I think SA needs some love. Right now it's the worst bonus on the map:

1. Brazil allows invaders from Africa to attack any other land, taking whole SA in 2 turns
2. the +4 armies is at least 1 too small, considering SA has 8 provinces (australia has +4/8 provs too, but it has much better position IMO)
3. player starting in SA is forced to attack other continents very soon, meaning he's very likely to run into player who has better resources (especially in NA/Africa)

How to fix it:
1 (better, more time-consuming) - split brasil into 3/4 parts and argentina into 2 then make 2 bonuses out of SA
or
2 (worse, fast) - simply increase the bonus to 5/6 so players in SA can have better chance and SA itself becomes more attractive.

Hm, I was planning to write about it too.

Right now, the SA
1. is awful to start in (takes ages to take),
2. easy to take later (the way Xalard described).

My solution to #1 is, however, merging some of the smaller countries together - for example Colombia+Peru and Bolivia+Paraguay, or Peru+Bolivia. Raising the bonus wouldn't hurt either.

IMO the best solution to #2 would be not to split Brazil and Argentina, but just make then not connected (screw geography, we're going for fun here; this would also fit with merging Paraguay+Uruguay as I said in #1). This way SA would be able to survive one more turn.

When creating games you can customize your own bonus values and I have seen people up South America to a value of 5 because they too felt it was a bit undervalued. This doesn't address any layout issues for the territories but serves as a good solution for just the value issue. I think in general any region with a lot of territories will in general be a worse starting spot simply because it takes longer to take before starting to receive the benefit.

Yes, I can customize that and whenever I host a game-I do. But I feel balance flaws should be fixed globally. Giving players tools to fix them themselves in each game is not enough.
And the issue with SA is not only the amount of territories as said in the first post.

I think it's good to have less desirable and more desirable territories on a map. With manual picks, it gives clear advantages to certain picks and early/mid/late game startegies. A more "balanced" map might make sense for auto-picks, to prevent luck from basically deciding the game. Some players like auto-picks, 75% luck and lots of random wastlands. For two equally good players I think that puts too much of the outcome in the hands of lady luck.

There is really only one thing on the map that I think is too unbalanced and that's the starting spot in Scandanavia. It should be moved to any of the other starting spots so you can't get a bonus anywhere on the map on the 1st turn (having an immediate +8 when your opponant is at +5 is a huge edge). Which is why 90% of the top players pick Scan as their 1st choice (making manual picks a little too predicable as well). Changing it would make Scan comparable to CA or India. Other than that I think the map is excellent.

Alternatively, you can switch the European starting spot to Germany, or the West Russian one to Murmansk. That way, even if Scandinavia is a possible turn one grab, it's very risky being so easily trapped.

i agree

I agree 100% with Duke and Waya. Also, this is why I feel random warlords distribution is vastly superior to the regular warlords distribution...and you get games with more variance this way, as starting spot can make a huge difference on what you rank territories at.