Preponderance - Big Team Game! [1-2 subs needed!]

[DrPraetorious]

I disagree with bidding points for pretenders - the actual application would work very poorly. We did test runs on this a while back and it was a headache mutiplied by a disaster.

I'd be fine with bidding something else - especially something that could be modded using map commands.

Suggestion:
Everyone has 500 pts to bid, you bid independently on two lists of nations, but you draw from the same 500 pts for each list and both partners of the team get the same starting stuff.

For each pt you don't spend, you start with 1 gold.
For every *full* 200 pts you don't bid, you start with 1 months gem income from your capital.
If you have more than 200 unbid points, for every *full* 100 pts bid past that, you start with +50% to your starting army.

If your list is exhausted without you winning a bid on any nation, you pay 0 points for a random nation among those left over.

Since a team game needs fixed start locations anyway, this could be handled with map commands and wouldn't require any communication back and forth with the players.

It would also have a more desirable effect, to my mind - weaker nations would get to start with gems and armies to jumpstart their defense, rather than weakening stronger nations (which makes early expansion harder and slows the entire game down.)

Thoughts?