[Cainehill]

Originally posted by dandavis:
1) I want to limit the number of starting provinces available to increase my chances of beginning in a comfortable location (I prefer playing from corners, as we all do, right?).

IMO, the easiest / best way to handle starting provinces is to use the "#nostart XX" entry in the .map file, where 'XX' is the province number. (Dom2 uses 2 files for every map that's played - one is a '.tga' file, a targa bitmap image. The other is has a ".map" extension, and is a text file containing a lot of lines of entries and commands.)

Using '#nostart' means that you don't have to do bitwise math for terrain flags, and minimizes the chances of it getting screwed up if someone edits terrain types. It also allows you to quickly and easily grep the nostart provinces.

If you only want a very limitted number of provinces available as starting provinces, I'd simply figure out which province numbers you want allowed as starters, and put in "#nostart 1", "#nostart 2", etc, for all the other provinces.

2) I want to limit the number of neighbors that provinces have - mostly to limit the AI's tendency to "jump" oceans and invade some of my coastal provinces. [...]

On the Urgaia map in particular, I don't consider this cheating. You all probably know the province that should be a proper choke-point - the long, horizontal province that connects the larger Western continent to the Eastern continent. I don't feel that a land-based AI should be able to avoid that province and cross the middle sea to invade my coastal provinces.

I've played several games on that map, and I believe you're mistaken. The AI isn't "jumping" over the ocean - that province (# 32) is a perfectly good chokepoint. If the AI is getting past it without conquering the ocean province first, it's either using flying troops, sailing troops (Vanheim and 1 Marignon theme, also some mercenaries), stealthy troops, or summoning them there.

If you look at the province in-game and turn on the neighbors filter (by pressing '8', you'll see which provinces neighbor which ones. #32 is a chokepoint.