Why is there absolutely no elevation on Arena? I’m not saying it should have hills everywhere like Arabia, but at least a little bit of terrain variation. That would give some advantage to players who actually micro their scouts.
On the current Arena, if you hit an enemy scout first, you can just chase it down the one who took the first hit has no option but to run in circles and hope to reach Feudal Age first.
What do you think?
I suspect the reason is because higher elevation can can interfere with wall generation. Plus the map being flat has its own tactical differences compared to maps with hills.
As far as I know, there was never any elevation on Arena. I’m generally against changing existing content unless there’s an actual problem. If there’s ever a version of Arena with elevation, in my opinion it should be a different map. Unfortunately, I know the current devs don’t agree with this position – see, for example, recent changes the Black Forest, Nomad, Yucatan, etc.
If I had to speculate about the reason, I guess it’s to do with the way RMS generates elevation, which always happens at a specific point during the generation process. I once tried to make an Arena-style map with elevation, but couldn’t produce anything I was happy with as the results were quite uneven.
Yes, it’s possible that elevation causes problems for wall generation.
Having a few small bumps on a map doesn’t fundamentally change tactics. On Arabia, there are hills everywhere, covering large areas, which is different. There, yes, you can exploit tactics both for military units and for buildings if the elevation happens to be on top of resources.
What I’m talking about is very small areas of elevation, just enough to favor the player who scouts manually over the one who uses auto-scout or ctrl-click.
Why not. I would be fine with another map too.
Something like Acropolis with walls would be interesting.