Opinion: Map Feels Better with Low Land Mass and Low Density Settings!

[Hawthorne]

First, really enjoying the game!

Second, I'm finding ways to tweak the experience more to my liking. For instance, on my first game or two, I found the map hard to parse. There were clusters of forests/cities/wire weed EVERYWHERE, congesting combat at every turn, and I could not get a good feel for the underlying layout of tiles. There were too many things on top of each other all the time.

So far I'm enjoying the following map settings:

Land Mass: Very Low
All Terrain Densities: Low (except Necron cities, didn't want to affect balance there)
Wildlife: Low

In general, the low settings are not catastrophic... the delta seems to be small, but noticeable. The overall effect, for me, is that the world takes on a more recognizable shape that I can visually parse and strategize around.

Cleaner tiles mean I can better decide where to plunk my base... the desert/energy tiles are THERE, the stone is over THERE, I get it. Plus the "Very Low" Land Mass setting creates some interesting shapes to the land -- again, it's not catastrophic. There isn't water everywhere. There's just that much more shape to the land, a chokepoint here and there, that I can recognize and strategize around.

Less forest/city tiles everywhere also mean that I not only have better fields of fire (or can more easily create them by clearing blocking features), but the forest THERE and the city THERE also become more strategically distinct.

Less wildlife lets me explores slightly more, but their presence is still very much felt. It's just not every monster type all the time.

If you haven't experimented with changing the densities, check it out and see if you like it better!

[Sunday_Driver]

I'm gonna try these settings. Marching through forest and narrow passes at my last push towards Orcs was a pain with many of my units blocked behind doing nothing because there was not enough room around for troops.

[A.J]

Agreed. Granted, I only put Forests and Imperial Ruins to low. Made the game 25% more enjoyable for me. It seemed impossible to even move around before.

[MladoTouan]

Absolutely agreeing with your post.

I very quickly noticed that the game was more enjoyable with pretty much everything set as "Low" aside from Necron tombs (since well they need some spots to expand), as otherwise there's too much of a mess made of forets/ruins/wires or whatever. It feels much more "natural" and playable with a low density of them, and as you said, it may also be considered as more strategical.

I didn't tweak a lot the landmass setting yet, but I've highly appreciated what the generator came up with when it comes to land and water environment shapes.

Of course, low wildlife means a more "playable game" (less chance to meet a pack of killer robots/scorpions), as well as a game more/quicklier focused toward faction battles.

[Shin]

Interesting. I need to try these map settings.
What is even the difference between forests and imperial cities? They seem to give the same cover.

[Hawthorne]

Forests and cities do give the same cover, but forests also hide units from view unless you're adjacent. This lets you, for example, park something in a forest tile by your base that enemies can't see, effectively ambushing them.

[Shin]

Originally posted by Hawthorne:

Forests and cities do give the same cover, but forests also hide units from view unless you're adjacent. This lets you, for example, park something in a forest tile by your base that enemies can't see, effectively ambushing them.

Thanks for the explanation!

[Rok]

Great to see people enjoying different settings; I personally favor high land mass, because I like having space to maneuver and I also love fighting the wild life and finding optimal ways to beat them.

[Shin]

I've tested the cover and imperial ruins also hides from view unless adjacent. It seems there is no difference at all.

[Shin]

Water seems to behave weird if you set things on low land mass. There is only a huge ocean with nothing else in the corner but not evenly distributed on the map. I wish it would create more lakes and interesting chokepoints.

[Shin]

Originally posted by Mr Eos:

The real fun begins, when you bump every setting to Very high.

You think I joke..... I'm not.

Space marines get this unit that can manually clear the land around it. Cannon something... They become invaluable at reproducing the notion of creating roads.

Also assault sqauds and vehicles that ignore movement reduction becomes much more important. Or removing wire weed with the Thunderfire cannons. It changes a lot of gameplay.

[Larkin]

Excuse me but what does exactly mean land mass in the game ?

[wabbit]

Originally posted by Larkin:

Excuse me but what does exactly mean land mass in the game ?

Low land mass means more water.

[LordOfPants]

I found that adding more factions makes the game much more fun. On a medium map 4 factions can basically each do their own thing if they want, bumping it to 6 factions means you still have a decent amount of land to build an additional city or two, but have enemy units right on your border to skirmish with. When I used the default settings it felt like 'spend as long as you want sitting here, then go find the enemies when you get around to it'.

[Larkin]

Thank you wabbit

[jesterr01]

I was playing with a friend last night with everything on medium except land mass and world size (both max) and there were one tile spaces of oceans and numerous rivers and chokepoints...so many that by turn 150 we had barely gotten control of our areas from wildlife. No idea why, but there were imperial outposts like every 8th tile or so. I was playing Eldar and made Khaine just to cleave a path through the wilderness. It was fun, but really frustrating at first...and we were too hard-headed to start over.