I just played a 2 player Third Crusade game and my opponent went first. At the end of the first turn he had 28 regions and I had 14 leaving large swathes of the map invisible to me. (it was automatic initial deploy, not manual)
Is this common for this map? I think it possibly is as there are some regions where you start off with six troops.
I really like the map, but this seems very unbalanced.