The Basics:

Layout:

The basic layout of the map is fairly simple, you on one side, your opponent on the other side, and a large lake between you.

Food:

There is plenty of food to be had on the map, however you likely won’t end up using most of it in a given game due to the fact one of the major sources is fishing of which is very plentiful on this particular map. Aside from the fishing however you will find within your starting town several goats, a decent sized berry patch, and ussually some wild boars. As well there are ussually plenty of stray goats to be found on the map through scouting. The fish in the middle of the map are the most important, but depending on your civ you might be able to take advantage of all those spare goats around the map. For offensive animals there are boars as well as bears to be found, sometimes there will be aurochs I believe but not ussually.

Gold:

Your starting town will always have 1 gold pile of 3000 gold in it, the rest of the gold is ussually spread pretty evenly around the outside of the map, make sure you know where your next gold source is after your initial gold runs out. If your opponent land rushes you and you can’t get to any gold from one entire side of the map make sure you know this beforehand. In most cases the gold will be out of range from ships until at least the third age, so controlling the water isn’t ussually essential to controlling the gold.

Relics:

There are always two relics on this map ussually one on each side of the map. Sometimes there is one near to you and one near to your enemy but ussually they tend to be spread out pretty much across the middle of the map.

Terrain:

There really aren’t any ridges to speak of on this map, so the only things that are going to affect how the game is played are the trees and of course the lake in the middle of the map. Sometimes settlements will be close enough to the water that siege ships can stop them from being built, so that can be a factor in some games. In almost all cases the water is far enough from the edge of the map that ships won’t be able to hold a chokepoint on their own, so the sea is ussually not overly valuable in the late game. There are always lots of trees, but not to the point where you can’t find a good open spot to build your base.

How to play the map:

Greeks.

Try to avoid building a mill at all in archaic, there are plenty of sheep to be found on this map most of the time and they should do the trick until you are ready to go classical. As Zeus you likely won’t be able to get to a norse dock fast enough to stop their dock from going up, however if you try you might find their ulfsark building a house either near the dock or in their base.

Norse:

This map was built for norse I think, it should be fairly easy for a norse player to take over the water as well as building hersir from their temple. As Thor or Odin a quick forest fire can gain you a big edge on water, as well try to use the excess food you gain on valkyries as they are quite powerful. As Loki try to do a hersir rush at the same time as fighting on water, once the water favor bug is fixed however it’s going to become a lot more difficult to perform.

Egypt:

Well there are two options on this map, as Isis and Ra you can try to FH, and with your faster farming (with Bast) hopefully pull a decent econ out of the works or go for the water basically, if you do happen to be trying to FH I would suggest putting up several extra docks anyways just to distract your enemy into thinking you are going to try for water in heroic, you can do that, but taking control of the map with chariot archers and camels might be a better idea. The second option would be to fight on water, use those serpents as Set and Isis to gain an advantage hopefully, and take things from there.

In General:

I would suggest going for the water in a galley war, on this map you can likely go all out with 3 docks pumping, make sure to get the gold and wood upgrades as soon as you can afford them. Also try to scout out what your opponent is likely doing either by scouting the water with a fishing ship to see how many docks he has up, if you see only 1 dock then it’s not really nessessary to go all out on gallies and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some military buildings up early instead. If you do fight on the water and start to lose it by say the 10th minute or so, don’t worry about it, water isn’t all important due to the fact that farming is actually a fair amount faster for 6 of the 9 civs. The only civs that don’t get a mythilogical technology to help farming are Loki, Zeus, and Set. As long as you kept a constant flow of villagers from the start of classical on, you should have enough villagers that your economy can function well even without the fishing.

This map can turn into a big fight for map control very often so losing water isn’t the end of the world. If you look at the map and see that all the gold is on one side, it might not be a bad idea to go for a small grush to waste some of their gold off on ships, then go for mostly map control taking away the extra gold mines around the map, here’s a good example game, I started off slow so decided that controlling the map was my only chance DOWNLOAD.

What not to do.

Don’t ignore the water completely, I think it would be pretty foolish to not even build fishing ships, if you ignore the sea completely you will lose pretty quickly due to the fact your opponent won’t even bother fighting on water but will go straight for you on land, only he’ll have a much much larger economy than you do.

Don’t forget to find your next source of gold, in fact find a couple that are pretty separated because you never know if your opponent will go for map control.

Don’t forget that if settlements are very close to water, water could be more important later in the game than it is early on.

KS_Josey_Wales