Nile-istic Red Sea REVOLUTION! 1.0 a la Weewar Times by McMonster

IN tribute to all Egyptian Weewarriors - you know who you are :)

This is the first draft of my entry for the wicked awesome Weewar Times mapmaking competition. Please post comments and suggestions for improvement/balancing on this forum thread: http://weewar.com/forum/posts/list/1155.page

I am especially curious about the playability of such a desert dominated map, and about how the green zones along the Nile and Red Sea work out. Also of note - I think red will have a relatively easy time taking Beirut and Damascus, so I have started them with less units than blue, for balance. Blue will have a tougher time capturing Addis Ababa, I think...

...

In the not too distant future, Iran tests an atomic bomb in the Persian desert and Israel's retaliatory bombing of Tehran radicalizes Islamists around the world. In North East Africa, an extreme Sudanese faction overthrows the government and unites with Al Shabaab forces in Eritrea-Somalia, opportunistic pirates in the Gulf of Aden, and Islamists in Yemen, Mecca and Medina. These tentative allies launch a not so surprise attack against Egypt in the hopes of destabilizing Mubarak's Western-backed government and showing Jihadists everywhere that the time has come to abandon guerilla tactics and challenge the Infidels on their own militaristic terms.

Egypt responds by uniting with Israel and calling on material support from the United States. The US pressures Ethiopia into allowing Addis Ababa to serve as a staging ground, which the Ethiopians agree to, in the hope that the US will stem the Islamist tide engulfing them from east and west.

Further north, the Syrians and Hezbollah take advantage of the situation to launch attacks against Israel. King Hussein of Jordan responds by joining Egypt and Israel.

The stage is set - will the Jihadists succeed in this, their first open war, or will Western backed Arab and Jewish governments hold the neo-colonial lines in the sand?

Cities on the map:

Marsa Matruh 5,4
Alexandria 9,3
Cairo 11,7 + 12,6
Al Bawiti 8,10
Luxor 13,13
Hurghada 15,11
Port Said 15,4
Suez 16,8
Jerusalem 18,4
Tel Aviv 18,2
Beirut 18,0
Damascus 20,1
Amman 21,4
Dongola 10,21
Port Sudan 19,22
Khartoum 14,27
Addis Ababa 20,33 + 22,34 (placed further north than geographically correct in order to fit on the map)
Asmara 20,27
Djibouti 26,32
Medina 26,19
Mecca 27,24
Sanaa 28,27
Berbera 28,33
Hurdiyo 32,33