by sammy324 on Tue Nov 18, 2008 2:38 pm
I feel like a great number of the issues people have with the Shapes and Art maps are related not to the absence of the world map, but rather the difficulty and un-artsyness of the replacements. I, for one, dislike them because it is not intuitive, and it doesn't really make sense to me. I cannot remember which shape represents which continent, etc. Maybe after a few more games I will start to catch on, but that brings me to my second point. Both replacements are, to put it bluntly, ugly. I know that they are clever, and were put together rather quickly, and I give the makers credit for that, but they still are not as visually pleasing as as the 100 other maps. Anything to help the maps look better, from changing the colors around, to giving the territory better shapes would improve the map for me.
In the meantime, I'm getting along without them, and I still enjoy playing other maps. The silver lining is that I've been able to play on maps that I had not tried before, precisely because I chose not to play games on the classic maps.
Has anybody thought of splitting the world down the Atlantic, and putting the Americas on the eastern half, and Europe and Africa in the west? It may not be enough of a loophole, but we could try it.