Conquest of the Pacific is probably down lower on the list because it’s just 2 players.
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I had a tough time finding a good “all encompassing” place name for the Northumbria fief (because there isn’t one that I could find). But, we needed that fief to reach as far southward as it does so that it could be “adjacent” to the Champagne fief. I tweaked the shape of pretty much every historical area to fit the map that we had been test playing for a decade*, which was originally a total abstraction not based in any real historical period. But it was fun for gameplay, which always trumped historical accuracy. Warlords is not a simulation, but an abstraction that does somewhat fit into the fractured 1200AD political landscape (for instance, there were obviously a lot more than 12 castles in Europe…the number that comes with the game). We hope the gamers will agree that it plays well, and we hope the historians can suspend their disbelief for a few hours to enjoy a game.
When you do tweak the map yourselves, I suggest you try to keep the same fiefs adjacent to each other as in the original. A lot of care went into making sure the most common starting castle fiefs for the 4 corner kingdoms are spaced fairly, up/down/left/right/diagonally. Though the map is a visual rectangle, the movement spaces make more of a logical square. This way top/bottom players would not be encouraged to fight each other more than left/right players simply due to map imbalance.
*When I say fit, I really mean match the adjacencies of the old paper/pencil posterboard, and not the actual shapes.
