Here's my very first cut at a new board. Probably errors all through it, but I'll never find them without help. Want to take a look? Test game at:

http://www.wargear.net/games/join/613063

Looks quite crisp graphics-wise GJ.

I see the game has filled up. I'd be up for trying another.

Give us a couple of days to smoke out the more obvious errors, and I'll start another one.

2nd dev game started: http://www.wargear.net/games/join/614055

Third test game: http://www.wargear.net/games/join/617000

Any further comments? I got two notes that abandonment was a bad idea on large boards. What are other people's opinions on this issue? I was thinking it makes for a bit more dynamic game, allowing greater concentration of forces after a few initial turns, but I could certainly be talked out of this notion.

I'd like more descriptive names. Continent bonus "BA" could just as well be called "Canada". 

As for abandonment, it looks like it works on European War, at least the board is a fairly popular one. 

My feelings on large boards that have abandon on - as a person who tries to view history to make informed decisions, it is very cumbersome to do so when many orders are spent by players traipsing through empty territories. With small maps, this is manageable. With large maps, it tries the patience and makes game less enjoyable. At the end of the day, we play these game based on enjoyment. If the decision is to keep abandon on, then I would respectfully recommend an order limit be imposed.

If I were you, and I wanted abandon, I would probably create two scenarios - one with abandon & one with out.

I haven't played colonies yet, but there are ways to make abandon work on big maps.  It depends on the map, but some ideas...

Abandon makes it easy for players to take a big army and eliminate a lot of spread out units.  It can make it hard to hold territories, and easy to eliminate people.  

You could make dice 5 sided.  This reduces the attack advantage to almost nothing.  Or even 4-sided dice, which gives defense a slight advantage.  

You could give more bonus for holding territory, so players are less likely to leave them so empty - make the per territory bonus 2 instead of 3.  Or you could add hordes bonuses, or a hordes factory bonus.  (hordes could also not require neighbors outside of their continent.)

As Thingol suggested - you could make a max # of attacks.

You could make a win condition to hold a certain # of territories (1/2?)

IMO, Abandon ON works for very few maps.  For all of the reasons listed above, plus:

If you create scenarios where there is an advantage to leaving an army, when traipsing through the map with a large stack it is very cumbersome to leave 1 army.  There's no button for it, and inevitably mis-clicks start to happen. I have two maps that use it, but they are specialty maps that are very un-Risklike. Go-Geared has a movement cap of two!  Battle of Waterlo has abandon ON, a territory cap of eight, and a max move count of six and I think it's still a bit cumbersome to play (mind you, that's the designer speaking). Honestly, I've all but given up on designing boards that use Abandon ON.  Back in the day, I was hoping that some day Tom might figure out how to incorporate Unit Range Limits into the Designer. Abandon on makes much more sense when specific armies in the territory have a restricted range.  I took a quick look at the Colonies map and I have a hard time imagining that Abandon ON would make for fun game-play.

Yeah, OK... Starting to see the problems. (my limited experience with abandonment on large boards may have been what led me to think this was a good idea in the first place) Let me think on it. Max # of attacks may be best, if I decide to keep abandon on. Considering reducing  dice sides as well. Any thoughts on what a good number of attacks might be for a board this size?

And I probably will fix the territory & continent names eventually, just haven't gotten to it yet. Also, I'll have to look a bunch of them up, and haven't really had time.

>and haven't really had time.

Ah, the mapmaker's lament.

Genghis Jhon wrote:

Yeah, OK... Starting to see the problems. (my limited experience with abandonment on large boards may have been what led me to think this was a good idea in the first place) Let me think on it. Max # of attacks may be best, if I decide to keep abandon on. Considering reducing  dice sides as well. Any thoughts on what a good number of attacks might be for a board this size?

I'd say 50 attacks would be a good number.

But doesn't "T" count as one attack?

"T" does indeed count as one attack.

Started a new test game http://www.wargear.net/games/join/618570, with limit of 10 attacks & 5 sided dice.

I fixed one more placement error, and am now working on actually getting all the territory and continent names correct.

All Territory and Continent names now fixed

Fortifies seemed low to me, so I've upped it to 3. Any further comments, or should I just go ahead and submit it?