With Jacko's help we were able to pick up on
Gnjus and Gazda's map balancing project, following a different approach that should improve native village maps a lot.
Last time there was a lot of flattening. It sounded good on paper, nobody likes climbing steep hills out of spawn or watching 1 team camp a hill while the other camps the village every round. There was no way to test how the flattening will go without letting the maps be played for a while, and well it didn't turn out so well. Although the map ladders were removed, people quickly learned to bring ladders for archers and almost every round ended in a roofcamping contest since with the flat ground ranged could get a 360 degree shooting angle from almost any roof. And of course there was the cav problem, that was advantaged too much by the general flattening.
So this time, learning from our mistakes we went for a different approach. Rather then flattening, invisible barriers were set around the top of the steepest hills/mountains to prevent camping and only in extreme cases the hills near villages were lowered - they are low enough not to be frustrating to climb at snail speed, but high enough to offer cover from ranged and cav; also, lower hills mean they are easier to be attacked if one team decides to camp the top.
No flattening was done inside the villages and on flat desert village maps some fences were added to slow down cav.
Most map ladders were removed (especially the bugged ones present in most desert village maps), except roofs low enough to jump on, all roofs require player ladders for access.
Some villages were moved entirely to the center of the map, and all spawns were balanced trying to ensure both teams reach the village at the same time.
So far there are 51 villages done - native villages 60-110. They were added to the EU1 and EU4 rotation, while all native village maps were removed. You can get them here
http://www.mbrepository.com/file.php?id=3134 if you want to review them. You are free to use them on your servers, all credits for the maps go to Jacko.
The remaining 1-59 maps are a work in progress, when they will be finished we will hopefully have 110 non-repeating balanced village maps in the rotation.
Looking forward to the feedback on this, use this topic to report any unbalances or bugs you encounter. This can be considered an open-source project, if you think you can improve one or several maps you are free to do so and submit it here to be analyzed.
