- Click image to enlarge.
I believe I've hit everyone's concerns with the new version. Okinawa has been readded to the map, although it's true geographic position is a couple hundred miles south of Kyushu, I thought it was best to add it there to put in the 7th bonus region back on the map. In that area I've straightened the line showing the connections. I'm not necessarily liking the look, curved lines might have to return there, but I'll have to be sure they are subtle and connect at the same point so it looks like you can hope from one territory to the next, to the next, etc. This adds 2 territories to the total, so I eliminated Mie and merged it with Osaka. Osaka now also connects to Aichi so the southern third of the map isn't bottle necked at Fukui.
Bonuses:
2 - Kyushu - 4 territories, 2 borders
2 - Shikoku - 3 territories, 2 borders
2 - Kanto - 4 territories, 2 borders
3 - Chugoku - 6 territories, 3 borders
3 - Hokkaido - 5 territories, 2 borders
4 - Hokuriku - 5 territories, 4 borders
4 - Tohoku - 6 territories, 3 borders
Hmmmmm....... A couple bonuses seem to be off by an army up or down, since I changed a couple territories, added and subtracted, my thoughts might be: Hokkaido may have to goto 2, Tohoku should drop to 3, but I keep looking at it and it looks really tough to gain control of, so I'm not sure there. Chugoku seems right now now that it's down to 6 territories. When I guess at the bonus values I weight border territories higher than territory total, I put Kanto at 2 because I took out the extra border. Hold the 2 borders and reinforce just those 2, in most cases you're going to get 5 armies so you have to, in theory, leave one border a little weaker which allows for another player a chance to break that bonus. It makes sense in my mind, but I do need some sleep.
Oh I did raise the minimap up and shrunk the title for a better fit in the top corner. I readded the Kanji title. (It translates: Japan) I really would like to put that on the map somewhere as a graphical accent, but the current version is very boxy, and at some point I'd like a calligraphy-looking version and see how that works.
I haven't changed the mountains, yet, but I can change the mountains by either coloring the bonus regions in a similar way oaktown has in his version, or color them brown, gray, or a little bit of both and vary the shapes so they aren't so uniform. I can do that in more detail as once the placement is pretty much set.