[rdonj]

Oops. By southwester I meant southeastern. Sorry, my fault for posting when not fully awake. It's just those 12 provinces seperated from the entirety of all other land provinces. If you are a land nation and you're stuck there, there's a pretty good chance you'll not accomplish anything the entire game. Especially if you have no native water or air access.

Connecting ireland with scotland is less necessary, as there's at least a significant amount of land there. By the time you've more or less conquered ireland getting to england/scotland should not be nearly the problem it would be in the southeast.

Also yes, in multiplayer people tend to prefer all starts to be more or less equal with say 4-6 provinces around each cap and at least 3 provinces between each player's capitols. The next most important thing players care about is relative availability of gold. In this map there's an awful lot of mountainous terrain up north in scotland and descending into england. You might want to compensate the players that end up there by increasing the population in some of those regions to keep the gold level more or less balanced.