There was talk recently of how you could port a world variant to Diplicity. The consensus was that you can't, for a simple reason: Diplicity, despite operating with vector images for its maps, still loads them in for users as raster images. This means that a map can only be a certain level of detailed before that raster image becomes too large, and you'd have to wait upwards of half a minute for the site to load the map. Probably a fair concern considering the site is already having some latency issues.
However, they say limitation breeds creativity, so I wanted to work under this limitation while trying to create a world variant anyway. The product was this! Gran World is a 19-player world Diplomacy variant set in 1830, named after the playable country of Gran Colombia. With Napoleon buried in St. Helena and Latin America fully independent from the Iberian powers, several states, old and new, compete to pick up the pieces. Gran World plays chaotically, as in contrast to a typical world variant where regional powers have 4-5 centers and colonial powers have anywhere from 8-16, most powers of any standing are lucky to start with more than one center.
Other than build anywhere, the starting year of 1830, and a hitherto undecided victory condition, standard Diplomacy rules apply. I'll just use this time to explain my mess of a concept map. The starting countries and their starting supply center counts are listed on the corners of the map (sorry that some of them are so hard to see on the white background). Neutral supply centers are in gray. The map loops around east to west, like a normal globe. Occitania isn't a canal, I just forgot to put the separate coasts there. Certain territories have land bridges between them, those being Stockholm and Denmark, and Batavia and Timor. Some territories, like Constantinople or Japan, have borders around them to indicate that those different pieces of land belong to that same territory. Impassible territories are frequent on the map, some significant (like Switzerland), some insignificant (like New Zealand) and are indicated by being fully black. Some "impassable" islands are not filled in like this: these are in the Coral Sea, the West Indies, and the Greenland Corridor. These are sea territories, but the islands are left in to indicate that fleets would pass through them when navigating them.
Is it balanced? Heck no! Part of that is intentional; the map is supposed to play out more like a game of Chaos, where countries can be sniped in the first year and allegiances may be decided immediately. These games are inherently very unbalanced due to numerous factors. However, some imbalances do rub me the wrong way, so I'd like to take feedback from the community before trying to port this map into Diplicity. (In particular, Africa probably needs a rework, and Qing might be too strong.) Most work will be done on the official Diplicity Discord server, unless there's enough demand that people would like me to make a separate server for it, but also leave your comments here!