(It's pending public, give it some time to be accepted before saying it's not there. For now, a screenshot will have to do: http://imgur.com/x4jJf.png)

A new map, just made it public. What do you think about it? I'm not sure if Ulster (north) is balanced well enough. It was 5/3/2 (north/south/all), but then it was overpowered, south (and thus +5) was too easy to get in one turn.

Also, what do you think about round bonus links? (I hope Randy won't decline map outright because of this.)


For curious ones, map was made by loading blank Ireland map from Wikipedia to Inkscape, converting it to paths using built-in function, then cleaned up, converted to black, thick outline (http://imgur.com/Udhls.png), then autotraced as centerlines using http://www.roitsystems.com/cgi-bin/autotrace/tracer.pl. Then I filled the resulting outlines using Inkscape's built-in fill tool and cleaned it up manually all again. In other words, magic.

Looks nice and pretty balanced.
Only thing I could think of are blue and yellow bonus values compared to both red ones. First ones have both 6 territories with 3 territoires to defend. Dark red has one border territory more, while red has to defend all 6 territoires and still get only 6. I don't know, maybe this +2 bonus for both red (if I guess correctly) will balance the diffrence. Hard to tell without playing.
Light green also seems "weak" compared to first mentioned pair.

Other thing - round bonus links? (gasp) This is madness!

Light green was nerfed a lot (partially because it's possible to take in one turn once you have dark green), and there's no starting place in it (there are five: green, blue, dark green and both reds). You may have a point about those borders, but geography sort of doesn't allow me to change them too much. Maybe I could tweak them a bit here and there and modify some connections, but I'd prefer if the map was played a few more times first ;)

Also, these are Ulster (green), Connacht (yellow), Munster (blue) and Leinster (red). Let's use those names :P