I believe that the Arabia that has been used in the competitive map pool up til this point is a very similar version of the “Green Arabia” that was one of the most played maps on Voobly. Accordingly, I am a little sad that it appears that we are going back to vanilla Arabia.
I have always liked GA better than Arabia because as SouMexican stated:
I am totally fine with open maps (make them as open as you want for all I care), but I would prefer a decent amount of wood on the map so that I don’t feel like I am running out of wood in the castle age.
The arabia that has been in DE up til this point, I believe, has been too closed (woods too close together etc). However, I feel like that could have been solved by just moving the woods further apart, instead of removing groves of trees outright.
At some point, most player wall in tournaments, irrespective of the particular map setup. The difference is that in standard arabia it’s pretty easy to be fully walled by min 10 while in kotd arabia you usually can’t do that unless you commit a lot of vils and res to that purpose which puts your eco behind. What we have been seeing so far is players continuously wall and make military to protect open spots or contest open spots in their opponent’s base. So, for instance, in case 1 scouts are mostly useless while in case 2 they have a great damage potential since partially walled maps don’t prevent them from entering.
Well, quick walling keeps a couple of scouts from some vils but if you have a larger number of scouts and skirms (which your opponent probably won’t produce if he can’t get in, in the first place) in your base quick walls won’t save you. Of course, having more units doesn’t guarantee more damage but the ability to quick wall in some situations won’t prevent people from playing aggressive while having an easy wall-off is likely to do so.
Personally I always liked the more rough versions of arabia, sometimes spawning with oases in the woodlines, weird woodlines, often not fair to both players, sometimes even 2 sheep stuck behind the forest were ok, all these things were adding more veraity, made game more demanding but also more satifsfying.
