[LumenPlacidum]

Has there been a decision as to the Age being played? I know we haven't done a Mid Era game, and I kind of want to try out one of those angel-summoning nations (lol, if I survive to that point).

As far as settings, any situation where we're throwing more resources and gold into the game is an advantage for the veteran players. Anyone can spend money, but the more you have, the more benefit you get if you spend it efficiently! It's much easier to manage your resources when inexperienced if those resources are relatively sparse. As such, I'm in favor of having standard gold and standard resources.

For nation picks, I think Lavaere's idea of having teams alternate picks is probably good. The vets will organize anyway, but it'll help the Noob team to try to decide how to cover the bases of what we can manage to do before the game starts, so that we end up actually having top picks in the first place.

Dropping magic site frequency is probably a good idea for the same reason as the gold/resources thing above, except that it's far easier to waste gems than gold.

Starting with more than one province is an interesting possibility. I'm not sure what the long-term effects of that would be except that they'd make nations with relatively expensive cap-only options have better starts with the initial gold boost that would fade away.

Regardless of the options, they all really need to be posted BEFORE any nation selections are made. We had some issues with that before.