Japan couldn't be better situated for a long period of isolated economic development, free from the threat of invasion, while China begins with so many resources it doesn't have to worry about anything. In fact, so far all the non-European nations I've played have been in fairly easy positions. And on a side-note, China is probably one of the strongest positions in the game. So as you can see, not every nation will be handicapped in terms of expansion. Then I started buttering up one of the Indian states, giving me even more maps. For example, in my game as China, I was able to rapidly build up a powerful army and economy, conquer Vietnam, Shan, and parts of Manchuria, and still have enough money to improve my relations with Tibet so fantastically that we exchanged our discoveries - giving me maps of India and the regions around there. One handy way of gaining additional maps is through diplomacy. On the other hand, non-European nations aren't completely handicapped in terms of exploration. But without early access to explorers and conquistadors (which is historically accurate, at any rate), I'm not going to get very far, at least initially. For example, as Japan I start the game with most of the world covered up in fog, but I do know of Korea, Manchuria, and China.
What's interesting about all these countries is that there is only a limited geographic area that you know about initially, so you get to know that region really well. I started campaigns as Japan, China, the Ashantis in Africa, the Incas in South America, and more. However, starting games as a whole bunch of different nations around the world isn't really a bad way to go when writing a preview and is probably what I would've done anyway, since it gave me a chance to see what all these new non-European nations play like. Fortunately, I was eventually sent a fix for this problem, and just recently I've been able to play complete campaign games. So for about the first week, most of the games I played tended to cover the first fifty years or so of one nation's development, and then when I had to do something else and turned it off, I had to start over with a new country and a whole new game. For starters, I couldn't even save my game, and as you might guess, that can be kind of a problem when you're playing an open-ended strategy game that can take a dozen hours to finish a single campaign. The first thing I noticed was that this was a beta - as 'beta' means an unfinished version of the game.
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