[PvK]

Sounds interesting even to me, a player who doesn't find the initial turns boring at all, and who doesn't really want the play to be "faster".

Although it would somewhat reduce the value of SC's for initial expansion, as you say, it would also tend to favor SC's, I think for initial destruction of human players, if the initial provinces make up 50% of the map, since that implies it would be possible to attack an enemy player with an SC in the first few turns, in a gambit to wipe them out in a decisive first strike, probably based mostly on pretender strength.

PvK