You raise a good point about potential non-participants. It's probably unavoidable that in any game of that size you'll have more people who are uncommunicative than you will in a smaller game. So it would be far easier to make a smaller game work out well. Septimius, what do you think about a little bit of a compromise. Go with the high resource/gold settings, or just start the noobs in much richer areas with perhaps some resource bonus sites (you could go with the idea that the uprisings are happening in slave camps, where workers are being forced to mine for the vets, something like that), but stay with a similar number of players to the last one. You would still get the massive uprising feeling, but keep the game more manageable at the same time.
I'm not sure if you recall or not stretch, but I wasn't playing this game except for two turns as fomoria to prevent stales
. I'll stick around since I'm admin of the noob forum anyway, although I was definitely starting to feel I was repeating myself towards the end there.... I might be interested in playing that game but it's not really noobs vs vets, is it? Perhaps graduate school :P If you like the idea you might have better luck organizing it on the side rather than making a noobs vs vets game out of it.