Bluestone Mountain - Great map, poor game.

[phoenixffyrnig]

Anyone else played on this new map? Looks good to me, but unfortunately it seems to be a coin toss of a map, mainly due to random TC spawn mechanism, but also partly down to the map design too. Let's ignore TC spawn for now, it is obvious it has issues, especially now that terrain effects plays a key role, and I imagine this would take a lot of work to solve.....

As to the map itself, it does look pretty good, but where it becomes unviable is that it has 3 open areas, and 3 enclosed areas. The open areas have movement boosted by roads, the enclosed areas have movement retarded by trees plus impassable terrain, immediately penalising the folks who start in the tight spaces.

Secondly, the borderlands between open and enclosed areas are completely packed out at the start, full of terrain or neutral units, therefore any "spare" TCs can only really go in the open areas, further increasing their advantage.

It seems to be that most launches with 4 or 6 players and normal or many TCs will bestow a TC advantage of about 2:1 in favour of those in who begin in the open areas. This is clearly beyond the parameters of a decent game.

My practical recommendations would be....

* to the map désigner - remodel the terrain of the middle ground between the regions so that an enclosed start opens out and an open start closes in (to at least give space for a TC to spawn near the bad start points and vice versa)
* to the players - only play this map with few TCs. Anything else is a lottery.
* to the powers that be, TC placement is becoming more and more critical, not only with terrain features but also with the rapidly growing number of strong players. Possibly time to think of different ways we could be doing this better.