Arabia and Coastal are the most standard balanced maps for playing with random civs.
The terrain on both is generated randomly. It will be great if there is a way to choose what terrain: (Desert, Rainforest, Bamboo, Snow, Temperate) the map is generated.
Maybe devs can make available the variants as separate maps in the menu. It is easy to implement and would be really good to have.
I would like to be able to choose the biome/climate of every map (at least in SP skirmish).
Actually I think it’s nice that different maps have different biomes. It helps to make them feel unique. If every map could have it’s biome chosen ahead of time, I think they’d tend to blend together more.
I can understand people wanting more biomes for Arabia (and maybe Arena, BF, and Nomad). But I like that the other maps are specialized.
It is not about asking more biomes. It is asking for the option to choose which biome appears.
This is a nice idea, and I’m pretty sure it would be possible to implement for map scripts that were written specifically to support it.
But there’s no way it could work for all map scripts, especially not custom ones, because the script would have to be written in a specific way. AoE2 doesn’t restrict you to specific biomes/tilesets when making maps/map scripts (which is a good thing).
Arabia, yes. Coastal was (still is?) the official default map, but it’s generally known for being unbalanced. I think it’s a shame, and that Coastal would be a great standard map if it was balanced, but unfortunately the distribution of terrain and resources is too random for it.
It is still the default. If you try to do any event all skirmish settings reset, then Coastal is selected as default.
If you want to argue I don’t think there’s any water map that can be balanced as civs themselves are not balanced on water.
No, I don’t want to argue – I agree with that.