Some good and balanceed map?

[Beorne]

I haven't he time to try the (mostly beatiful) m free maps for Dom2.
Graphically I love the Lutes map, but I do not know what map are fun and balanced.

Could you advice me on some good and not too big map (we are a few players)?

Thank you very much.

[Arralen]

"Karan" is great nice with 8..12 players.

Haven't tested "Paraganos".
"Cradle of Dominions" is a great map, too, but to big for your purposes.

[Beorne]

Thank you!
Someone has tried the smaller maps and can tell me about??

We are 4 players and I don'want computer controlled. They can seriously advantage or disvantage players.

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Beorne:
Thank you!
Someone has tried the smaller maps and can tell me about??

We are 4 players and I don'want computer controlled. They can seriously advantage or disvantage players.

For the smaller maps - Aran might be okay with 4 players, if you give a 'mulligan' option, where someone can on the 2nd turn call mulligan and get a restart. The reason for this is mainly that Aran, for some reason, has never been set up decently to where people can't have the worst of the possible starting provinces. (Might someone from Illwinter be listening?) Starting on the tips of the peninsulas, in particular, often dooms a player if the 2 land neighbors they can attack are things like knights or amazons.

Urgaea and Cirlani are both quite a bit better - somewhat ... circular, so there aren't as many dead end provinces - some starting positions are better than others, especially depending on where the others start, but not dead-in-the-water bad.

I haven't had a chance to look too close at a couple of the other, new, small maps on Illwinter, but they might be okay as well.

Good luck!

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Arralen:
Haven't tested "Paraganos".
"Cradle of Dominions" is a great map, too, but to big for your purposes.

The creator of these maps suffers from the habit of "too many terrain flags" overload. This results in a preponderance of impassable provinces with no population. Tough to play. Zen has modified the Cradle in his Cradle of Zen to alleviate some of this, but Paragonas is unchanged.

Also, you can get that really crappy start on a one-province island surrounded entirely by water. If this happens to you, you're screwed.

[tinkthank]

I'm currently in the process of fixing some of these; more info later....