Problem with designing maps for regular arena play using battlegrounds tiles

[Sailor Vulcan]

I've been trying to design maps for regular arena using the battlegrounds tiles, and I encountered a bit of a snag. ALL of the terrain tiles are designed to slow down play, rather than speed it up. This is really good for domination, when you want to make it harder to reach sslaks, but for regular arena it's a problem because it means that longer game strategies have an advantage. This was the core battlegrounds set, and literally every single terrain in it seems to benefit long game strategies over shortgame ones. Secret passages don't have line of sight through them. Corrosive pools and molten rocks hinder. Etc. And there are no earlygame oriented terrain tiles to counter them. It looks like the ONLY possible way to even attempt to make a kind of balanced map using terrain is to make the arena significantly smaller, but that then brings range issues into the mix, and you can't have a tile that's (i.e.) BOTH a corrosive pool AND an Ethereal Mist AT THE SAME TIME. And that would cause problems with the druid.

It's starting to look impossible to make a balanced map that encourages sufficient strategic diversity for regular arena play using the battlegrounds terrains. I am sorely disappointed, because I was REALLY looking forward to making some good maps for regular arena play and not just domination.

Are there any plans to make more terrain tiles in the future so that I can actually start building a balanced and interesting map for regular arena play? I would really like to hear about something like that.

Thanks!

One idea I thought of was to give some of the tiles terrains that go away after some point, like the Spiked Pit Trap, only instead of hindering, they give some other bonus, like giving creatures that enter them an extra move action, (if they roll high enough to trigger it). Or maybe you could make some terrains that come in pairs or groups, and you can send an attack from one tile with that terrain directly to another.

[sIKE]

Interesting that the king of variants hasn't decided to repurpose a tile "image" with different effects. Now I know these effects wouldn't be official, but I would think that if you come up with a great idea for an effect for a modular tile that it might be adopted in a future release, if there is one.

As for existing tiles I would think that the Altar of Oblivion would not slow a game down...

[Zuberi]

I disagree. I think Corrosive Pool and Molten Rock can actually speed up a game. Yeah, they hinder, but they also deal damage. So, just don't position them in such a way that slows mages are forced to go through them. As long as aggro mages can walk past them to get to their opponent, the game hasn't been slowed down, and then you have a few cool places to dance around and shove your opponent into. The Molten Rock is especially nice if you're using Flame Immune or Burnproof creatures. There aren't many Acid Immune creatures though to resist the Corrosive Pool. Devouring Jelly may be the only one.

But Secret passage is definitely something to speed up game play, as they kind of shrink the Arena and make it easier to get around it. If you position them near, or even in, the Mage's starting zones, Aggro books would get a huge boost.

And if you really don't like using them in Arena, then don't. You can always just decide to keep them as normal tiles with pretty art and create a custom arena without tile effects.

[Sailor Vulcan]

Interesting that the king of variants hasn't decided to repurpose a tile "image" with different effects. Now I know these effects wouldn't be official, but I would think that if you come up with a great idea for an effect for a modular tile that it might be adopted in a future release, if there is one.

As for existing tiles I would think that the Altar of Oblivion would not slow a game down...

Doesn't altar of oblivion depend on having creatures to sac?

I could, and I probably still will make alternate effects but that would probably confuse some people and significantly reduce the number of people willing to play on such a map, and significantly increase the amount of playtesting needed. You'd also need some visual way to tell which effect was being used. I suppose you could use spare change for this purpose...

This might just be a coincidence, but in my experience the number of people who are willing to play a variant is drastically lower when it's not official.

[Sailor Vulcan]

Also, secret passages speed up movement yes, but they also block line of sight, teleports and pushes through them. Which means that it's not quite a counter to a larger distance between starting zones. And it's only useful for larger distances between starting zones, otherwise you start having issues with range, like I said. A map shaped like path of war is only 12 zones, and without using the secret passage there is a six zone difference between each mage's starting position. If you try to go through a secret passage in the corner where it's normally/best placed, your line of sight will be blocked to them even if they are one move action away.

And if you try to make the board itself smaller while keeping the secret passages, you start getting range issues. Perhaps now you're only 3 or 4 move actions away from the enemy mage using the secret passage, and 5 away in the direction you have line of sight.

The corrosive pool and molten rock do damage yes, but a turtling mage will just stay where they are and never enter it, and a rush Mage will either have to move through it to reach the enemy or just go around it, depending on the size and shape of the board. If the rush traps the enemy Mage in such a zone, I suppose it could speed up play at the end of the game, since it makes it harder for them to escape and causes extra damage.

So I suppose the main issue is shape and size of the board, and the use or lack of secret passage. I'll try again. Maybe if I start with path of war as a template and remove two zones or so from the middle, and take out the secret passage...

Maybe secret passage and board size can be used to counter some of the terrain zones. After all the balance issues with range could be mitigated with ethereal mist and septagram.

I'm rather hesitant about arenas with a smaller distance between starting mages than five though.

This still might be an issue, though, since I'm not sure whether the terrains, secret passage and map size really quite balance each other out. I'll have to think more about this.

Thank you so much. While some of the things I talked about above might still be issues, I suppose they might also not be. I spoke too soon, need to test a bit more first.