now about my beef with the map.
normally 1v1 maps involve quite a bit more luck than games with more players. the drop and the dice have more influence over the outcome of the game but on this map i've known the result of a match from round 1. i never saw this happen on any other map. not even on doodle earth.
basically imagine this. you go second, you have 11 terits in the decay zone and your opponent starts with 4 river warriors. deploys his troops near a tribe chief where he has more troops (Ndaba or Cetshwayo most often) and takes that tribe chief. for round 2 he's set to get a bonus of 12-14 troops.
you start your first round and have 6 troops to deploy. if you go for a bonus, even if you take it on round 2 the opponent will deploy his big bonus and break you so your only option is to try and take his tribe chief and break him. if you're lucky enough to have a stack right next to him it will be a 9v7 battle. 2-3 bad rolls and you fail. and that's if you have a stack right next to him but sometimes you'll have to pass through another terit with 3 troops so generally speaking your chances of breaking the bonus are bellow 50%. fail to break it and the second round starts with your opponent deploying a big bonus and trashing you.
and basically that's what the map is all about. if the player that starts the game gets a bonus and you can't break it then it's simply game over.
in 1v1 bonuses are just too easy to take and defend. no game should be decided solely on the outcome of the first round.
since a real example is always more helpful than a theoretical one here's a quick one.
i'm in a game where the bottom right corner of the map looks like this:
i'm green, i'm first and i have 6 troops to deploy. a few scenarios:
1. let's say i'm more conservative and i don't get lucky rolls. so i deploy 6 on phila and attack ndaba with 9v4. i have a 74.2% chance of winning and have 5 troops remaining. i stays in phila and i move 4 in ndaba. since this is chained i'll move 2 from mondli to sihle and get a 5 stack there. i'm not even gonna bother talking about unlimited reinfs cause it would be mayhem for whoever goes second. now i've secured a +3 deployable bonus and a +2 on the chieftain. player 2 MUST break my bonus. so he'll deploy in jabulani his 6 troops. he now has to attack 9v5,4 to conquer my chieftain. the chances to do that are 34.4% so he needs great dice to do it. and even if he does he'll have just 1 troop on those 3 terits and he'll be easy to eliminate from there in the next round. if he doesn't break my bonus and goes for a bonus of his own i'll just use my bigger deployment to break him.
2. let's say i'm feeling adventurous and i get mildly lucky rolls. nothing special though. so i deploy my 6 in sihle and attack the chieftain and jabulani. i have a 56.9% chance of winning those terits. then i'll use 2 troops from mondli to reinforce my chief. if it were unlimited i could also use other troops and make my defences even stronger. now the shortest route for player 2 to get to my chief would be from dingane and he'd have to win 8v3,1,3 to take my chief. the chance of successfully doing that is 23.3% and he'll have 1 troop on those terits. so not only he'll need great dice to break me but he'll be an easy target in the next turn where i'd deploy 6 on phila and easily take those terits with 1 troop.
and this is not even the worst case, i've seen even more imbalanced drops.
point is, in 1v1 it's too easy to get quite a hefty bonus in round 1 and successfully defend it.
if your poor opponent even gets 10-11 troops in the decay zone (like it happened to me) then by turn 3 he's already down 20 troops just from those areas.
for crying out loud half of ALL the games created on this map are 1v1 with manual deployment. games created with the sole purpose of abusing this exploit. how was this allowed to go on for this long when really all it would take was to bump the neutrals for the objective and make it impossible to get in the first rounds. sheesh.
i see that instead of changing the map you've even used this exploit for yourself which is not nice at all. you haven't used it in hundreds of games like others did, but still....
“In the beginning God said, the four-dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric, second rank tensor equals zero, and there was light, and it was good. And on the seventh day he rested.”- Michio Kaku