[Arralen]

No, blood hunters won't have an advantage, unless you count crippling your gold income by decimation the pop through extensive blood hunting an advantage. An experienced blood player would go hunting in the numerous 5-6k provinces and leave the others alone, to get more gold to buy more mages.

Did 2 test games against AI on the map, and here's what I had to find out:

The map size is far from ideal - it's simply to "stretched" in the vertical direction for a wraparound-map. Together with the (therefore) NW-SO "wrapped" land masses this makes for a very strange game. And it becomes complex fast - but in such a sense, that you have lots of interlocked fronts within short time, and have to check neighbours etc. constantly.

The Bridges as provinces is something I can't get used to. They end up with about 4500 pop. and 14 ress., despite being small plains (have to be plains, otherwise terrain movement restrictions would apply) - so they are more worth than some full-sized mountain/swamp provinces.
Even worse - they don't work as intended. A bottleneck is something you have to pass through. But they only make distances longer by 1, and you actually move into them and sit there. Unless you're caelum, in which case you're happy about another way to use you province hopping ability. Furthermore, they're cluttering the map horribly with all those additional prov flags which, if you zoom out, seemingly are placed right on the borders between "real" provinces.

The oceans/seas are too small/too few - seafarers, esp. Vanheim gets an unfair advantage this way. The vans could simply move everywhere as if the seas wheren't there. Heck, if even the AI could use this to it's advantage ..

Adding pre-placed sites to the cities will not be sufficient Even if you add the "best" ressource-giving site, it's only a meager 50 ress. Which are not doubled by building a castle on top of them, IIRC. Better make those prov. "plain" plains and add additional pop via map command. (basically, that's what the "grassland" flag does: 150% pop, 50% ress. IIRC, and lesser chance to find magic sites)

My suggestion: Drop the bridges. There are bridges on other maps (e.g. Cradle) which work quite well as a hint for prov. neighbouring. Add cities as "standalone" prov. - they are much more easily discernable.


But don't get me wrong - it's a great map, nicely done and absolutely playable. Actually, I'm being trashed by my own modded Ulm in the 2nd game, and it's the DOM2 game I have the most fun playing ever ! But the map shows so much potential to be even better ...