Many people like the black forest map, because it makes rushes harder, and provides terrain advantages for players to utilize. However, black forest is in my mind lacking in several aspects:
- People have learned how to rush in black forest. Many people play with the no-rush rules.
- Once nobody rushes, players tend to wall up, and it becomes difficult to penetrate these walls.
Battle forest tries to address these issues by:
- Instead of having a big clump of forest, this map has smaller patches of trees spreading across it. Therefore, there are various paths between the tree patches, allowing battles to take place in various locations of the map.
- These paths also make walling up more difficult, as the attacker has more options at his disposal.
- To prevent rushing, each player starts with a walled fortress. Players no longer need to play with no rush rules. However, because some resources are only available outside the fortress, an aggresive player still has the option of raiding economy outposts of the opponent.
- Copy Battle Forest.rms to the random map folder of your AOK:TC game. Usually it is found under:
C:Program FilesMicrosoft GamesAge of Empires IIRandom
- When playing a "Single PlayerStandard Game", choose "Custom" as the map style, and "Battle Forest" as the location.
- Can also be played as a multiplayer map.
* NOTE: play with a larger map size. For 2 players, use Medium sized map; for 4 players, use Normal sized map.
- Small patches of trees covering the map with some cliffs in between.
- Each player starts with a walled fortress, but good tower coverage and no trees in these walls.
- The fortress is medium sized, but has enough open space for the player to grow economy.
- Each player starts with 7 villagers and some farms.
- There are 8 sheep and 6 deers outside the fortress wall.
- There are few trees inside the fortress, players have to set up lumber camps outside.
- Each player starts with 2 scouts and 5 swordsmen.