The current arabia is bad imo.
I dont understand why its even called arabia, should be renamed into hideout 2.0 or something. The reason why I say that is, on that current arabia its basicly all about camping behind walls and boom.
There is barely any feudal agression. And that has its reasons.
How can you do damage with drush or m@a if the wood lines are only 2 tiles away from the tc fire range? Why would you even go for scouts if all you will hit with them is palisades and houses?
Its just too easy to wall, like 90% of the games, players are fully walled before the time scouts or archers can arrive, or even in dark age already.
In castle age the passive playin just goes on, everybody walls and booms.
The agression basicly starts in Imperial Age.
If I want games like that, I see no reason for me to play Arabia. I can just go for Arena.
Arabia is not supposed to be like this.
Last year we had KOTD4 Arabia version. That one was nice.
And Two years ago we had a way more open one.
What happened to those?
I dont understand why the Arabia was changed in a way like this.
Anti-wallers won already. There was a series of threads in the past complaining about walls and the map was too closed. They nerfed walls, still was not enough, nerfed walls even more. Some guys still want walls nerfed even more, since they get upset they have to break down a wall.
Sometimes the map is very open. Other times it pretty closed-ish.
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I dont want walls to be nerfed, never did. What I would like to see is a more open Arabia like the original version on Voobly / HD Version.
Current Arabia is more like GA version back in the days, which was designed for beginners to get easier into the game by finding the sheeps faster, not needing to think about uphill damage, and having an easy walloff.
I know there are probably some people who would rather like to play an easy wallablle version, so maybe it could be an option to just put two different arabia into the map pool.
I agree on two things:
Firstly, we should have a “Arabia HD” and an “Evolving Arabia DE”. To offset this, we could forbid people to select two “versions of Arabia” (Arabia HD, Runestones, Lombardia, Kotd Arabia, …) at the same time in the ranked map pool. I guess it is only fair that “Evolving Arabia DE” (or whatever its future name would be) stays in the pool.
Secondly, it would be nice to get more maps like Land Madness. If possible a mixture of Arabia and Land Madness. That is, a map visually like arabia, but with several pseudo-random non-constructible tiles, close to some stones, golds, forests, and in the middle if nowhere.
This would make it near impossible or extremely inconvenient to full wall Defensive players would dir instance have to tower the gold and wood line. This could be compensated by having a little more stone on the map.
The game you are talking about and the game you are playing somehow are not the same we play, arabia doesn’t have woodlines close to the tc so that alone kills your argument, we used to have memb’s arabia before current one which was a woodless map full with hills that prevented any tc expansion due the fact that hills where all around.
The arabia we are using now has small woodlines, archers can fully cover it since feudal age, while in voobly the woodlines were way thicker and large, we even have lakes back which reduces the already small woodlines, the only thing they need to reduce once more are the hills, too many elevations around primary resources.
You seem to be angry cause your old build orders can’t make damage, go man at arms pop 20 followed by archery range, walls can’t stop that.
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Arabia is very open and hilly, get good
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Absolutely. Thats another reason why i made this post, the current map pool is just horrible for any one who likes to play open land maps. No other options besides arabia, which is by far not as open as it used to be.
Obviously we have different definitions of what “close to the tc” means.
I dont know what “membs arabia” looks like but from your description i can tell it sound nice.
Dont know at what elo your playin at but when i go m@a archer against a full walled player, there will be usually no damage done. Walls alone cant stop that true, but all he has to do is build one tower or add a couple skirms and he will get safely to castle age without a single villager lost.
If scouts weren’t so strong at killing villagers I think walling wouldn’t be so necessary. I don’t think walling is the problem, it’s the attackers advantage it provides if not.
The problem is not walling by itself. Quick walls are fine. What im complaining about are fully walled bases (at early ingame time) which deny any units from doing damage to the economy.
When is your army showing up? Also, the more open the map goes, the more people have to small wall. You are actually better off having them full wall, because there’s more weak points. Some of the maps in the past were absolutely horrible. You couldn’t place TCs, so it shut down an eco approach in basically every game, and the woodlines were so far out and so small, a single archer could shut down a woodline, and you only had a few woodlines to start with. It really wasn’t fun at all for most people. Even pros with a more aggressive playstyle, like Hera, eventually started to get bored of it.
I already made a proposal to make walls more expensive but stronger. This would make the decision more a trade-off.
BUT I also think that the raids have become too strong. And that’s also one of the big reasons we read this “enerf walls” threads all the time cause people want to raid the opponents to death all the time. This is the bigger issue in my eyes, when one meta play has become so dominant it leads to people demanding to even further increase the dominancy. Then it becomes really hard.
The game is designed around strategical balance. Raids have become too strong here, that’s why people try to stop them with early walls. Then walls get nerfed because they counter the meta play… at least it feels so.
But why nobody complains about the earlier and earler and with tighter buildorders perfectionated feudal rushes we see in basically every game?
If these rushes were really so easily to stop, why everybody still does them?
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As you mention the woodlines I think thats one of the good changes they made, there are always at least 2 or 3 wood lines in a acceptable distance. Sometimes at the “old” arabia I remember there was only one good wood line and if the opponent got a tower up behind it it was almost like gg.
Well sometimes now you get only one decent woodline, the other one have “lakes” in it, but as far as ive seen, the enemy gets the same watery woodlines then so at least it seems balanced.
I never understood why they made walls weaker, as it still leaves them doin what they made for - preventing the enemy units from reaching your economy. As soon as they are up, it does no big difference so far, in most cases people will still be able to just rewall behind and keep the raids out.
Im not sure about the idea to make walls stronger, as there are stone walls, which already got a buff, and making them more expensive - as far as i know palisades already are more expensive than they used to be.
Im not sure if this will prevent people from walling? Probably not.
Why people play rush? Maybe just because they like it.
I personally dont have problems with early rushes, playin or defending against it, I like both.
But I totally understand that people dont wanna play open against early aggression and wall fast for that reason.
When I was new to the game, I first started with Black Forest. Then as I discovered Arabia, the games were too fast for me. So I switched to another Arabia version called Green Arabia which was a lot easier to defend for a couple months.
But those were lobby games where obviously you choose the version you wanna play before the start.
Basicly what Im sayin is: I would like the opportunity to choose between an open and a more closed Arabia version for ranked games.
Runestones is a perfect version of Arabia tbh, 10/10.
Arabia current has way too many hills surrounding the starting tc.
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I once played a custom Arabia that spawned much more closely to the classic AoC Arabia. The first reaction I had from someone who played it was “feels like home.” I’d love to have a “classic” map playable in the ranked queue in place of the current Arabia. Could be fun to try that out for a map pool.
And still people ALWAYS wall because walls are still freakishly easy to build and insanely strong for feudal army.
Defeats the purpose of a feudal age. Just some walls, some stray army to try and kill maybe a vill or two and then castle age where the game actually begins.
The problem isn’t how open the map is but about the number of woodlines each player gets near their tc. IF there are just two wood lines it would make feudal aggression more feasible. But usually there’s # ## atleast 3 and players close the wall a few mins into feudal.
They should make Arabia more open at the front but always have guaranteed thick woodlines at the back. So sick of having forward woodlines but being so open with no wood at the back.
But I think palisade walls are fine as they are. You can easily break through them in feudal with fletching archers. Or just pick Cumans and use Feudal rams if the lack of early aggression bothers you that much.