Post 19 Feb 2013, 05:28 by Categoricus
Let's go back to the topic.
First of all I prefer asymmetric maps, which are often wrongly titled as unbalanced. Life simply takes place on diverse lands, but this doesn't mean that one cannot take advantages from the others' disadvantages or vice versa. At least one side of a war zone should be divided for territories fitting different kinds of role playing within a company.
Secondly it's quite unreal that you have an opportunity for a time of a middle-range battle to fetch tones of resources, or to set up a metropolis however, there's no reason for warfare in a heavy lack of materials or human supplies, so I'd vote for medium-sized locations where map size is not concerned.
Thirdly I prefer defense to offense, for I interpret war as an essential tool for setting up peace in hard times, and if peace is taken as the objective, than priority is to retain valuable resources for further use, then kill or destroy if unavoidable. This makes me look for well-defensible locations, and maps having the most well-defensible locations.
It's also important for party members to easily get rid of attacks affecting allies, in case he doesn't currently have the appropriate resources to set up an efficient defense, let alone that the least weakness of one can take the attention of the entire hostile party, making isolated defense completely barren.
Last but no least is the choice of branches, which mainly depends on the available materials, namely wood against iron. I claim best if the exploitable amount of iron is enough to keep up for a long time in conjunction with wooden units, but not enough for the enemy to let him omit training wooden units and shortly overtake your diverse units with his purely iron-based army. This seems like a scissors-paper-stone game if no one performs a worthwhile discovery, let alone cheating by running multiple instances of the game client, which should be prohibited by hard coding.
Taking all these five factors into account, my winner is The Same Rocks, although it's directly followed by the The Cracked Land.
Primus Christianus Hungaricus Categoricus