Maps with less snowball effect, but still SOME snowball effect

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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In my mind, there are basically two types of maps atm; maps with a big central pile of resources that everyone fights over, and maps with evenly-distributed resources.

I like both, but the first often feels like the whole game can be over after the center gets taken. They get a huge gold/food/stone advantage, and use that advantage to snowball the game. Sure, sometimes the enemy can take it back, but it’s less common.

The trouble with the second, of course, is that there’s not as much to fight over. Maybe a hill or something, but it makes the game a bit less interesting.

But this got me thinking about ways to do hybrids of the two. What if there were maps with piles of resources that become available as the game progresses, but which are each relatively small, so players want to fight over them, but taking any particular one isn’t GG?

A way this could be done would be via timed triggers. For example, say it’s a map with a huge ocean on the side of the map. Out in the middle of the ocean are a handful of ‘whale’ tiles, which can be collected extremely quickly, and let fishing ships carry much more food each. They’d be there right at the start of the game, but only like 250 food worth, and they’d respawn every ~10 minutes or so, maybe each time with a bit more food. Maybe 500/750/1000/etc.

So whoever takes the ocean gets this bonus, but then it depletes, and since the ocean is off on the side, they need to decide whether to hold the ocean, or move back to land!

The same could be done with gold, or stone; A quarry, off on one side of the map, roughly equidistant from both players, that periodically spawns a few tiles of gold or stone. It would be a pit, so holding it would be a bad idea, and players would fight and re-fight over it again and again as the game goes on!

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I dont like the concept of respawning resources.

I would rather have:

  • a “middle” with lots of resources (say, 10x number of players as number of gold tiles = 20 gold tiles in 1v1)
  • Then far away from it, 2 sets (with symetrical position on the map) of less resources (say, 4x number of players as number of gold tiles = 8 gold tiles per site in 1v1)
  • Finally , squatered around the map, a little of resources (say 4 sites 1x number of players as number of gold tiles = 2 gold per site in 1v1)

Then:

  • we want to control the middle
  • controling the middle is not enough if the opponent controls the rest of the map.
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I feel like that would just end up balanced, like if you had two gold piles in both players bases to start with.

What you need is a map that CHANGES, to give a dynamic, changing fight across the map.

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