Playability: 5
(Solo-style or large army-building map that encourages play with mastery spells. Good playability for relaxing long games)
Balance: 4
(Mostly even play)
Creativity: 4
(The introductory terrain is highly abundant with goldmines and mana. The map-style starts with a slow conquering of isolated local domains and builds into a nearly limitless resource fuelled feud. The starting nearby cities are primarily opposing races, likely for the purpose of encouraging early aggressive play into enemy territory. A wonderful creative element to this map is the focus on mana resource overabundance and therefore the forced consideration for dealing with level 4 spells on a large scale. (e.g. holy fear changing the scale out of favour of large armies of evil units))
Map Design: 3
(Bonus points for not using endless inverted terrain underground. Bonus points for not creating jinxy teleporter back-doors for race domains. The map design feels isolated with single-file choke points. If the map had been created as a small map with external gold income instead of many mines, the threat-level and map pressure would greatly improve. The AI sometimes does not know how to explore the map. In my play-through, the Dark Elves did not discover any other race until turn 43).
Story/Instructions: 3
(7 lands)
Additional Comments:
Room for improvement, but all-in-all it's not a terrible map.
Posted on 01/01/02 @ 12:00 AM