They have Arabia for that 
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But you are mixing combat with vision. Nobody is feeling strange building a outpost on a top of a mountain near the sea and you see minus area than building another outpost near of the first one but on a plain terrain?
I wonder what the motivation is behind not using mirrored mapsā¦ You can randomly generate half a map and mirror it so that both teams have the same opportunitiesā¦
May i say that i do not like mirored map.
Every one will know where every thing is and will not need to scout.
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- How do you know where everything is if you didnāt scout your half of the map?
- How do you know where they built all of their buildings and what units or specific buildings they have built if you havenāt scouted their base?
- Is it really not worth having the ability to offer competitiveness that we see in SC or SC2 ?
- Do you think in SC or SC2 scouting is nonexistant?
I understand that mirrored maps can contribute to balance and can be good for competition.
However randomly generated maps have always been part of AOE games. Whilst this does lead to some advantages and disadvantages, part of the skill is to identify how best to protect yourself or capitalise on the map generation. This also greatly aids map replayability.
Not saying one is better than the other, but AOE has managed to thrive competitively based on these types of maps. So it is not just a case of inserting the SC2 formula into the game. I personally love both SC and AOE. The top AOE players stay the top players despite map generation.
Scouting is obviously very important in both games. SC is more cut throat in this regard in my experience if you fail to scout.
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I think they can just tighten up map gen randomness a bit, no need to throw out the whole system.
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This has definitely been worked on in the past inspired by tournament map generations trying to improve balance, like distance of herdables from town center.
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you can have also randomly generated maps 1/2, then flip mirror like this you have the random but also the fairness and balance
I believe this kind of half map generation has also been trialled but, like I said, the current generation is kind of built into the skill ceiling in AOE games. Half map generation also did not become popular with the community.
Random map generation does increase the importance of scouting and knowing the strengths and weaknesses of all civilisations at every stage of the game. This is a rather attractive trait to have despite presenting some balancing issues. Again, AOE is a lot less cut throat and there are more opportunities to overcome the map with a slower pace in the game and similar unit options in each civilisation.
As above, variance can be minimised by tweaking the map generation and top players still win. It does not seem like the biggest of issues based on how previous AOE games have unfolded.
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This. While the exact positions of every single entity (forests, resource nodes, boar spawns, etc.) are randomized a bit, the general rulesets are mirrored on most maps. Both parties will always have the same amount of resources, and the same general layout (distance to trees, gold, stone, hunts).
It still forces the players to scout both their own AND the opponents map and make adjustments to their gameplans, but it is never unfair.
The new arabia shows how completely streamlining a map script looks likeā¦ 
AOE4 already showed problems with those basic rules. E.g. the wildly different fish distribution around islands and in the black forest ponds.
Completely scrapping the height bonus system just because you cannot fix your map generation method seems like mindless overadjustment.
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Simply treat them in two different ways:
- Competitive/Tournament maps: symmetric in terms of resources, terrains (heights included), etc. with a little randomness
- Casual maps: balancing is not so important so larger room of randomness is okay
Problem solved.
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That would not be inserting a āSC2ā formula. SC2 uses maps produced by a human. This would be āAOE formulaā randomly generated maps.
Oftentimes one player will spawn on top of a hill and another will spawn in a valley.
So itās not always the case that you had to work hard to get the hill advantage. You were lucky to be born with it.
Thatās what they tried to get rid of.
I guess they should have made starting locations equal opportunity but they did not.
Hills still grant LOS tho. And cavalry canāt charge uphill, is that correct?
It seems this is not true. Maybe it was before, but they said they reduced hill benefits to just line of sight.
And that is what I cannot understand.
In casual gameplays that is not a problem. You even have completely random maps, or real-world maps with no symmetry at all.
In competitive gameplays everything needs to be spawned as symmetrical as possible. Resources, waters, obstacles, erc. and I have no idea why they just cannot make heights symmetric as well.
Youāre telling me I have been fighting for and building on high ground and I wasnāt crazy to notice there werenāt any bonuses, even minor?
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Was not an issue in AOE2 and itās simple map scriptingā¦ so yeah, donāt know why it should be a problem know.
If they cannot fix the map generation til release thats one thing. Scrapping related game mechanics as a ābalanceā attempt on the other hand is a really lazy way out of it and only postpones the problemā¦ They have to fix it at some point to make it fair, or completely remove any hill related features (-> also scrapping the LOS bonus).
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