the Gold Lion (running)

[Hellboy]

Dragonlord said:
Red candle ?! This was frigging turn 5 !

He's talking about your domain going positive, which will show up as red candle on Lanka's map. This is certainly possible by turn 5. (and actually it's a black candle w/ a red tip)

I had just given my first order to capture my first province on turn 4 ! (Mostly cause I was scared of getting beat by indies and kept failing to buy mercs, even though I offered em twice their asking price.... and I staled for a turn).

For your next game you should figure out how to take your first indy no later than turn 2. (I know some people do it on turn 1 - not sure if that's a good idea or not)

Point is there *was* no trail to follow back, ...

Again, a single candle could screw you.

... it was 3 hops due north of me. Way too close.

agreed (see below)

Its not like he ran into my dominion candles either cause I noticed that the turn he showed up I was even down to zero dominion in my home town, and 1 candle in 2 neighboring provinces.

I think it's more complicated than that. For one thing dominion candles come and go pretty frequently in the first few turns.

Anyways, I am considering starting (hosting) a new MP game that hopefully addresses this by having 12-15 provinces allocated to each player (so no more than 10 players on a 130 province map). That should allow for more refined strategies to also get a shot...
Perhaps the Cradle of Dominion map, I like a well designed map which also graphically looks nicer than the stuff the random generator makes.

Sounds good (let me know, I'll likely want to join in!). However, you're actually describing a very dense map - the map for this game had 17.6 provinces per player, at the outset (230 provinces w/ 13 players). So, you might want to consider upping the provinces per player a good bit more.

I suspect that it is actually rather difficult to write the code for a good map setup, that is maximally fair to all players. I noticed that DrPraetorious has hosted a couple of games where he used a script to generate fair starting positions. I don't know if he's considered making that publicly available, or not.