Hera made a video that Arabia isn’t fun anymore. He says the strategies on the map are stale, it’s either scout rush or archer rush and nothing else. He says he has no solutions to the map but I have a few ideas. Make palisade wall and houses (house walling is much weaker now) stronger, undo the nerf that the walls received. Make walls cheaper. Generate more cliffs on the map for a more choke pointy experience. Increase the bulkiness of the forests, so it is more easier to wall up.
With wall and house walls stronger and the forests thicker it will make a scout rush much harder to pull off, since the walls are stronger, cheaper, and need less wood to spend on walling up, allowing a player to put up a defense easier. That way it can be a bit more easy to punish a rusher.
Or simply: Give Arabia a chance to have significantly thicker forests. That will allow more defensive orientated play and other strategies. Sometimes Arabia will generate sparse trees, for people who like a more open map experience.
Pros complained about Arabia being wall only map 2 years ago, so the map is much more open now and they nerfed wall build time and foundation armor.
In addition to this, you don’t need market to see ally vision anymore.
Anyways team games on arabia 2 years ago were much better with little bit of early aggression but also fast castle times, but 1vs1s were worse, Maybe the map should just be removed from the team game pool?
I warned them before on this fourm. The Anti-Wallers cried about walls. Demanded nerfs, and this is the result. Old thread where I brought this up. WTF is going on with Arabia?
The anti-wallers and anti-boomer players kept crying and crying and this is what you get. They demanded more and more nerfs to walls and more and more open maps. The game these days seems to be more appealing to Twitch Streamers who love raiding constantly. It used to be more rewarding to have a big wall and have more foolish players scratch at your walls of doom.
Pros mostly wanted changes to 1vs1s. 2 years ago we saw all pros preferring team games in arabia/nomad, because 1vs1 arabia was pretty boring and mostly decided by civ matchup. Now it is the opposite
At least give the map a chance to have more dense forests. That will allow more variations in gameplay on the map. Sometimes it’s open sometimes it’s a little bit more closed.
The solution is super simple: Just ban Arabia, and play something else instead. There is no law that demands that the most popular map must be (called) Arabia.
It’s also completely fine if the suitability of some maps w.r.t. 1v1 or team games differs.
So from my point of view, the video discusses a non-issue.
Eh for late game you could just nerf gold soueces in TGs
Changinf stuff in eaely game is a bit more complicated. I guess you could buff walls and buff militia vs buildings but walls are complicated without annoying people and with scouts supported by archers you can break walls well enough
Arabia as a map has mostly been used as the gold standard for 1v1 games, but I’m not 100% sure if the same is true for teamgames. At the very least, it’s known as the 1v1 map, so I don’t see why team games have to have Arabia in the rotation. Probably the simplest fix, and if nothing else, the devs can just try it out for one rotation anyway.
In TGs people still wnjoy the openness and agressiveness of arabia, you cant just remove it.
You could probably change the map geneeation for larger arabia maps or use an arabia clone like the one we had last year, but I dont think it would go well to just remove it entirely
I’m certainly not a pro but i share the opinion of hera 100%. I never understood why people complained about other maps so much and only wanted to play this boring archer flank(90% britons) and scouts into knights(90% franks) EVERY GAME. If i could only play arabia i wouldve deinstalled the game 2 years ago.
I enjoy the “boring knights and xbows” team game meta, and could still play hundreds of hours of it without problem.
People who do not enjoy it still have many closed maps and Nomad maps.
I personally wouldnt mind not being able to select position, or having to select the civ before the map is known, or being allowed to ban a couple of civs.
Delaying earliest aggression is a very good way to promote units unlocked from castle age onward. So we could maybe do one of the following:
add a “treaty 15 minutes” checkbox (enabled if >50% of players check it)
replace team game Arabia with a tweaked version by adding a neutral palissade wall between the two teams.
replace Arabia from the map pool with Lombardia, or an arabia variant where teams are far from one another
Another way would be to have new maps which prevent early team grouping. For instance every player is sepatated from his teamates by wood, and directly linked to a single opponent (so like enemy islands, but with narrow wood walls instead of wide rivers)
It was pointed out in YouTube comments that archers have +3 damage against spears. Why? It could be +1/2/3 as the commenter suggested. Hell even with zero bonus archers would still probably shred spears. Frankly with +3 they make spears completely not viable as an anti scout option, because they’ll be shot to pieces.
Another issue is men-at-arms are slower than scouts and not as tanky to archer fire. I suggested that they get +1 bonus damage vs scouts this would reduce the number of hits to kill a scout by 1 for men-at-arms. Honestly feel like scouts do too well vs a unit that costs gold. (not sure how you’d implement this) bonus could be lost with longsword upgrade.
You might see civs play into units that they’re actually good with or get bonuses for.
Yeah this is what I was thinking, Arabia shines for 1v1s, but for team games I think its kinda supposed to be just vanilla, and the other maps really get to shine more in team games; and honestly I think its fine that way; let Arabia be the 1v1 map and just play the other maps in team games.
idk if this will happen, i don’t think we can just completely redesign an entire unit line.
But in general I think the idea of having an Infnatry unit that fares well against the archer + knight combo could be great. I once started a thread for this kind of ideas here:
I think an Infantry with high Pierce armor and bonus vs Cavalry could definitely work. Especially as a single player making them won’t be enough to stop being doubled. Meaning, whilst they might be great in strategically countering the knight + archer combo it would still be a practical issue to make them work cause of the lower mobility.
They could be countered by either a new ranged (trash) Infantry counter OR potentially even skirms and spears dealing some bonus damage against them. And then ofc as it always was Siege to some degree cause of the low movement speed.
Yes and at the end i’m fine with it if people still enjoy playing arabia…but then they shouldn’t complain about things like 2 nomade maps being in the map pool.
Not selecting position wouldn’t help that much, i think…people would probably do the same and it would lead into unfair games, where one team has the perfect order and the other team does not. Civ banning could be a good option tho.
idk feels like changing the map into maps which already exist, like hideout for example. I don’t know why hideout isn’t as popular to begin with. There is still a lot of room for early aggression but also for other strats.
I don’t think this would be a good idea tbh. I mean not a bad idea for a map in general but it shouldn’t be a map which is all the time in the map pool, unless people enjoy it.
wouldn’t change a thing unless you buff them vs archer in general, which could break the balancing. Usually nobody fights men at arms with scouts…they rather let the archer play clean them.
Here’s me just randomly putting this together off a thought:
Instead of a single Yellow Shield toggle, split it into three.
“Not Willing Random”
“Willing Random Any”
“Willing Random Flank”
“Willing Random Pocket”
I believe this solves a huge part of the issue, because people cannot afford to go random because having pocket civ on flank can just end the game at upper levels. So willing random means adding a HUGE extra RNG aspect to how much fun the game will be. So they have to pick civ. And if they have to pick civ, the enemy picks the best civ so nobody plays non best civ.
My game knowledge isn’t deep enough to really know, but I’m probably way wrong on some of these, but you could poll the top 200 players and vote for a standard “Flank Civ” “Pocket Civ” grouping and set those as the pool it pulls from. Some civs could be both if it isn’t “CATASTROPHE” to have them in either, like Magyar or something. since they have decent Arbs and Cav.
On the other hand, having only 1 simple meta reduces the complexity of the game. This helps new players practice the basics of the game without worrying about variation.
