Edited map.
...And with that, I've created a map with 10 land and 2 water starting points. I had *no idea* what I was putting myself in for when I volunteered for this. --Still, it was fun, even if it did take quite a long time to work out. ; )
Before you look at the map, I'd like to add a caution: creating a perfectly fair map was absolutely impossible, of course. I did the best I could though!
Here are the starting provinces I selected: 76 (Oceania), 78 (R'lyeh), 18, 38, 37, 103, 99, 207, 172, 196, 148, 131. (The land provinces are listed here in a roughly counter-clockwise manner, starting from the lower left corner, and will be randomly assigned to the players once the game starts.)
Now, most of the rest of this post discusses the reasons why I chose the ones I did, plus a few minor changes I made to the map. Feel free to stop now if that doesn't interest you.
When I selected the starting water provinces, I found that one--76--was an easy choice. For the second, though, I had a number of choices, none of which were ideal. Whichever choice I made gave a totally unfair advantage to one water nation or another. I finally settled on 78 for R'lyeh, so that Oceania has at least a half-chance to gain some provinces that R'lyeh would otherwise get by default. Oceania needs resources though, and 78 has only two water neighbours, so Oceania couldn't start there; R'lyeh gets it.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's the best I could come up with. ; )
For the land starts, I tried to pick provinces that a) had only 4 or 5 neighbours, no more or less; b) had at least 2 forest, mountain, or border mountain neighbours; and c) were at least 5 provinces from the nearest player (not including water players). Now. This was *damned hard*, and eventually I realized I could only do it fairly by changing the properties of certain provinces:
--For start 37, provinces 37, 41, and 54 are no longer Waste, 41 becomes a Border Mountain, and 25 becomes a Forest.
--For start 38, provinces 38 and 39 are no longer Waste.
--For start 103, province 93 becomes a Forest as well as Farm, and 94 becomes a Border Mountain.
Again, these starts aren't perfect, but they're the best I could come up with. And they'll be one *helluva* lot better than completely random starts! ; )
--That having been said, we still have some time before the game begins. If you have any suggestions you think would be better, please let me know.
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