Map Concepts Based on Starcraft

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

Objectives:

 

Make early game harassment possible by making most resources rest at the fringe of the initial borders.

 

Make expansion an important strategic choices by limiting the number of resources at each viable Civic Centre placements and giving good pockets to place new Centres full of meaningful resources.

 

Make Scouting an important stage of the game by limiting the number of initial hunted animals to be collected at the Civic Centre.

 

Balance between chokepoints and open terrain to diversify the types of possible engagements by balancing between offence and defence, making there be a limited but multiple number of windows of attack.  

 

Possible Objections:

 

This seems to make the game seem way more Starcraft-like when 0 A.D. had clear roots to Age of Kings: why the shift in map design?

 

While there are many connexions between 0 A.D. and Age of Kings, concepts such as the citizen soldier, differences in building uses, and passable forests make 0 A.D’s meta far more chaotic since choke-points become few and meaningless and citizen soldiers set an entirely different pace.

    Also a new map design can provide maps with more intriguing strategic depth since builds would be based largely on which resources are placed where. 

 

Below I have a mockup of a hypothetical minimap.  The shading represents the elevation: the darker the shading, the higher the ground.