Ranked Map Suggestion

Ranked is coming some time soon, and I’ll probably jump back and play the game on the reg a bit more. But 1v1 QM in this game sometimes ruins the game experience. Imbalance aside, one thing that really breaks my experience is map design. Here’s a quick wishlist:

Remove French pass. Remove Mountain Pass from ranked pool.

  • Not only do these maps heavily favor certain civs, they take too long. Average game length should be 25 minutes across the board, both map and civ. There will be outliers that take 40+, but they are tolerable.

More hybrid maps

  • Don’t introduce them until you fix water balance. But water raids should be a common occurrence.
  • Amphibious raids should be a common occurrence also.

Speaking of… Rethink Confluence.

  • It’s a really bad map design when it comes to hybrid maps, really. The “water rush distance” in the middle is too short.

Varied map sizes

  • Why are all maps square? The overall playable area should be the same. Some maps should be narrow and long. I really wish that maps like Mongolian Heights is a bit narrower but longer so that width of the river in the middle is wider. Right now, it’s a really bad map.

Reduce map randomness.

  • Some randomness is cool. But game-determining things SHOULD NEVER BE. Whose brilliant idea was it to make relic distribution random AND make a civ completely reliant on them? How many HRE matches are literally determined by relic placements on the map? How many games has HRE lost/won from the beginning without us every knowing? Make it so that 4 relics spawn evenly distributed along an axis of the map. Have 1 spawn along the center line of the map. The walkable (note the emphasis) distance between 3 relics and players’ first TC should be exactly the same for both players.
2 Likes

This part 100%. I despise looking back at a replay to see the locations of all the relics and seeing that my team only had 2 relics in our base while the opposing team had 4.

I would go further and remove the intensely boring Dark Age from the game and start all players with ten villagers to bring the time down to 15 minutes across the board, and to make it 10x more fun for Single Player lovers to get a boom going earlier so they can spend two hours against an AI.

Remove Mountain pass but make another Map narrow and long. I dont see the logic here.
They dont need to remove Maps from the pool if they just implement a Veto System like in Aoe2 for example.
And some breaking news, there will always be Maps where certain Civs are favored.
Arguing with Mountain pass favouring civs, well Dry Arabia also favours civs.
Artificially reducing Gameplay time and forcing an average time should NOT be on their list.
Some games take longer, some shorter.
If you dont have the time to play, dont.

2 Likes

I specifically said Mongolian heights. Which would have 3 land crossing as well as water for landing ships. Also, by the waters, the map is wide open. Mountain Pass has 1 chokepoint. See the logic there?

I already said longer games are tolerable if they happen time to time. Not a constructive statement. Not to mention written with needlessly ill-mannered tone.

Why not? They want people to play more, right? Less hour-long games mean more matches per day. Shorter games mean more people will feel comfortable jumping in and out.

1 Like

100% agree, also remove black forest too!