[M] (4) ESV Ithaca by prodiG

the reaver rocks!

Someone give this hero a medal before he vanishes in a regal twirl
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made me think of u

Anyway, I think that the changes you implemented are a great start but I feel that there's more that could be done to fix potential imbalances.

With the gold expansions acting as alternate thirds, blocking them with rocks (or destructible towers) makes sense, but not on a 4 player rotational map. Due to spawns, Zerg can sometimes be forced to expand towards his opponent instead of away from them if they do a fast expanding build. With the water creeping very close to the third as well, there's no room on that side to hide some units so that when the enemy walks down the ramp into the third he only has to fight one direction, decreasing the chances of surrounds and flanks to defend that area.

Without analyzer images, it's a little bit difficult for me to be able to tell the exact bounds of the Xel'naga Towers, but right now, I think they help the attacking player get a contain rather than the defending player. Since it's right up against the cliff, controlling it will be difficult unless you control the center of the map (which in most cases means you are the attacking player). An attacking player will have an easier time denying the defending player from his own Xel'naga Tower, making pushes into the natural easier. Particularly Protoss will have a large advantage. The Colossus can see directly over the cliff blocking sight to the Xe'naga Tower from the center of the map, and can walk up and down the cliffs in the middle. This gives Protoss a large advantage when it comes to map control. Also, outside the natural, you have a high ground obstruction that with the combination of force fields can greatly harm the other races. I can see that it's overall size was shrunk, but I strongly feel that it should be shrunk more, or possibly removed. On top of this, the addition of the Xel'naga Towers caused the decrease in ramp size. Moving a large army to attack the middle is now quite difficult. And the side paths aren't much better in terms of choke width. The ramps to the natural are still 2x wide and a Protoss player can easily fast expand.

This map was used on the Korean Weekly, and I didn't watch any of those games, so I could be misguided with some of my thoughts. I'm just having difficulty in seeing how your changes made the map less Protoss favored to the extent needed for balance. I'd like to suggest a few things:

Increasing the size of the intended third outward into the water more would allow easier flanks when an attacking force comes down the ramp from the gold.

Altering the area outside the natural, whether it be remove/shrink the obstruction, or remove the line of sight blockers to make a third more difficult for Protoss to expand/defend.

Moving the Xel'naga Towers and adding the large ramps back would be a good idea in my honest opinion, but I wouldn't know what to do with the Xel'naga Towers after that. The only thing I could think of regarding that would be to put just one in the middle, but that is uncreative and probably imbalanced with the chokes already in existence in the center. Maybe if you place a Xel'naga Tower there, you could pull the obstructions towards it so that one touches each corner and creates 4 mini paths that access the tower, but are blocked by it as well (not a through path). That would create more room in the center because the obstructions would be less spread out and closer to the center of the map.

I hope you find my feedback useful, and good luck in the competition!

Oh, I almost forgot your welcome back present!
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bullshit bugs like this drive me insane