Realizing an earth map with a balanced European continent?

Earth maps have always been my favourite in CIV4 and most of the time I was playing the GEM. But this map or other earth maps have not been balanced probably to represent European nations as worldpowers. I´d like to share some thoughts about playing on a world map. The goal is not to have a new Rhyes and Fall but I´d still like to see important nations of our history to survive until the later game and also play a big role in the world´s history.

I know it was always hard in former CIV games to represent so many important nations on such a small continent but with the CIV5 gameplay it´s even harder to allow a balanced game in Europe. The big problem at the beginning is, as it always has been, the limited space and some important nations like Rome or Germany just can build 2 cities and become more likeliky a city state unless they don´t occupy their neigbours. Unfortunatly this leads to an early vanishing of nations which actually would represent strong nations in later ages (i.g. if Germany wants to expand it has to erase France early and vice versa). Furthermore in the later stages of the game, civilizations like China, India become so powerful due to their large amount of tiles to settle on and as a European nation you just have a chance to deal with them if you already occupied the entire European continent.

The first idea was to uspcale Europe and that´s of course a beginning. At least you should give nations like Germany, France, Spain, England or Italy (Rome) a chance of having 4 cities within their today´s borders. Unfortunatly the GEM for CIV5 seems to be smaller then the GEM for CIV4 and those named nations have less space to build cities, plus the fact that cities in CIV5 now work tiles on a larger radius than in CIV4.
Another step was that Europe became more ressources than other continents which was nessecarily. But the actual GEM for CIV5 doesn´t have it yet.
As far as I know these have been the only changes that tried to make Europe more importend and balanced to the rest of the world but imo it was not enough.

Another new problem is the new gameplay concept especially the new system of warfare. There is no real space in Europe to make tactical manovers and this also limits the fun of playing an earth map.

Unfortunatly I have no real idea, exepct the below mentioned, how to handle this issue and make European nations stronger compared to the rest of the world. What do you think about that? Any plans in progress to make a mod or change in already existing earth mods?

Here are my first thoughts about balancing Europe:

- give each tile in Europe +1 food and +1 production
- allow tech trade between the European nations
- limit the expansion disaffection for European nations, so they can spread around the world what would represent their colonization

Discuss...

PS: Wrong sub forum. Mod, please change. Sorry for that.

I've actually had a good deal of success with making European nations competitive in my Legendary Earth Mod. The current version available is not compatible with the patch (does not account for minimum tile distance of 3 between cities), but the new version I've been play testing has been quite successful so far. The runaway civs are never China, India, etc. as you mentioned, but actually Songhai and the Inca.

In my attempts to balance the map, the recent patch has actually helped out the most. So called "tall" empires can compete with "wide" ones, such that you see very high populations in the couple of cities that European civs can build; this keeps them close in technology. Also, it's not unusual for my European civs to go off an colonize the world, I've seen British colonies in Madagascar, Spanish/Roman ones in northern Africa and French ones in the New World where America/Iroquois/Aztecs have failed to expand.

All in all, my point is that you don't have to mod in unfair bonuses for Europe to be competitive. Simply working within the confines of the worldbuilder and cleverly developing a map can make things balanced. When the newest version of my map is released (within the week) try it out for yourself and see.