The town/castle of New Dhirim has some extremely defensible positions that are borderline unfair. The castles super powered defenses start at the outer walls of which you can only attack one side. The one wall that you can put ladders on is fairly balanced for both sides including the gatehouse. However once attackers are inside the castles walls all the defensive team has to do is fall back to their inner keep to turtle the rest of the battle. Now I have no problem with turtling at your last defensive position, but it is unfair to provide only a single door way to charge through and no way of laddering up to the roof. If played on defense this is probably the easiest castle to protect seeing as the enemy can only win if they somehow manage to go single file through a doorway and kill the entire defense waiting inside the doorway. When playing this map I felt like a cow going through a murder chute...
The map is not completely broken I believe if the invisible walls are fixed it will be a much more fairly balanced castle.
Simplest solution to make this on par with every other city on the map -make it an impassable doorway into the keep and remove the flags inside it. Problem solved, no idiotic single file pathway with 50 guys overheading/shooting/kicking as each attacker goes through the doorway single file.
That would not make it on par with every other town on the map - Dhirim is tiny. It's already much smaller than any of the other revamped towns, to the point where it's not even much bigger than the native town maps. What you're talking about is reducing the total area and number of flags the defenders have to work with on a map already significantly smaller than others of its type while changing no other aspect of the map. It deserves to be looked at more than that.
The clusterfuck doorway chokepoint is bad, yes, but the only thing the map has going for it for the defending side is a single thoroughfare of chokepoints. There's nowhere else to go to try and defend once the disproportionately small amount of walls have been bypassed. Cutting the only area it's possible to defend for a prolonged period of time in half won't fix the map and make it balanced, it would only turn it backwards and make it a cakewalk for the attackers.
Also, here are the parts in other threads where people have talked about Dhirim specifically, if anyone cares to reference what people have already said about it.
A few replies starting from this post (http://forum.meleegaming.com/scene-editing/strategus-city-improvement-project/msg813948/#msg813948) and a more heated and dramatic conversation about the war surrounding the town starting from this post (http://forum.meleegaming.com/diplomacy/summer-lovin/msg815263/#msg815263).
Not really. You just need to actually defend your walls instead of running away back to a broken inner keep area first chance you got. Combined with 2 chokepoints I would say its very similar to curaw or ichamur, maybe slightly better with how strong those 2 chokepoints still are being narrow and controllable.
Part of the issue is respawn timers. Fall back to the choke points with barely defending the front gives defense great respawn timers the rest of the fight. Attackers because it takes a lot more to break those points by the end of that funnel of death have very high respawn timers by comparrison, makign the taking of the place harder than any other.
Not sure eliminating all of the back is needed.... Opening that door completely and or allowing an access point from above would be helpful. Taking away the mass amount of rooms and flags inside would also help. (not just making it wider)