New arabia is bad

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Hi, this is just a friendly reminder that the arabia version that came with the dawn of the dukes update is really bad, I average 1k9 1v1 rating, but I reached 2k once, just in case you were wondering :slight_smile: (and I’m the arabia only type of person).

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It’s just a different map. It’s not bad, but it’s played different than the previous version of DE arabia or AOK arabia.

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Well I mostly agree with you. But I think everyone who says it’s bad should be more specific.
Previous version of Arabia was far from perfect too. Map generation was rather unsteady.

Things that I like in new Arabia:

  • Removal of cliffs and and water oases
  • Sheep generation feels more reasonable now. Feels like they reduced max distance from TC to 4 additional sheeps.

Things I don’t like in new Arabia:

  • Main resources on hill slopes is awful. Hard to wall berries on hill against drush. Impossible to place TC near it.
  • Forward resources are too forward. Secondary resources too far from TC.
  • Overall civs with strong early bonuses became more efficient on Arabia.

Mixed feelings:

  • Starting wood lines generation now pretty consistent and pretty good overall. May be their positioning should be adjusted.
  • Hills makes more sense now. On previous version of Arabia hills were quite random and often useless. But I think hills often too aggressive now.
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I absolutely hate it, in TGs, sometimes you have only 1 starting wood line, and it is placed so far that it messes up your build order. I’ve seen a bug report where someone had no wood line at all. From one game to another, you can wall easily, and then you can not wall at all. To me it seems clear that the TG map script was not ready for the change they made. Hills being closer seems reasonless and another thing to mess you up depending on RNG. The only thing I like is it seems there is no wolf anymore.

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In which way do you think that the new arabia is “bad”?

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Blame the anti wallers. They wanted a super open map where it’s very costly to wall up, so you are prone to being raided so the game can end early. They wanted a super open map. They think palisade walls are boring or whatever to break down.

So, it’s a scout rush fest. No other strategies is really viable. Since you can’t boom heavily to unlock cool looking units. It’s either you rush, or get rushed.

The anti wallers found the old arabia has far too many trees… thus it was too easy to wall. So, they made it very hard to wall up. They made a compromise by making the map extremely open without nerfing walls into oblivion.

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Why do I think it is bad?

  • Generation is repetitive, always 3 nice woodlines, yes they spawn far away from the tc sometimes, but they are always at the back or sides of the base, so you literally can always wall to the tc. This also reduces the importance of scouting, since you always know for a fact that your opponent have 3 nice woodlines, and that he will wall to the tc every single time.

  • Since the woodlines are always nice and you can always wall to the tc, you only need to be lucky with the gold position, even if the berries are at the front, doesn’t matter, if you have safe gold you can just do whatever you want, on the previous arabia version you could have beautiful maps where you wall very easilly and go drush fc, and also could have a map with only 1 woodline, this woodline could spawn at the front, with golds, berries and stone at the front as well, there was variation, it was trully a RM map, now it just feel scripted, repetitive, boring, no need for strategy or adaptation.

  • The fact that there’s nothing in the middle of the map is bad as well, makes it so people just need to camp the hill that always spawn in front on the base, because that’s also something that feels scripted, have a big fat hill in front.

  • The position of the 3rd gold is bad, a lot of times I have a “neutral” gold closer to me than my own 3rd gold, makes no sense, or even worse, my 3rd gold is closer to my enemy than myself.

  • This arabia version is actually easier to wall imo, is repetitive, is boring. that’s why I feel that it is so bad.

Sorry for my english, is not my first language.

Idk about how the map plays out at lower elos, but believe, this one is really easy to wall 8/10 times.

  • I’m also not saying that the previous one was perfect, but imo was better. There’s good elements of this one, but need LOTS of rework, hill positions, res position.

  • To make arabia and the game in general more aggressive is making walls more expensive and also reducing house hp, maybe even building foundations having negative armor (except for castles, towers and tcs), so people playing greedy with walls and walling behind with houses get punished.

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Yes fully agree with you wood need to be randomized more to not have them only at the back

Perfectly agree as well

Ah, it depends whats do you mean by that yes wallings is still very possible but the wall himself is not as strong as before i mean you give a lot of map control especially with these hills before i don’t thinks walls is in a bad spot at the moment. if you talked about stone walls the side of the map in late game not sure about that, the position of wood just needed to be changed as well to make this less repetitive as well

I don’t think that drush fc is very strong even with gold in the back you really need to be against scout and with a very good map else agressive play especially with maa trush can kill you, but yes still it’s a clearly viable strategy in some cases.
As for the old one that was almost everytime the same type of games with maa archers wall and booming it’s was too strong especially with those flat ground.

