Agree with swaq that scaling the +/- tiles will just scale up the endgame sizes without actually balancing play. The single most unbalancing aspect currently seems to be the ability for a larger player to repeatedly attack a smaller player and ensure that the smaller player cannot reach a sufficient size to defeat the bigger player. Possibly this could be reduced by adjusting the conquer bonus + penalties based on the relative army sizes... so armies of roughly the same size (or smaller army attacking bigger army) would receive the current benefits. Say the attacking army was twice as large as the defending army, then the smaller losing army only loses 25%, and the winning army only gains half what would normally be gained. Perhaps at 10x relative size, the bonuses both ways would become 0. Not sure that this wouldn't slow the game down too much with <10 players on the board. Also doesn't solve the problem of someone with a large lead being able to maintain the lead by sitting on + fields, but does seem to help prevent them from aggressively maintaining the lead. To encourage participation, perhaps change the logic for fields that are occupied during an update; decrease the value by 1 during the update... if this is too fast, then by 0.5 or 0.25 and the real value is rounded up. The exception could be free movement fields, which would remain free. This would also give some distinction between free movement and blank fields; blank fields would slowly become - fields if you stayed there too long.

To reduce the befit of multiple attacks against a single person while they are obviously offline, perhaps reduce the bonus obtained by defeating them by half on the second attack since they have moved; to a third or a quarter the third consecutive attack, etc. If this gives too much benefit to not moving, then perhaps roll it back one step each update, and max it at 4 steps, so each update you could still lose portion of your army to attacks by peers. A single move would return this to par.

I was trying to work out what alliances would actually offer other than having people you cannot attack on the map. Two thoughts... * Offensive/defensive alliances. If you are within range of an ally, a portion of their army would be included in offensive/defensive battles, with a proportional gain/loss of the result. * Nudging. You cannot attack an ally, but after a terrain shift, or after an attack you may notice that an ally is sitting on a - field, or otherwise in danger of attacks. You could enter your ally's field to "nudge" them in the same direction, to put them into a safer location. Or at least, you hope your allies would put you into a safer location, rather than just stealing your cool field. That would come down to choosing good allies, though!

Having said that, I've voted this down because I feel balance is more important.

This would be useful for making the site accessible. Rather than creating different content for different users, this could be done with css - either generate and save the css for a user who has customised their colours (does Google apps allow this?), or contain the css in the outer page, so when the board refreshes it doesn't need to reload the stylesheet, reducing the cost of dynamically generating the css. Not familiar with Google apps and Ajax however, so I don't know how realistic this is.

or to make the interface simpler, a forced march means moving twice the distance in a single direction. Unsure exactly how this affects the dynamics of balance, but to simulate the stresses of the forced march on the army, any battle on the target square might be at -25% strength.