Okay, so I have created my own gamebox of the original game. This is based on a map I grabbed from somewhere, one of the expansion projects that had an unfinished eastern portion, which I just cropped out. I added dotted lines so the western expansion map is optional.

I created 2 seperate gameboxes, one is the standard 55 piece game, the other is the empire variant with 80 pieces, 7 ships and 18 cities. This is way my friends have play tested and it works well. I included the new advances because it is easier than trying to rebuild all the old cards. Plus I think the new cards are better. Also, in the empire variant I added extra trade cards for 3 to 9. This is because the way we played it, when you get 10+ cities, you start over at 3 instead of 1. This also allows you to add the extra calamities. You don't get extra points above the maximum for the card though. I left out the era requirements because I'm not sure which is better, the original colour requirements or the new point requirement. When we play tested the empire variant it was with the old rules and it seemed to work. If you play 5 person empire variant on the whole board (no western expansion) it works really well. It's almost a different game.

Anyway, here they are:

standard box

empire box