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From 15 games that i played vs in the new arabia i can say, that walls are still the same, they just build them a little bit later, so meh.

The maps is way too unfair most of the times because of the hills, that was a step backwards, in 8 maps from those 15 games i couldn’t place a tc either on wood or main gold so thank you for putting me behind in terms of boom, in vanilla map when you got those maps you could always try fwd or towers, but with 3 woodlines at the back, fwd and towers are only worth to deny few farms and maybe the main gold, so you can’t make enough damage.

The big hills in the front are always there, so that just forces the camping mechanics behind it and the third gold is just too far, ur enemy’s gold is closer than ur third gold pile lol

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Leave the cost of walls alone, please. Just make the map have even fewer trees, and even more open so it’s hard to wall.

Or nerf walls where takes ages to make them. Some civs need to turtle in order to shrine.

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I liked it, but I think it’s more so that I still like it better than most of the other maps.

My issue is the repetitive generations and borderline impossible to defend resource gens.

If they wanted to nerf walling, give units a slight bonus damage to buildings in Feudal from what they are at now. Like a fraction for every unit aside from men at arms. .5 maybe.

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Walling has been nerfed a lot of times already but no one will stop walling because it’s way too important to don’t do it

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Yeah I’m aware, it’s a ridiculous concept, but also something that the devs will for whatever reason continue to prioritize over other repeat balance issues.

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I think this could be a solution. Just increase the bonus damage of maa (and militia line) against walls/buildings a bit, so feudal agression is more threatening.

Walls are just too important for the strategic and civ balance of the game, as they are several “defensive” civs that just must rely on their walls until they get to their lategame powerspikes. And these are already quite weak civs in arabia.

I don’t even know why some people diabolize walls, as walls add the game the strategic diversity we have. Without walls or bad walls the game would just be a pure raiding feast with no strategic decision making. Why even playing that game?

Raiding is already the strongest simple strat we have - no need to buff it further. For the sake of balance of strategies raiding actually should be nerfed, not buffed.

And TBH I think many of thes “nerf walls!” people hate walls only because it provides a bit of protection against raids. They figured out who strong raids are, think they can cheese it to the maximum and can’t accept that walling is just an important tool to balance the OP-ness of raiding compared to the other simple strats. And they usually also wall themselves cause they know how devastating counterraids can be. So the whole “walls OP” narrative is actually hypocrit. It’s not about walls, it’s about “I want to kill you cause you have no defence, but you can’t kill me cause I have!”.

Especially nerfing early walling is absurd, cause you only want to early wall if you know you have a civ with very low early agression potential against a civ with high early agression potential - as it delays your rushes. If you then even can’t half-wall your base you have basically no chance against early agression civs. Either way they can hit you first and when you fought them back somehow, they just walled behind their agression and you can’t even get a counter-raid in.

I mean it would be OK if all civs had comparable early agression potential, but that’s just not the case. There are a lot of civs designed around their later powerspikes.

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Or just stop nerfing walls because they have already been nerfed to oblivion. If you’re still consistently losing to walls, then you’re just bad at adapting to another strategy.

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its not always about losing to walls, i hate these incessant strawman arguments

towers werent nerfed because they were too good, arabia wasnt made more open because players couldnt beat wallers…

its because they lead to unpleasant experiences to a degree, people are pushing for the right balance between offense v defence…

last year’s arabia, hardly featured any feudal fights because walling and map gen encouraged FC. and players get frustrated having this lengthy eco build up into castle instead of fighting…

EW and aoe4 has rectified this, but in the meantime devs are clearly trying to encourage more fighting in feudal…

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But walls are just such an important part of strategic balance…
I wouldn’t change them, I rather would make it more revarding to be “proactive”.

Do you understand what I mean?

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For me, EW is such a bad example of going in the right direction. An average EW game is barely longer than it takes to queue for said game 11.

Anyhow they kept nerfing early aggression over the time, so no wonder it died out…

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But that’s only because devs decided to make several EW maps + bans, isn’t it? I think one map (runestones) is perfect for EW. Short queue, short matches.

Or is there another map EW players prefer? I’m not into this scene.

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Games just snowball very very fast. I stopped playing it, because I don’t like such short games, but when I tried it, the whole games lasted like 5-9 mins. Easiest wins ever, but no satisfaction. On the other hand, losing also doesn’t seem to teach you much, because it was probably down to one literal mistake.

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