I have to disagree, but here you see the dichotomy between a defender's and an attacker's perspective on map design, I reckon.
The front walls are plainly obnoxious to hold, moreso than any castle I've defended before. The wooden roofed section to the left of the gatehouse is too dangerous to keep people on top of because of lack of cover, and it requires a ladder to even reach it from inside. There is an easily accessible way to drop down and get
behind attackers on the walls in two spots because of the side roof of a building behind and between the middle-left tall tower and the gatehouse. That middle-left tall tower itself is easily reachable by laddering from multiple sides and because of its size (large outer surface to catch ladders, small inner space) and twisting stairway is hard to defend against people coming from outside.
We defended them less and less each time because they're difficult walls to try and hold, and, really, it's a town. There
should be more to it than just the walls.
There is also the case of catapults rendering the entire front section worthless. Once that's done, there are only the open courtyard (with at least three ways for attackers to access) and the archway corridor remaining.
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.
Don't you "not really" me, the map is smaller than any other town and that is the truth.
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.
Because of the one-dimensional nature of Dhirim, it quickly becomes a fight only of attrition, with chokepoints favoring the defense. The only choice is to grind through one path, where almost every other fief on the map has at least two different ways to approach/ways for defenders to spread out.
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)
There is a doorway to the second floor of the keep that's blocked off, but a whole second area to the left of the wall inside the archway chokepoints would have to be put in for it to be reachable. Any second area like that beyond the current open courtyard area would probably improve the map, so it's an idea worth looking at.
The problem with mapmaking in this case is that the keep is, for the most part, one scene object. It either gets scaled on the whole, moved, or removed and possibly replaced.
Edit: To clarify, the walls are bad, but not irrevocably broken, as the doorway chokepoints are. The map balance as a whole, however, does not revolve around them, and the more usable portion of map made unavailable where the rest of it remains unchanged will tip the balance askew too far in the opposite direction. Many castles and towns have rooms with tiny chokepoints and flags inside, the thing that makes this case so egregious is that defenders can't really spread out, so those are the only flags they wind up spawning from early on, and that there are so many inside one single building.
