[Septimius Severus]

Oh, fine. Glad to here this.
Since I'm the first time in your games, I have some questions under way.

Thats fine ano, let me answer your questions:

1. Are the starts in each team random or predefined? Can we choose which nation starts where?

On the larger scene, which team starts where (blue, green, yellow, etc) will be determined by a random die roll.

Within each team (which is I think your question), the captain has discretion as to which of his teams nations will be placed in their slots. By default (unless the captain specifies otherwise) whatever nations are played by the noobs, will be placed in the two rearward positions at the borders of the map. So if you want certain nations in the forward positions, assign them to yourself or your leuitenant. This is done so that the most experienced players are facing the greatest danger. After you decide which nations each team member will have, if you decide you want a noob upfront instead, playing whatever nation, you can indicate that to me in your team assignment PM.

2. I didn't quite understand this rule:

Does it mean that if you beat PD of a castle with a VP this counts as a taken VP? Seems a bit strange. Big (and even not big) teleporting guys can easily decide this game.

No, whoever holds the castle (if one is present) in a given VP location is said to control the VP location. Beating the province PD and any patrolling forces itself does not get you control. This is the way the game handles who owns the VP when two players are vying for the same province.

3. If you are an admin of a forum, you have an access to all topics, don't you? Or is there a way to protect our part with a password or something. I don't mean to distrust you, I just don't like security holes and want to be aware of them

That is a natural concern, especially if I end up having to play in the game, which it looks like I might. While I have access, I never peep at any other teams forum if I am in the game. I can also remove my own permissions for your team's forums and if I had a co-admin, that person could remove my permissions without me being able to change them back. I'll check to see if there's a way to let you set a password that I wouldn't have access to, but I don't know. Its a trust thing really with any admin in a game.

4. Can we download and test the map?

I will provide a vanilla version of the .map file for testing purposes. However, this will not contain the starting locations since that won't be determined and known until the game actually starts.

If you want to test out a certain possible location, I can provide you with the #specstarts for that particular location which you can insert into the .map file or you can add the specstarts yourself using the province numbers in the doc file in the opening post.

Thanks in advance! Also, thanks for organization and everything. Being an organizer myself, I understand how much work you put into this.

Thanks, it has been quite a challenge, running through each nation, examining all the units of every nation, identifying common themes, looking at native gem incomes, examining every single pretender. Wheh!

Note: For those who might be interested. I had two choices when it came to deciding secondary paths for each team in this game. One was using a given paths Greatest Contributory Path (GCP I call it). For example, the path that occurs most frequently in the entire blood spell list with blood magic is Astral. The other was using the same method I chose for the main path of each team, i.e. the path most common to all or most the team's nations and having the same general theme. This included factors such as native gem income, native mage access to that path, etc. I chose the later to avoid any conflicts with the main paths of each team, and it happened to work out fairly well.