Nothing could frame thy fearful symmetry

First pass with towns, city colour assignments and terrain:

(Sorry, image lost)

Notes:

• I ultimately added another city in Timisoara (and moved it closer to where Resita really is) purely for gut-feel balance reasons
• I’ll price the hexes adjacent to Belgrade higher as foreign links
• I knocked off two half-hexes from the northern border in order to help it fit on the publisher’s paper (should have little to no game-effect)
• Most colours are assigned simply on census population reports. This Bucharest and Belgrade got royal purple etc
• Despite the note below I didn’t group the colours in the south east. I’m hoping that the terrain pricing, long gap to Bucharest and general absence of towns will sifficiently weaken that area due to production difficulties
• The rest of the cities, predictably, got a fairly normal distribution
• Yeah, there are only 11 cities, not the normal 12. This is deliberate
• I may yet lose 2 or 3 towns. Or not.
• I won’t allow urbanisation of towns adjacent to cities (only two cases this time)
• The urbanisation pattern for the centre of the map is going to be hugely significant. This is where the map and each game will make or break, but there are just enough towns off in the boonies to make defensive urbanisation viable. Hopefully I’ve helped move the town focus a little further west due to colour choices
• I don’t think I’m going to bother with rivers. Just hills and mountains
• This is starting to feel less like a 3 player map than like a 4 player map that plays well with 3
• For the obvious reasons I won’t be posting the exact rules here, but I will be discussing the rules development and implications.
• Blog name changed from Age of Steam: Rat Race (name relevant to desired mechanisms) to AoS:Romania (obvious reasons)