I don't know if other designers come up against this a lot or if there's a workaround, but I find myself having to deal with the problem quite often.

When a board with a high territory count has a high unit/territory per diem bonus, the first player ends up with an advantage. Assigning 1st round specific bonuses by seat helps a little, but in many cases only serves to push the problem out to turn 2. As far as I can tell, most designers either deal with it with small unit/territory ratios (Antastic) or by disabling the feature entirely (Battle of Bladensburg). Suffice it to say, small unit/territory ratios are not popular with players, and unless a board has some serious factory generation going on, disabling the bonus feature is out of the question. Here's the only solution I can think of.

Again, I don't know how easy this is to implement, but it seems like it might not be that invasive. It might look something like this..

"Do NOT count the first territories held"

Come to think of it, though it's not the same thing, it might address the some of the issues associated with the ubiquitously popular Token Territories request.

I can see where that would be useful

Of course, we come up with these 'idea' in the course of trying to accomplish a design objective. This is pseudo-related in that it might also satisfy some of those Token Territory objectives.

When a design includes off-board territories it's all but impossible to have a player eliminated when they are eliminated on the map. (short of surrendering and waiting for everyone to accept the surrender, which doesn't work half the time because players refuse or don't know how to accept the surrender. The easy solution that came to my mind was to make every territory on the map a capital. Imagine my surprise when I found that you can't create unallocated capitals.

So.. we have two alternative feature requests if Token Territories is not an option..

Allow for unallocated capitals.

Do not count the first x units held

They are both functionally quite different, but they both alleviate the lack of Token Territories to some degree.

..Just spitballing

Having capitals that are randomly allocated would be a huge win for me. This new suggestion is nice, but not as critical from my perspective.

Ozyman wrote:Having capitals that are randomly allocated would be a huge win for me. This new suggestion is nice, but not as critical from my perspective.

Agree. Having to use smaller bonus ratios to compensate for large territory counts is more of an annoyance than anything. It just seemed to me that it might be easier to code.

Randomly allocated capitals, on the other hand, would be a game changer. I was actually surprised when I went to use it and it wasn't there.

Ozyman wrote:Having capitals that are randomly allocated would be a huge win for me.

Ya, this kills many a good map idea.