Eka’s Tier 5 Map Example

So after spending a few minutes on the complex program ‘Paint’ I came up with a version for a T5 map – look at my mad paint skillz!

As you can see I smashed the PvE lake in the middle so that even if you are doing a PQ, some invading army may sweep past you and give you a dirty look. In this particular zone each faction is ‘capped’ by a fort and to access the fort it is a sorta pyramid design – this would be a ‘middle of the campaign zone’. You can either go balls out and assault the fort directly which would be terribly hard to do, as it has massive amounts of defenders and solid doors and walls OR you can take the zone as intended, bottom up. The key to weakening the fort is taking the four keeps which supply it, and the key to taking the keeps is to take the four bastions which support them.

• Bastions – either fortified (via door and walls) or an open BO. The doors have only a few thousand hit points (enough to stall the lone DoK, but not enough to hinder a warband). Each bastion bolsters its keep in a specific manner – door hp, lord hp, guard numbers, outer postern deadbolts,etc.  and taking them greatly eases capturing the keep. Take the four bastions and the keep is ‘defenseless’.
• Keeps – our standard keeps from t3/t4 but their survival depends on the strength of their bastions. The keeps are simply garrisons, the bastions supply them. Like bastions, they directly bolster the zone’s fort in various ways. As a T5 keep their lords would in fact be of lord quality and require conqueror gear and drop invader gear.
• Forts – the key to the zone. You control the forts you can spill over to the next map. These would be structured much like olden forts and require invader gear and drop warlord gear. Their defense would depend on their keeps.

In this fashion the war would be more wide spread. You see your enemy is on the march and taking your bastions, a chunk of your faction holds up in the keep for the defense, but knowing that no keep can stand unsupplied you send out small groups to recapture the bastions. The keep falls and the retreat pulls back to the fort, now greatly weakened. While the battle wages at the walls of the fort and the outer doors buckle, you send a crack team to recapture a few bastions around a vulnerable keep. Now the enemy must choose – will they press on and hope to push the fort with a greater degree of difficulty or split their forces to ensure the keep holds and the assault on the fort is supported. Naturally the problem with this approach would be population – what is to stop a defending army from sweeping the keeps while the assailants charge the fort.

It is hard to envision this system with current population levels but I personally believe it could work and would split up the zerg. My main issue with the current zones is the side with greater numbers zergs from bo to bo to keep to bo, and so on. Most of the zones are so linear that you simply funnel armies into each other and see who has the bigger knives.