Some random afterthoughts:
I think our game settings have worked very well overall. IMHO getting only strong veteran players with no newbies made the game much more enjoyable (and fair, since no veteran player could quickly roll over a newbie that happened to be next to him, as always happen in mixed newbie/veteran games, which would throw the balance out of the window)
I was also glad to see endgame not determined by who has casted one of the 3 game-winning globals but instead by strength of arms and magic on the battlefields.
Ok, since we are all bit*hing about our nations - let me bi*ch about Pythium a bit...
So about my nation - I had very rocky start in this game (not related to my actions). In fact in all my years of playing MP Dom2/3 that probably was the worst starting location.
If you look at our map, you'll see that Pythium capital has just 3 neighbors. All of these 3 provinces are totally disconnected from each other(!), plus one of them is deadend(!!), and another is 5 province long narrow tunnel leading into Vans territory(!!!), and was stuffed with tough indeps.
All that made my earlier expansion a real logistical nightmare and the speed of it was much slower then it would be if not for such horrible starting location.
It took me two wars (vs Agartha and C'tis) and absorbing both of these nations to partly catch up with the game leaders in a number of provinces, but even then I was still lagging behind them territory-wise.
Another totally weird and unlikely situation in this game for my Pythium nation was my death income. I've searched each and every province of my land for death gems, including farmlands, using death games I've traded from other nations. You know how much death gem income I had at the end of this search? 4 gems per month!
(for comparison - for each other gems type my income was within 20-30 range) And that was at the stage of the game when I was supposed to start getting into tartarians and lich summoning...
So I had to ravenfeast like crazy using my large spy network to comb the earth for places where Death reigned... (thank you Ermor for those large battlefields full of corpses that you were leaving behind you in your wars
). BTW ravenfeast spell is really efficient with our balance mod. Changing its casting cost from 5 gems to 1 has made all the difference in the world. I've also traded death gems as much as I could, and forging Sickle has became my top priority when I've reached Con8, once I've realized that the Chalice was taken.
Only after I've conquered Vans territory and got several 30-strong loads of death gems from my Sickle's harvest the deathgems situation has became less dire for my nation.