[Cainehill]

Since Quantum_Mechanic mentioned thinking that Urgaea would be a fun map to play with 13 players, and I agreed that it would be interesting, I did a little thinking about it.

Certain races (Jotuns, Ulm, etc) would have a huge advantage, given the incredibly close proximity of everyone to one another. Because of this, I'm not sure it would be a good / fair game if races went out first come, first claimed.

Someone, either Zen or Gandalf, had mentioned doing games where each person designed a pretender for a nation, but then the nations were randomly assigned. Thus, no-one builds the uber-setup they think would be capable of winning, but rather one that someone else would be hard pressed to win with - everyone gets a sub-optimal pretender.

Kind of interesting, but a lot of work, what with passwords and all.

But maybe if you did a lottery to see who gets first choice of nations, who gets 2nd, etc? Everyone has a fair chance of getting something decent - the 1st person gets a primo nation, sure. But the next to Last and Last get to make a choice with the knowledge of just what nations are going to be in the game, which might even it out a little bit.

(This actually goes with what I think is wrong with tournaments like Napoleon is doing - certain people, with certain nations, are going to dominate. But giving them a random nation, or maybe even better, a random setup - ie, the Pretender is already designed - makes it more of an even playing field, imo.)