Not sure if this has been talked about before or not...but its the first time I'm experiencing the new maps...

...and I don't realy like them.

They look soooo boring with the each family's Home System so evenly spread out.

Also I thought before, there was a lot of discussion about the naturally evolved style of gameplay using 'cores'.  And that people generally don't like them (though they're a necessity - you don't choose to have them or not - they just naturally exist).

Regardless, what I see here is, that these maps facilitate people having large cores and just accepting what they have.  What I mean is, a naturally defined core boundry exists.  It's just the halfway point between your home system, and the family next to you in each direction.  Naturally you just assume that thats your safety zone (the zone will be bigger/smaller depening on the strenght of the family), and anyone who's explored from a different area in it, needs to be removed ASAP.

I don't see any variabilty. 

Also, exploring for 'spread' becomes something attackers will do less and less.  Why? Because each place you explore out of the zone near you, is automatically in someones 'core'.  I'm not saying it's impossible, ofcourse not, good attackers will always find a way and always set up their outposts - it's what we do.  But for the large mass of ic players, I don't think its achievable easily.

I'm also not saying that the old maps were perfect nor fair to everyone.  But when you find out that you're half a tick next to someones home system, then it adds a new dimension to the game.  People have allied on that basis, or come to terms ie "you explore left, we'll explore right". 

It just added a mix to the game and introduced nice strategies.  Even for example when you'd identify there was a HUGE space in sector 4 or something, with heaps and heaps of clusters of systems, everyone knew that thats a prime place to set up a secondary outpost.  And naturally throughout the round, it ends up being a huge battleground from all different fams of who can gain what territory.  Everybody would identify it as a key location and would all target it.

It was definitely more fun.  Ofcourse i say "more fun" even though I havn't seen the whole round yet in Capri, but I'm assuming it will be just as I describe.

Maybe some kind of algorithm to stop 10 families being all within 4 ticks of each other - cos that I think is really stupid and definitely limits gameplay.  But overall, I like the old maps better.  More dynamic and encourages different playstyles.

What do you guys think?