I was playing Slaughtered as BE earlier, and our team managed to avoid that horrible valley by swimming through the lake and building a forwards rax very early in the game. Obviously, that's not something you can generally pull off if the enemy is alert... but it was fun. I mean, it's always fun when you win, but even when things were at a standstill, it was much more fun than that cramped little chokepoint. So. How about simply flattening most of the mountains on the right-hand side of Slaughtered? Leave a small opening to the NF area at the top (possibly tightening the existing opening between the area with the ref, and the area with the lake-side), and the BE area at the bottom... but eliminate the long valley, for the most part. Essentially, change the map to shift the confrontation on the right-hand side up a bit, to the plain on the side of the lake. This might require revising the area just north of it in order to keep things defensible for NF, but overall I think the map would be much improved. Yes, yes, more open plains. But wouldn't be too big, and the fact that it borders the water keeps things interesting. And nobody likes that damn valley.
Valley fails tbh. I lose more games there for no reason whatsoever. I know, I know i'll draw some flak for this, but NF seems to have a little bit of an advantage. When it gets late game and arty shells are flying overhead, most of the time, a counter rush by BE just won't cut it, and get completely destroyed in the valley. Flattening the valley, could make it more of a fight. And yae, I do lose as NF too, so i'm not saying it's critically unbalanced, but it's one of my favourite maps and even I know somethings wrong.
If anything should be done to slaughtered, we should move down the BE ref on the other side of the vally/sbend hills fist. Be mainly looses because NF shells it with arties, aswell as the base, while BE has no chance of shelling NF ref/Base
Or heighten the sky box so you can rocket ranged cannon arty shells into the sky from be and hit all their bases.
Their are enough open maps in empires thanks for trying to force everyone to play open maps. Im not wrong I have another oppinion as you, but you are wrong cause you seem to think your oppinion is absolutly right and everyone that doesnt think like you is wrong.
lower skybox. Arty is just fugging fuggly on that map, it really is. As for the valley, I wouldn't be against some tunnels or something that makes that NF area north of SBend a bit more contested.
I agree with Aquillion. But an alternative is simply to have slaughtered as a low player map, as is it when there gets a lot of people in the valley that you can't push. http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=8182
I agree'd with mayama's first post, and I massively endorse the post above. True trench warfare like you don't see on any other map occours in that valley, it can get really intense and fun. If you want to lower the skybox to prevent artilliary, frankly you've failed. Utterly failed. You're introducing an bug into the game intentionally to try to balance out the game. This is, obviously a terrible way to balance the game.
They don't call it slaughtered for nothing. There really aren't that many chokepoints like it where you can get 20-30 people battling it out in a little valley with tanks and mines and everything. Also nothing promotes teamwork as well as just shoving the entire team into the same spot.
Maybe you shouldn't maek useless posts. The bridge stays.. Also, BE is wayyy undermined on that map. If BE takes s-bend, they have to contest through aa looong chokepoint to reach bridge. If NG takes s-bend, they can take BE's SE base or middle base. Then from there to SE/MID/Main.
decision is devs, not yours also ,lowering the skybox is a pretty good idea, no more arty fests choke can be really good, but engys shouldn't be able to place walls there(com should). Walls can be really helpfull there but its wayyyy too easy to seal it off.
There needs to be artillery on that map. Or you will have stalemates that go on forever, until someone griefs their team out of that chokepoint lock, and metaplays the whole server into a different map. That happens, and is that not a sign that chokepoint warfare is not fun? Static battle-lines are not fun either? Eliminating the artillery use would just make for even longer games, where teams are locked in boredom. Sorry Mayama for being an asshole. Was angry during posting.