Might try playing my small Europe map if you haven't already. It's just about the right size for my taste. Basically, that once it's clear you're going to win, actually finishing the game doesn't take more than a couple hours unlike larger maps which can drag on and on.
Anyway, if I'm still playing and get bored with the small one, I might make a standard or large Europe map. In the meantime, you might try editting my huge Europe map - chop off Africa and eastern Russia. *shrug*
semi-tangent:
I think I've found out why the computer grinds to a halt. I suspect it's the algorithm that calculates the shortest route when the AI moves units. From other games, I know pathing isn't easy to program. It really is a trade off between finding the shortest route and processing time.
I set a map up to shoot for max score. I built ~400 cities and hardly had any units (the only comp civ was permanetly stuck on an island) on a huge map and the game went smoothly. But then polution hit after building hospitals and I had to build workers to clean it up. Just hitting shift-P with a new worker took ~30 seconds before the guy moved just trying to figure out what to do. Even with all the "view unit moving" options off having 150 workers auto clean polution took a few minutes every turn. Now imagine having 16 civs on a huge map each with ~300 units and it gets ugly. I suspect that a smaller map size means there is less for the move algorithm to branch out to. You'd think after railroading a continent, as soon as the algorithm found a route using 0 movement points, it could stop. Maybe in a patch. I guess it could be the AI trying to decide which polution patch to clean up too.
Oh and after discovering that polution is caused by poplulation and not shield production, I may revise my city placement strategy and never bother to build hospitals.
