ed: ninja'd

[@WrongEndoftheRainbow] How much do you enjoy naval empires?

Your map encourages island- or continent-grabbing, which isolates players until they develop sail and completely dispenses with the need for land travel once they do. Once you have the technology (and if you go the Polynesian route you will get it [i]fast[/i]), oceans are a connecting factor, not a barrier. To some extent this is also a problem with my map, but maybe not quite so bad. There's a mix of land separating oceans and oceans separating land.

Also remember that not all overland trips are possible, never mind easy. Mountains, forests, deserts, ice fields and enemy territory are all obstacles that have to be mastered (and, in our case, can be manipulated!). You could try doing the same thing with water civs on an 80% water map, by some divine shenanigans, but it's much harder. Also, aquatic civs like mermaids will [url=https://youtu.be/yHNfvJc99YY?t=107]enjoy tactical supremacy[/url].

People tend to play land civs, too (even when there's room for both), so land connections give us some lovely border disputes and cultural exchange. On a water map your borders are the beach and then how far you can get before you see how leaky your boat is. There should be island princedoms, obviously, but maybe not an entire planet of them (unless you guys want one!)

Some things to put to vote, though:

-Should continents be larger and rounder? This will encourage overland travel a la the Silk Road and Saharan trade networks

-Should some landmasses be inaccessible to one another without sea travel? This could let us have fun with old-world new-world dynamics with two or three continents taking completely different cultural paths (until sail). Enough land in between would do this too, though (Mediterranean vs. sub-Sahara, Japan vs. Britain, see large continents).