Maps and Provinces

[gollum]

My suggestion would be to convert them into coastal/inland major Provinces in whichever area you think they are needed (ie is badly represented or will support more factions in the future).

Regarding income balancing - i suggest multiple hubs of good income to be present within all theaters - and these hubs to be surrounded by provinces of relatively low income. I further suggest that even the lowest income provinces to not be completely worthless (as it hampers the AI factions).

Generally speaking i would suggest a small variation of income between fertile/rich and not-so-fertile/not-so-rich provinces. That is for example say; poor apprx 200 flrns on average, medium apprx 300 flrns on average and rich close to 400 flrns on average. The vanilla differences are a big plus for the human player that quickly occupies the rich provinces at the beginning and since the AI factions seem to view them all as equally important (the AI will fight for rich and poor provinces the same sometimes) they end up in great disadvantage. Some variation is good to create competition in a local level - a lot of variation (ie poor 100 flrns and rich 600 plus flrns as in vanilla) is quite bad for AI progress and so challenge imho.

There is a post of suggestions that i wrote in reply to Garnier regarding king influence in relation to AI faction progress and AI personality - its quite relevant for the PoM and i believe it can be helpful - if you wish me to, i can copy paste that post here too.