Sorry, the post below went in the wrong forum. Here it is, in the correct thread:
Dawn of the Enlightenment is now MUCH closer to final form. I will skip noting purely cosmetic stuff (name changes, border adjustments which don’t change adjacency relationships) and just go through the material changes. Here are the changes in no particular order—hopefully I haven’t forgotten anything:
• All of the Oceanic areas have had their High Seas provinces reduced from 7 to 6. I want to make interaction a little more likely, though I believe that will already be the case for games which are in the end stages, as the large Powers may well have the force to spare for long range naval adventures.
• The East Pacific and West Pacific Oceanic areas have been changed to North Pacific and South Pacific, in order to aid in movement around the globe in the south, and make the north more important for being a route toward where most of the dots are.
• Tonga (Tongatapu) and Fiji (Viseisei) are added in the Pacific, along with some adjacent sea provinces, to make it play there more relevant.
• Iquitos was removed, so Peru borders both Amazonas and Orinoco.
• Missouri and Assiniboine have been combined.
• The dot in the Palatinate has been removed. I thought there were just too many neutral dots in Germany.
• The island of Ireland was added. Scotland is now a neutral dot. England now has fleets in London, Bristol and Dublin.
• Some provinces in northern and central Africa were rearranged and combined, since there were a few non SC provinces that didn’t really serve a purpose.
• A dot was added in Berbera, along with the addition of the adjacent Gulf of Aden sea province, to improve Oman’s position.
• The Netherlands appeared to be too powerful in the East Indies. I removed the dot in Makassar and relocated it to Elmina in West Africa. This should also make the rather strong position of Portugal around the South Atlantic a little less secure.
• To address perceived weakness of the Asian Powers, I gave each of Persia, India, Oman and China a 4th dot, in Rey, Aurangabad, Salalah and Kaifeng, respectively.
Please let me have your thoughts. The variant homepage can be found at
https://davidecohen.wixsite.com/diplomiscellany . You can email me at zendip18AToptonlineDOTnet with questions, comments, or if you need a full size copy of the map.