Essamir redesign is awesome, but lattice has made it incredibly zerg-centric

[Badjuju]

Cant say enough about the new map design, particularly the bases, however the lattice has ruined what I would consider healthy battle flow.

Essamir prior to the lattice, was great in terms of battle flow. You would have a zerg or two, then a number of decent sized smaller fights which tended to be very balanced in numbers. Even if they weren't, numbers are not as decisive in determining the victor in smaller fights and they end up being very competitive fights. You had a great variety of battles and lots of room to make tactical decisions on how you are going to approach conquering the map.

Post lattice, everyone is funneled into a few zergs, which are almost never even fights. Those extremely large battles are almost always very off balanced, and often not enjoyable whether your the one steam rolling or the ones getting stomped. When you limit the number of options for this many people to fight to such a degree, your bound to have massive imbalances. If 70% of your faction are hitting one location, that only leaves 30% to fight at the other. When you have more avenues of attack, the numbers tend to balance out allot more and you have the option to make more reasonable infantry shifts. I spent more time looking for a good fight than actually fighting it seems, typically only finding huge spam festivals.

Beyond having trouble finding good fights, the meta game has taken damage in my opinion as well. How your going to tactically approach the map, and your options of attack are severely limited. As I said before, forces are funneled into a few avenues of attack, instead of leaving empires to chose what they think will be the best way to conquer their enemy.

Overall essamir is a 100% zerg centric map. Battles are almost never even, and often can be too big for the base it is taken place at. With this design pre-dictating battle flow and doing so with so little options, numbers are all that really matter.

The only way I see this being less of a problem is with the implementation of continent locking, where the lack of constant 3-way fights will open up the map more.

I am usually against hasty judgements with the idea of feeling things out before complaining. However, i feel the lattice made indar worse, and is even a bigger problem on Essamir. As a PS1 vet, I was an advocate for the lattice initially, but will admit I was wrong. It is awful getting funneled, especially when there is this many people to get funneled.