Sounds like you have no idea how games with competitive scene become successful… How slightly more balanced maps would ruin the game for casual players?!
The “group of friends” that can play with custom unbalanced maps if that’s what they call “fun”, not the opposite…
And normally there is so much difference in skill level in a group of friends that I bet that is not the maps that will cause the “funny” situations!
Why, in poker, isn’t everyone dealt the exact same hand, then? 
Some games are just better-suited for some organic randomness, imo. AoE happens to be one of them for me. If my nearby lake to fish is 1,253 pixels to the front of my starting TC, and my opponent’s is 1,202 pixels to the back of theirs, I’d be cool with it. That’s my opinion, and you’re welcome to have yours 
If i wanted a game without any randomness in it to resources or what not, i’d play sc2.
I think that a bit of randomness is needed in AoE. Things like knowing when to lure a boar based on its distance are parts of what makes the difference between being skilled or not. If the map was cookie-cutted, and each side mirrored, then it would descend in a basic build order with no decision making.
At the same time I understand that some extreme occurrences in randomness can cause slightly unfair situations. If one want to make an early raid, but the enemy lines are all conveniently placed in easy to wall positions, then yes, it is unfair.
Everyone (including pro players) agrees that some randomness is good for the game. What we need to discuss is what a healthy level of randomness looks like - and that very likely goes into the direction of randomness, which can be handled, but doesn’t come close to affecting the game more than the players decisions.
It’s basically the same with poker. There is some randomness and that is good. But it could easily become too much. For example if you introduced a rule to poker that every time a player runs out of chips he flips a coin and if it is heads he gets 50% of the richest players chips - well you got a lot more randomness into the game and you’d certainly get situation that some people would perceive as “fun”. But I’d argue that this would be a terrible change to the poker rules, as it is a bad kind of randomness. Play with your friends that way if you want, but it’s not good for an official ruleset.
It’s the same with age of empires. Some randomness is good (and we have that and we aim for that). But there can certainly be too much of it. So we need to discuss where that boundary lies and I think we did so for the past 20 years and I think the state of the game in that regard is very good right now and one of the main reasons of why it is so successfull.
And to be fair I think even most of the casual players might like the idea of total randomness at first glance, but realize this kind of fun diminishes very quickly after experiencing it a few times…
Look at all the big games, which introduce crazy game modes from time to time. It’s basically never permanent. Why? Because it’s fun for a short time, but at some point most of the players want to go back to a more stable version of the game.
Would love to know how this thread was resurrected? What did the necro search for to get this back. 
For the people pushing for so much randomness:
As i mentioned before… If it was purely random then statistically someone will get screwed over every single game… Like flipping a coin 100 times and getting 100 tails in a row.
Its very funny for yall to say you want random and to get 50 heads and 50 tails across 100games. But you will also cry if you had 100 tails in a row, and couldn’t wall your base, with 2 forward boar, all gold up front and your sheep closer to the enemy base than your own… And thus certain things have to adhere to an algorithm to ensure that everyone has the feeling they are getting a fair deal. It’s far more punishing to be the losing outlier
Now who determines what that threshold of “unlucky” should be? Is getting screwed 100 times too much? 50 times? 10 times? Twice in a row? What makes it fair for one guy to get screwed and another not? And that’s why we argue for such a high level of algorithmic over random distribution…
Maybe @PKClown was just reading the forum, or doing various forum searches, and came across this popular thread and wanted to contribute their thoughts. At least they posted here rather than start a new thread, which I think is what is preferred.
Sometimes people don’t pay attention to the last post date. Come to think of it, this forum makes it cumbersome to do so, with its continual unfolding of more and more posts as you scroll down, trying to get to the bottom. I sometimes just give up and move on to the next thread. Other times, I just give up and post; not knowing when the last post was.
Indeed, given a couple recent events and tournaments that I’ve been following including the ongoing DM World Cup 3 (DMWC3), I wanted to offer my two cents on a relevant topic. And yes, the forum system on here is a bit awkward.
But look, to be clear, I’m not saying turn AoE2 into SC2 or what have you when AoE2 RM is “Random Map” by definition. However, I think there are specific things in terms of maps and resource placement that could give a small or even material advantage to professional players at the highest levels, and so, if we’re talking about tournaments with hundreds to thousands of dollars on the line, I’m all for preserving the fairness and integrity of competition for those people. However, you guys are right - casual players who aren’t playing for professional pride or money will find chaos and randomness to be “fun,” and since their objective is “playing for fun,” that’s fine. At the same time, I’ve been part of AoM tournaments that included rules RE: map vetoes so that players could request restarts without being penalized.
I’m ok with maps being fairer but let’s don’t destroy the randomness. I agree with you though on this point tho - don’t do everything with t90 and the 10 in mind.
No one wants the randomness of the game destroyed, but there shouldn’t be stuff like sheeps spawning at 40 tiles from your tc or no woodline + 3 gold and 2 stones in a single spot
When people complain about randomness, they usually mean extreme cases, like all your gold being forward or woodlines being extremely far away from your tc. Nobody wants randomness being removed, we just wanted to remove those extreme cases when map generation is basically screwing you over.