NG assigns nations to regional groups, which have different chances of using different homerealms, each of which has different pretenders and a few national spells.
Since we have 12 players (plus a controversial 13th), I'm going to close recruitment. ATM, I'm looking at 4x3, with Boksi being the odd man out, as reliability is more of an issue for larger games. I don't want that to be perceived as stigmatizing you, Boksi; you've never vanished into thin air and always make a good-faith effort to keep pushing out your turns, but you've had competing time commitments in the 4.17 that make me reluctant to include you right now when we have a nice, round 12 others.
So. We need to fix an era, decide on rules, decide on a map, and decide on teams. And I need to get NG to the point where I can justifiably push out 0.6.9, as there's a number of small things that I find very annoying in 0.6.8. I'm aiming to get that to a releasable state by the end of the weekend, even if that just means finding a convenient dividing point and releasing e.g. only some regional themes for primates in this patch.
For picking teams, I'm going to leave that open for discussion.
For picking a map, since we have a slightly larger group than usual, I'm going to suggest Hexawyr, which would be 18.75 land provinces (plus ~3 sea provinces) per player. This is certainly open to debate, though.
For rules, we foremost need to pick era and whether we want to do fixed start or any such thing. Oh, and I'm going to tentatively go ahead and say we'll do the "collective mulligan" thing, as that seemed to be acceptable to the majority. We can also start squabbling about thrones, though that really needs to wait for the map to be chosen. I'd point out that my experience suggests that 2/3s or 3/4s is a better win condition for a disciples match than 50%+1 - when you're dealing with a team, rushes can be far more sudden and dramatic, and you can theoretically achieve total victory by conquest with 25% of the starting players still in the game.