At the risk of throwing Tom into an apoplectic fit, which I would do by simply saying good morning without buying him coffee and bacon, the revised map that he's linked up adds some new territories, and will create some interesting new play dynamics in *some* areas. And while it pays some heed to the problems with the seas spaces (the northern hemisphere looks entirely more playable now), it absolutely fails to address the the fact that South America, remains an impenetrable fortresses, where stalemate lines can be easily erected around the continents. This dos not lead to more diplomacy, it leads to more games being forced to end faster. Players that resort to stalemate lines have done so because diplomacy has failed, and players that do so in the mid game are either lazy, bad, and/or apathetic. None of those attributes are good for Diplomacy either. And while this may be Tom's intention because his games play using voting rules to determine victory, it does not suit the play here where we use supply center totals.
The revision is not a total loss though. I want to say again that the work in the in the northern hemisphere is very good, and adds game dynamics whether you implement an "icebreaker" rule or join open the spaces for year round travel. And the land bridges to Baffin Island And Greeland add playability and fun to the map. I'm not sure what the purpose of adding Novaya Zemlya to the maps was, because on one hand it addresses the same problems that are ignored in South America (while Africa has been subtlety addressed), but since those issues seem to be anathema to the map designer, I'm confused. I want to say, "great work!" but I have a feeling that any benefit that I see from it was unintentional. I would also note that the recoloring of the nations is much more graphically attractive, and removes the overabundance of pink shades on the map we presently use, while also removing the dreaded Amazon-Empire/Turkey clash nightmare.
So, great work in the north, and a good start in Africa but in the southern hemisphere that concept is abandoned. Yes an Antarctic sea space is added, but it's draw such to only further insulate the southern continents, which compounds rather than corrects the problems. Why is the Arctic Ocean divided into three spaces, and the Antarctic is drawn as one? That's just bizarrely inconsistent. Another map clogging problem compounded is the one at Galapagos Islands, which is left drawn as a sea territory, but functions as a land territory, meaning that no convoys can pass through. This is bad enough in itself, but the new map now does the same thing with Cape Verde Islands, and adds the new occurrence of this at Zanzibar to the list of bugs. I like the use of all three spaces as supply centers, and as islands, but giving the land mass and a sea space zone of control only contributes to the clusterfork.
I do like the redraw of the Chile Basin border allowing Lima access to it, and shifting it's landfall point to meet with Valparaiso. Unfortunately the redraw just made Pitcairn Island even more of a fortress by dropping Chile Basin as an adjacent space, cutting the number of such spaces from five to four. Overall in South America, the added seas spaces are a bone thrown to a starving dog. South America needs more non supply center coastal spaces, like the ones that were added in Africa.
So overall it's a start, but incomplete, and in my opinion unnecessarily so. Clearly a lot of work went into the effort, but why play test something now when it clearly leaves a great number of the know issues on the map? I still think that the real answer to this congestion on global maps is to redfine who we look at ocean spaces, and to give proper respect to the oceans as playable territories. Oceans comprise a large majority of the earth's surface. They cannot be tamed, owned, or predicted. This very fact only helps to justify the use of a new territory type like Mr. Cohen's "high seas" rule for Ocean spaces. I would have preferred to see that explored rather than dismissed out of hand. That concept has been tried, and it has worked. It would work again here, and it would add an infinite number of diplomatic possibilities, including many good reasons to keep smaller nations alive,simply because any nation with a fleet in the game game make themselves extremely useful in the stackable high seas.