Having played two rounds in a six player game and already eliminated one of the players, my impression is that either this map requires very careful resource management or this map is a mess.
Non-Roman characters in game chat are converted to question marks
Various online translators make it possible to pseudo-converse in languages in which none of the players are fluent. E.g. Google Translator. Specifics:
The phrase تدخين الحشيشه الخضراء appears in the chat log as ...
I like the one-way nature of the U.S. and Baathist loyalty squares the way it is now. It does a good job of modeling quagmire. "Now look what you've done, you careless commander: you have stuck your forces someplace from which you cannot retreat."