Round table

Could it be that the only road leads to zone 9, and that's it? And getting to the main computer involves traveling off-road with a penalty. For this reason, instead of zone 9, there should at least be zone 6.

Well, you can come up with various "combinations of loads." Try generating some, and take a look. Out of a large number of generations, I haven't encountered this even once, and it seems other players haven't either. (Once, there was a multiple path to a corner village, and its guard blocked the path to the computer; but now there is no multiple path, and the guard is now 6k, significantly weaker.)
I understand that we're talking about zone 19 now. I specifically made the second blend (15) easily traversable, and almost always there is either a road or a portal to both adjacent zones, so I believe there are paths for development.
I wanted to make some screenshots of the maps, of what the output looks like, but I'm not very good at stitching them together into one readable large picture yet.