A button on the province admin page that will sort them by original countries.

apart from the primary to the secondary provinces, would there be any other differences?

Personally, I'd much rather see cashflow (money income) added to be sorted.

I believe you are referring to a suggestion of adjusting the province list sorter tabs. I remember in the 100-player map that it was split by regions but not nations. So for the maps who don't have any sorting options you would add more specific lists by nation, and a sub-division for those that already have that sorting option.

I almost was about to say this was a great idea, but it has a few minor flaws. There are islands for nations that are not attached to the mainland of the nation and in those cases it would be flawed slightly. So when you go under these divisions it would have to be slightly edited. You wouldn't want to defend Valetta when mainland United Kingdom is under attack, but still it would be a big help, and the flaws it has could easily be noticed by the players of the game. I mean everybody knows these islands well because you need to make sure you don't forget about them. But for the most part this is an excellent idea.

How do we feel about this idea?

It really depends on the map how the provinces should be sorted. For example, sorting by "Europe" for the 22-player European map would not be particularly helpful because two thirds of the action on that map takes place in Europe. Perhaps, North America, western Europe, central Europe, Scandinavia, eastern Europe, Middle East, and North Africa would make more sense. Personally, I would choose sorting by regions comprised of 3 to 6 countries over sorting by individual countries; I think this works reasonably well for the 50-player Pacific and 100-player world maps.

I am partial to a sort by country if made available for 2 reasons:

1. I could quickly go to my core provinces/factories

2. No mater what map I am on, I will know what countries are at the front at any given time. Those in turn become my priority build sites for new units.

Good points, Pete. Assuming that both a sort-by-country and a sort-by-region would use the same software architecture, perhaps it would be possible to provide both as player-selected display options.