[zepath]

On the first point, try setting up your game with the "Victory Points" condition for victory. Select the button that assigns one point to each national capital and then use the slider to set the required number of victory points to win to something like 20. You can then use the other three sliders to set the number of provinces on the map (randomly chosen) that will be worth one, two, or three victory points. I would recommend setting these sliders to 9, 4, and 2 respectively. These settings will require any of your players to sieze a total of 20 victory points to win. Each of your capitals will be worth 1 point and there will be a total of 24 ther points out there in independent provinces. This should encourage you all to fight over the victory points rather than try to destroy one another completely.

On your second point, yes. You can change a .map file to assign specific starting locations. Check out the mapping guide .pdf in the /dom3/docs/ folder for more info. If you would like an example of such a map, my Uropia map uses those commands to set nations in their "appropriate" places on a map resembling Europe. You can find the map in the Maps & Mods sub-forum.