[Micah]

Lolo-

He gets the one he bid the most on (and he can't bid the same amount on 2 nations).

My question is what do you do about LE Ermor? They don't really care much about their capital's population.

Likewise, some resource-intensive nations might get skewed, since you have to rely on other people bidding low to get the iron mine bonus, which won't happen if people all decide to bid fairly high on, say, MA Ulm, realizing that they can take a lower gold:resource ratio and do fine...the person that ends up with them will end up in a bad spot not because people all thoght Ulm was awesome enough to overcome, but because they thought they'd get some bonuses to compensate for it being crappy.

Finally, people tend to have nation preferences that are independant of balance. Some people simply don't want to play, say, LE Rlyeh because they don't like the feel of it, which again will skew the bidding, giving the person that does end up with it a big boost since everyone else bid low to avoid getting it.

I like the idea a lot, and I know every system has flaws, so I'm not trying to nitpick, I'm just pointing out what I see as potential problems so that maybe someone can come up with a tweak to fix them, or just tell me I'm being overly anal. =)