I prefer espionage without the volcanoes me too. Without the volcanoes it is a lot easier to launch an attack on any side. I would find that really great if we could add variants without these volcanoes. The main problem with volcanoes is we can setup somes barricade, sit here, wait and when it happen it can make the game rather really boring... In general I find it is clearly easier to create active play without the volcanoes and of course also when you have more pieces to play on the same turn.