Many of us consider changing alliances when a power - especially one across the board we haven't had too much interaction with - seems to be getting too big. We're France: maybe Russia just took Austria and Turkey. Suddenly that fight with Germany seems ill-suited to driving back the Russian advance, etc.

Obviously these calculations are and should be done by SC counts - hard numbers which are readily available to us. But some of it isn't: to some extent, decisions about who is becoming dangerous are made when we see the map and think "gee, a lot of this map is looking blue all of a sudden".

So this is my question: To what extent do you think this influence exists? Is it big enough that a 7-SC Russia looks more dangerous than a 9-SC Italy, just because the Russian home SCs and a lot of their potential growth areas (i.e., scandinavia) happen to be big on the map: making their coloring-in with purple seem like a bigger deal than Greece being colored green?