-over and encourage interesting play by objectively choosing whether coastal territories start with fleets or armies beforehand).

Here's the map in its current incarnation. It might take some clicking to see a larger version of it, but even that isn't as large as we will need it to be later (especially for Europe, which is tiny but packed with centers.) Anybody know if there's a way to get blogspot to stop shrinking the picture?

Nations are indicated by same-colored centers in close proximity. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.