The problem is that just like in Doomsday4, the map is STILL too large for such a low number of people.
Sure, there's 227 land provinces, but there's also 47 sea provinces. That leads to 27,4 provinces per player in a perfect world, which still is quite a bit too much, especially in a high gold/resource game.
But instead of a perfect situation we got the same we got in the earlier game. One or two people getting (near-)perfect starts with lots and lots of indies around 'em rather than other players while most others were clumped together like nobody's business, leading to either quite early wars or stunted growth.
In my opinion, having seen this happen with even less people and now 10, this map would need like twice the people to work with the settings we're running with. 300% everything is a bit excessive when there's a chance that someone'll get like 50+ provinces from INDIES alone. Should've had a 150 province map at most.