You know, I’ve been thinking about why exactly people like to play maps like arabia, bf, arena and nomad more than any other maps. I thought to myself that it was maybe because they’re more basic and straight forward than most of the other maps, but then I watched some youtube vids of matches being playing on scandinavia and oasis, and I just thought to myself “why aren’t those maps played more often? they seem balanced enough for me”, but then one of those days I found out why in another topic from this forum.
This is the link of the topic if anyone feels like giving it a look, but the most important is here:
there’s a print of a map generation from scandinavia someone else posted, and if you pay attention one of the players is completely surrounded by trees, only having a single tile opening at the bottom, and this completely changed the balance of the match giving one of the players a huge advantage over the other, and as the other user said, the reason competitive players have stuck to those map is because their generation are much more likely to give fairer matches than others, so I feel like instead of complain about which maps should be choosen or not, they should instead work on the maps generation so that other maps are also viable for competitive play, making matches fair more often than not. If something like that was done then I wouldn’t mind at all having more maps at the pool.
In fact, I personally would like to see the ranked system being split into 3 elo categories if the maps get reworked for competitive play: land maps, hybrid maps and water maps. I think we can all agree that the way we play the game can change drastically depending on how important water is on the map, and some players just love/hate having to deal with ships, and not only that but even the civs’ strenght can change depending on it. (I for example like playing land maps more than anything, and I love playing cumans which are great for land maps, and altho I can still adapt a bit with them to play hybrid maps I would definitely not choose them to play a water map. I’d pick Koreans instead, their new bonus makes ships cheaper to produce and their towers would greatly help defend my docks from atks and my shore from transport ships. It’ll require from me a much different skill set to play on water than on land)