This map fetures many small lakes with snow and grass. Since all the wood is on the snow only,
there is ferice fighting for it. Also there can be extra food or stone or less gold. Have fun!
This map has a lot of promise, and I did not initially want to give it a score so low, but there were some issues that could not be overlooked.
Theme: 4
This is definately the maps strong point. There is a very good underlying theme that has been put into place. The idea of pock-marking the lakes is a nice touch, and the attempt at resource manipulation was a good touch, but I will discuss that in more detail in Playability.
Visual Appeal: 3
There were some good things, and some bad things, so the map basically averages itself out. I really like the tiny lakes, as I said before. These beg to be used as fishing holes, though, and the amount of shore fish just doesn't play into that. What did not appeal to me was water placed on hills for no apparent reason, and ice giving way directly to grassy terrain. With some tweaking of the elevation limits of the water, and a different specification for the terrain_to_place_on of the ice, these could easily be overcome.
Playability: 2
When I first loaded the map, I thought everything was alright, until I got in to play and discovered there was no gold within any logical distance of my starting village. The scripting is there, but the gold simply does not appear on the map, making me wonder if the map was playtested much. Multiple loads gave me similar results, the absolute worse case being a map that only generated a single 6 object clump of gold in the middle of the map. A map with no gold is not a map that lends itself to Playability, so it does receive a major mark-down.
There is a LOT of promise to this map and to the idea, and I think it could be easily salvaged with some playtests, and some slight alterations of terrain placement. What exists is a good foothold, but there are just too few rungs further up the ladder to make the map's current form anything worth playing.