Hello all. For quite a long time Islands has been considered the standard full water map for 1v1s. However Islands games are, imo, boring. They all seem to follow a similar system. Some feudal water play into castle water play with a boom into imp, fast fires, galleons and lots of camping. Sometimes there's a landing mixed in but it doesn't really happen a lot and the player going water usually wins out over the lander.
At the end of the day we have a situation where strategy doesn't matter so much as being able to execute and camp. You can go FC, Fast Feudal or even Fast Imp and the end result will mostly be a similar, long and campy game.
With the rise of Portugese as a dominant naval civilization this issue has gotten even worse because even if they play horribly in the early game they can camp and win when there are no trees left using Feitorias. Now water in general is quite boring to me since there are only three types of basic units and only one type of siege unit. However changing water balance and/or adding new units has proved to be an unpopular opinion on this forum so I'm going to suggest another idea.
There are two other ways to solve this issue. One is to make a different map the standard water map. Rooster was a popular map as well before and there are also others such as Bog Islands and Archipelago which could, with some good map scripting, prove to be worthy alternatives. Another would be to increase the damage ships do to buildings. This would mean that once you win water you can take out docks quickly and do more damage to anything close to the shoreline.
At the end of the day we have a situation where strategy doesn't matter so much as being able to execute and camp. You can go FC, Fast Feudal or even Fast Imp and the end result will mostly be a similar, long and campy game.
With the rise of Portugese as a dominant naval civilization this issue has gotten even worse because even if they play horribly in the early game they can camp and win when there are no trees left using Feitorias. Now water in general is quite boring to me since there are only three types of basic units and only one type of siege unit. However changing water balance and/or adding new units has proved to be an unpopular opinion on this forum so I'm going to suggest another idea.
There are two other ways to solve this issue. One is to make a different map the standard water map. Rooster was a popular map as well before and there are also others such as Bog Islands and Archipelago which could, with some good map scripting, prove to be worthy alternatives. Another would be to increase the damage ships do to buildings. This would mean that once you win water you can take out docks quickly and do more damage to anything close to the shoreline.