Don't worry Calahan, as soon as Jazzipi made his post I gave into the feeling I had about the map ever since I thought about the water situation. So, I locked myself in and made another map... again. I really didn't want to take your hard work and scrape it, but there really was no choice. Thank you so much for what you have done.
In the newest map, the water situation has improved to being at least as good as the first map, if hopefully not better. The problem is that I have so many other considerations and I'm at the mercy of a random number generator. I've already gone through it to eliminate a host of provinces as start locations. The details are as such:
-All starting locations on land have either 5 or 6 province on the border. No more, no less.
-All starting locations on land with 6 provinces have either a wasteland or swamp on its border.
-All starting locations on land with 5 provinces have no wastelands or swamps on their border.
-All starting location in the water have 4 to 5 water provinces on the border. (This excludes land provinces)
-There are no starting location that border the larger body of water.
-The larger body of water is 16 provinces large. Though still a bit slim.
-Choke points (as requested) are to a minimum.
-The remaining start locations are reasonable well distributed, though I have yet to zone it to ensure even spacing between nations. If it needs it, I'll do it.
My only issue is that I can't seem to stop the map generator from creating large clumps of mountains and large circular bodies of water that don't cut off huge sections of land or make a ton of choke points. Anyhow, enough ranting, here it is:
Link to standards_version 3.zip
Edit: Testing shows that some zoning will have to be done. Not a big deal as I only need to eliminate sites until I have 12 small clusters. I have a visual record of which sites are start locations, so it won't be too hard. I'm pretty sure it's a change you won't need to download as I can just make it on the map I'll upload to the llamaserver.