The overall trend with these changes and the ones you already made in the Med are to limit stalemates.

Well, I'd say the East-West confrontation we've seen in the present game presents something of an anomaly. Yet I indeed am aiming for more fluid play. The most important step here was to reduce the victory criterion to 15. The second-most important one the reworking of the Central Med.

It also slows thrusts to some degree, which is fine and in keeping with the game.

Well, my aim is to keep the map very integrated. I want to keep players even more on their toes.

Specifically, all of the ones that Nigs mentioned - Franconia and the Prussias - seem good to me. Making Turkey non-contiguous influences it to move east and west instead of to the Balkans - is this what you want?

Don't think that A Damascus was going to march straight into the Balkans in the old versions either. But it could provide backup to A Belgrade and hence that very possibility somewhat diminished the attractiveness of a South-Eastern thrust by Austria.

A Damascus can really turn into any direction:

- Karaman gives you a play for Candia and some protection against first-year attacks vs. Constantinople.

- Armenia also allows one to cover Constantinople, covers a "soft spot" and presents a possible play for the Crimea or Voronezh.

- Azerbaijan is somewhat similar to an Armenian opening, but probably not much of an opening move.

- Persia is obviously the "grow now" option.

- Egypt presents a play for Tunis. More attractive now that F Sevilla is somewhat less of an immediate factor.

I'm liking the added incentives for moves to Egypt and Armenia.

With regard to changes in Russia, I would consider splitting Novgorod to facilitate an attack on Sweden...

That one of the ideas I'm looking at. Carving out a norther buffer out of Novgorod, while also extending Moscow to the northern shore.

and I would also break up NRG. The possibility of NRG C Sco - Nov amounts to a sort of long-range blitzkrieg unseen anywhere else on the map. (My issue is more about consistency than historical accuracy.)

Ah, until I reached v2.5, NRG indeed didn't border Novgorod. Here's the 2.0 map (which is basically where I had left things off in 2004, the new work in 2009 began with v2.1 which was already an entirely different beast):



Yet this type of map arrangement created kinda a D-W-R string rather than a genuine "Arctic triangle". I wanted Denmark (and indeed England, then an "Arctic quadrangle" to be able to attack Russia (and vice versa). Makes for better gameplay and is also historically justified.

Indeed, only up there can one power "leapfrog" two basically closer powers to attack the another. I like that a lot!

But there's another reason why I'm showing you this mothballed old map version. It shows you an arrangement of Poland's buffer provinces in the East (save for Polotsk, which I introduced with v2.1) I'm now once again considering. Moscow is, as you can see, shielded by the Smolensk buffer (which corresponds to the territory Poland lost to Russia later in the 17th century)).

Cheers,

Charles