Even then, I doubt they'll come into play much, especially given the small size of the potential bonus.
Here's the thing, if you're going to have starting neutrals, then taking one kinda needs to have an immediate benefit, otherwise only the crap players will bother. By immediate benefit I mean that the terit itself needs to be a bonus, like the cities in 1914 Europe, or Wellington and Napoleon in Waterloo, etc. And even then, the neutrals will often sit for most (if not all) of the game. I look at a map like Wales, and while I congratulate MrB for coming up with one of the more interesting maps to hit live play in the last six months, I fear that too many games will see the neutral 2's just sitting there, lonely, as the action passes them by.
I was 100% okay with the 5.7% drop chance with one city neutral and two coded as starting positions (and I suppose, if it works like that, two challenges could be similarly coded). Mitigating 1v1 drops is a good and worthy effort, one that I heartily approve of (and I don't even play that many 1v1s), but having 3 cities start neutral (2 of them in out-of-the-way spots that will rarely if ever come into play) seems a bit much for me.
I suppose we should thank wong, as he seems to have ignited a new, more rigorous approach to calculating bonus drop odds that had been somewhat ad-hoc in the past. But I don't want to see this map sacrificed on the altar of fairness for a game setting that is inherently unfair.
And of course, I'm sure everyone will remind me that I said all this when I get back to hectoring cairns about drop bonus percentages in Trafalgar.
