The map ‘‘Sea of Worms’’ feels very out of place for ranked, it is very snowbally and very gimmicky. The moment you win water you have access to a ‘‘back island’’ with up to 6 goldmines and a TC, completely shielded off from the rest of the map.
I feel this goes against the current design philosophy for aom retold, we just nerfed the fish upgrades to allow for comeback potential on water maps. I’m telling you, this map is completely unwinnable if you lose water, your opponent will have infinite gold that’s unraidable, an extra tc and to top it all off, the rest of the map is easily wallable, you can just wall off your main with a single wall and then expand to the island in the back. So not only do you have an insane food advantage when winning water, you also have a pop and gold advantage.
What makes this worse is that there are several civs that have a pretty big advantage on water. Set and Isis with plague of serpents, the greeks with scylla and resto/bronze, China with exploding fishing ships and the maelstrom tech. Water battles on AoM retold feel very gimmicky at times, and the outcome of who’s going to win on this map is largely contingent on water battles.
If we need a water map in the ranked pool I’d vote for anatolia, on anatolia losing water sucks, but you can still leverage an advantage by controlling the middle. there are multiple avenues to winning the game that make the map very dynamic. Sea of Worms is just one giant snowball that starts by simply winning water and transporting a few viillagers over.
Spam docks. Use ranged siege. Fortress covering water. Flying Myth units. Underworld Passage Shifting Sands Roc Vortex Nidhogg Yinglong Nezha. Take the other half of the map with a longer trade route and the other 4th TC.
By the time you get a fortress up, a big enough army to SS or UW or a trade route set up the game has already snowballed out of control. This honestly feels like a meme reply ‘‘just send yinglong bro, just send nidhogg haha’’
Even if you somehow UW the island and take their remote base out before they flat out kill you, the opponent will still have a fish economy and most likely a better economy for the majority of the game, and I think you’ve pointed out another weakness of this map where teleportation GP’s like UW and SS are disproportionately strong on this map. I don’t know if that’s a good argument for why this map should stay tbh.
What is proportionally strong? Bronze to win the water or Underworld Passage so it doesn’t matter? What about Bronze on Steppe?
Asymmetry and opportunity cost is the game under Age of Mythology: Retold. Understand it and use it. Why do they have fish economy? Youlost water.
I don’t think the opportunity cost is very high when you’re fighting for water anyway, people fight for fish on medit, people fight for fish on anatolia, I think the ability to fish is enough for people to fight over. My issue with this map is that it gives you access to both fish AND gold AND extra pop, the rest of the map is extremely wallable, it’s not a very interesting map in that aspect either. It’s not a very open map at all.
I wouldn’t compare bronze on an open map like steppe to a UW that can secure you 6 gold mines. Yes, bronze is strong, but there’s way more outplay potential there than simply UW’ing to a remote island on the map. For reference Poseidon only has a 53% winrate on Steppe above 1500 elo. I wonder what the winrate will be on Sea of worms for strong water civs or civs with a teleport GP.
Totally agree. 1v1 ranked should be for ‘standard play’. Putting in maps which require non standard play increases player frustration (they wanted to play standard but forced to play non-standard). I understand the devs want to showcase all the work they did on water units and stuff, so maybe the solution would be to simply delete all of the fish on any map in the 1v1 ranked pool. (Credit to Boit for that idea). That way even for gimmicky maps like Sea of Worms, the reward isn’t too high for getting the gold island. Of course a bunch of ‘boring’ standard land maps would be ideal. In AOE2 ‘Arabia’ is considered the standard map last I checked.