You had to convince the 3rd and all the others players to counter.
Not that it usually happens..

The current system with most points for first will already make it less interesting to play for anything less than 1st.

A good sign is that we already see less middle wins, something that I found very frustrating to see in the previous system (someone in the middle got a big stack and the moment one person chickened out and flagged, others caved in too)

it's hard to build in a system that punishes early flags though

Maybe you need to prevent really good starts but it means fiddling with the total randomisation of the starts. You could build in limitations that prevent having a connected base with more than X dice total or something. Or virtually divide the map in 2 and randomly put half a persons dice in one half and randomly put the other half in the second half of the map. Not sure that's the way to go though, just thinking out loud.

It's hard to enforce it as a real rule but maybe the community should just try and motivate itself to become less passive and less scared of one big stack.

Also top players could give a good example by not accepting vflags and not flagging before round 4. The problem somewhat started when real flags became only possible at round 8. round 8 is already pretty end-game in over half the games. People who don't vflag and wait until round 8 will probably die fast. So earlier flagging makes sense but things escalated into round 1 and round 2 flags

Maybe if real flags were possible from round 5 (or 4), we could motivate the community more not to vflag anymore. Also higher kill bonuses will motivate people to accept fewer weakflags.

On the other hand, someone with a very risky first will still be tempted to accept early flags in order to still get the easy other flags.

Ryan, play 500 or even 2k/5k. The problems you describe are rather rare there.

No chat for first three rounds (forget whose idea this was originally.)

Will input more later, I hate typing on an iPad.

Was just going to say that Monte (I can't remember whose idea it is either); no chat (or avatars, if possible) for 3 rounds would definitely curtail most of this.

Have tables with more lands. Then each player starts with more lands and maybe brown and green start with a good set of connected areas. Also, more lands mean more lands in the center rather than on the coasts and a big build may more likely fall in the middle.

Also, you might try The Brain's idea of a toroidal map (lands touch top of map to bottom and left of map to right). On a torus, it is possible to have seven contiguous countries, each of which touches the other six.

I got your solution. Don't do a damn thing.

simple , if the game end before round 10-12 (or if there exist 4persons flag up for 2,3,4,5 before round 10-12), 1st will get weak dom

=]

or introduce a "attack counter",

people required to attack >10 (or 15) times in first 3 rounds , fail to do so = half dom

We used to simply attack the person who flagged and the person who accepted the flag if it was accepted. Early flags are simply bad form.