In the last few years there have been a lot of interesting map ideas and several of them have been integrated into various tournaments. While the playstyle varies from map to map they all have one thing in common: They are somewhat balanced, disregarding map generation bugs.
We love our Arabia partly because we can rely on our eight sheep, two boars, berry bushes and deer. Sometimes our map isn’t as we wish it to be so we have to adapt to a forward gold or an exposed woodline. Making decisions based on the map is part of what makes a good AoE player.
However, I don’t think those decisions should be whether I want to have less wood or less food than my opponent because I can either place docks all over my ponds or ignore the fish altogether. Alpine lakes is an absolute coinflip to the point where sometimes not a single fish is accessible from the shore.
One way to have decently balanced resources while also allowing for some RNG is to place them in a shared location, i.e. in the middle. Nobody complains about deer generation on valley.
While the default maps might be fun to play in relaxed games with friends or singleplayer, most of them just aren’t suitable for ranked play. A lot of tournaments relied on altered versions of maps for the sake of consistency and fairness and I think the ranked map pool should aswell.
I really hope to see community made maps in the pool, as they do not only have interesting and unique ideas but are also field-tested already.
Totally agree with you. Plus even if the fish is “technically” accessible from the shore, with current pathing it’s useless to send more than 2 vils on one fish, and even those keep stopping randomly over and over again (way more than anywhere else like e.g. on farms by my experience).
yeah the poor pathing aggrevates this issue tremendously, most of the ranked matches i see my allies just building docks due to fishermen idling half the time
ive even had 1 fishermen on a shore fish and i had to keep retasking him each time he dropped the fish coz he couldnt path back to the fish right next to him, every single drop…
i just dont get the idea behind having alpine lakes in ranked map pool
they removed steppe and valley because they were somewhat mongols dominant maps, so now they add a new map which is ( or atleast technically should be, IF THE PATHING LETS IT ) indians dominant, which with the current pathing is persians dominant
do we really need more ONE civ dominant maps? we already got nomad and medi which makes you feel dumb if you dont pick persians on them
I would be alot happier of they modified the factions so that they weren’t as dominant on certain maps. It would be nice to have the variety of maps if the factions faired equally.