Topic: Add new official maps?

I believe it's been quite a while since new official maps were added to Widelands. Maybe we could select some from the homepage and the add-ons, preferably already well tested ones.

The most obvious choices are the maps that were used in past tournaments (with the exception of Inselkrieger which is an interesting idea but needs reimplementing to fix the differences between the islands):

• Crater Lake – regardless of the blocking possibility, this is a good and nicely designed map that just needs a note about the blocking in its description
• Forest Valley
• Plateau from the Naval Tournament 23 add-on mapset
• (the original versions of maps used in the 2021 tournament that are based on non-official maps?)

We can also collect further suggestions here, but we should require some number of "sponsors" who also attest that they have also tested the map themselves, or something like that.

Most notably, we need more maps that depend strongly on seafaring for the naval warfare feature.

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kaputtnik wrote:

• Crater Lake – regardless of the blocking possibility, this is a good and nicely designed map that just needs a note about the blocking in its description

There are already two maps of this kind official: "Crater" and "Glacier Lake". So -1 from my side.

Both of those maps have a much smaller usable area than "Crater Lake", plus the stone blocks in "Crater Lake" make sure games are longer, giving each player enough time to build up for the battle, while "Crater" is for speed games (probably "Glacier Lake" too by the looks, but I haven't played on it). Though "Crater" and "Crater Lake" are indeed very close both in name and first looks in the map browser.

• Forest Valley

+1, with the exception that the useless portspaces will be removed. Reason is this bugreport

IMO the proposed tournament version has a reasonable distance between port spaces (of course, because I edited it :)), and they make the game interesting. They also mitigate the possibility of blocking the middle (like WorldSavior did against you).

As for the bug, I think the link is wrong (that bug looks unrelated). Did you mean the known-portspace spamming issue? That has just been fixed in protected/navalwarfare.

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kaputtnik wrote:

I know that the spamming bug was fixed

Oh, sorry.

I mean the problem that this map can have useless fleets due to the small rivers have no passable connection to the big river. The AI may build ports on the small rivers which is just useless and cause malfunctions, imho.

Yes, that was indeed a hard decision when I edited the map, and the current situation is somewhat a trap. However if we remove the portspaces from the small side rivers, it's still possible for a badly placed shipyard to build ships there. (IIRC it happened to hessenfarmer and some other player too) So if we must solve it, I'd rather remove the sand pads blocking ships (and the rocks on them, but keeping the ones on the shores). Though I think it's a really nice touch of the map that your workers can cross the river there. But yes, removing those fords makes the map depend even more on ferries and ships, which is probably a good thing.

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Accurate Europe is a great map, +1. However its 1.0 version has some problems with the rivers, which the 1.1 version claims to address, but that map is only three days old, so I'm not sure about which one to pick…

Personally I find Islands Of The Eight Tribes rather too bland, it makes for good gameplay but I would dispute the "optically appealing" part

From above, +1 for Forest Valley and Plateau and -1 for Crater Lake.

I haven't played any of the other suggested maps.

What about dropping any official maps? We should not have too many, so if we add e.g. two new larger 1v1 maps then a similar but less good map should be dropped. How about Islands at War or The Far North.

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Ok, i've played Egyptian Mandala v1.1: But it has only one port space, but i believe initially it had more. My guess is that port space detection might have been changed… The map has little resources but i think this makes it interesting. If some port spaces get readded/reenabled this could be a good candidate, imho.

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