A small little request to be added to the bottom of the list:

I have been invited to a private game with a bunch of friends and during the joining phase we have had one of the players pull out. Currently this involves us recreating the game and reinviting everybody. Is there a way in the future that the host of the game can change the player count (and regen the map) without booting everybody?

Just a thought.

You can start the game with less than the set number of players already. Just tap start game.

Yes, but I'm presuming (never tried) that it will start with the currently loaded map. This would create an unbalanced map from on the onset because some people have more expansion opportunities early on.

Whenever you start a game with fewer players than you had originally set, it re-creates the map and makes one of the correct size. The down side to that is that any orders you had issued are cancelled. And any negotiations you had done with your neighbors are wasted since they may no longer even be your neighbors.

But other than that, start away. It'll be fine.

Cheers Noel, I didn't realise it did a regen of the map.

Is the 4hour countdown until the start still the same? In the event of a game starting with less players it might be a good idea to extend that a little to avoid any exploitation in the future once rankings come into play. I can just imagine going to bed with all my orders setup (in case the last player joins whilst I'm asleep) and waking up 8 hours later to find that the game was launched early and I'm now 4 hours behind in the expansion rush.

I'm pretty sure the countdown is the same (4 hours). We talked about making it longer at some point, but we left it the same for consistency and simplicity. Maybe we'll change it and make it longer to allow players enough time to re-negotiate the opening moves.