[Chazar]

• Cities as farmlands: I think that cities should be highly valuable focal places, therefore making them into large farmlands seemed logical. Furthermore I think that it is good to discourage chosing a lot of sloth and a low-admin castle. However, maybe it would be a good solution just to add a known resource-bonus site like an iron-mine to each city - if other people think so as well.
  
  Previously I had cities as their own provinces, but later on I decided against, as it would make the map bigger and even more inaccessible. It also seemed illogical to me that a player could fortify both the city and its sourroundings. Similar to Arralen's proposal, I already tried to shift the province boundaries somewhat, so that cities and their surrounding provinces became identical. BTW, this is in the end the reason why the flags are still placed within the cities...
  
  I also thought about outfitting each city with a thematic "fortified city"-fortress, but then opted against it as it would discourage choosing such a fortress type even more. The resource issue and the benefits for AI are good points. What do other people think?
  
  
• Mapsize: I deliberately choose a big map size. The main reason was that Dom2 breaks the picture up into tiles. These tiles are displayed overlapping, producing a notable glitch. The higher the resolution, the lesser the glitch. I also think that smaller icons for fortess and temepls are quite nice, since they do not obstruct the map view anymore but are still noticeable. On the other hand, I admit that it is annoying not to view the whole map at once, but only a small portion is hidden at minimum zoom. I do not see that this is a really big problm - while resampling the map means a lot of work, especially replacing all province dots (Due to inexperience, I merged all layers before placing the white dots. Placing them again means doing the .map file again from scratch, which is a thing that I do not want to do.) Good point about the default zoom though!