Firstly...

[quote]What do you guys think? Geography? Or plain? There's pros and cons to both, I guess.[/quote]

With geography. It just makes things easier for me as a player. I'd love a climate map, too, actually.

[quote]So what I'm asking is, should the first evolution phase end at:[/quote]

IMO? I love, love, [i]love[/i] the Greco-Roman eras, and also the world even before then. Note that while I say that I'm talking about Europe and the Middle East as a whole. So many cool weapons and nations come from that time period. You don't get the falcata in the medieval era, nor some of the weird looking polearms. You also have a variety of different government systems cropping up: theocracies, republics, monarchies, tribes, dictatorships... It's a really, really interesting period, and it gets played way less than the medieval one. Plus, chariots and such are still a thing. And did I mention cool weapons [i]like the falcata?[/i]

With that said, I wouldn't mind the first era ending in the Napoleonic era or the Age of Exploration instead. Actually, the Age of Exploration is a perfect example of a good time period for an NRP: gunpowder still hasn't dominated warfare, so it's perfectly common to see crossbows and even bows still in use. Cool formations like the Spanish [i]Tercio[/i] are still a thing - a mixed unit of pike and shot - so you can have a nation that's focused around its old methods of war with veteran pikemen actually standing up against (or fighting alongside) a nation that's producing a bunch of greenhorns with muskets. Cool era.

EDIT: Again, dunno if I'll be joining this quite yet, but that's my thought.