[M] (2) Backdraft

basically the way the centre is with the tower at the moment often leads to the units taking long ways around and half your army dying. Because of the way the paths are in the centre (which I'm going to talk about in a minute) you need to quickly move your army to respond to your opponent moving across the map. Oftentimes half your army arrives to fight first and you just die. Players shouldn't need to babysit their forces when they're just moving across the map.

You can take 2 bases on this map just fine as usual and defending them feels very nice, but problems start to arise when you take the third. I opted for the 12/6 third when playing and it always felt very far away from my base cluster and that I had to move my army right over to it to defend the attack paths in to it - this really sucks for protoss and terran against zerg where they can get smashed by a more mobile and swarmier army. The other third isn't really viable in that situation because it's just so open and there's a direct and fast line between your opponent and the third. Taking a third is pretty tough because of that. Because of the attack paths issue, taking a fourth is even worse because you need to pull your army even further out of position to defend it - whether you go for the other third or the next base in the circle, you'll always be opening up loads of new attack paths making it really tough to hold.

This is what I see as being the biggest issue with the map so far. At the moment, there are 6/8 attack routes across the map, which is a lot. Each of these is kind of broken up further in to loads of other ways that you can be attacked. because of the middle, this often means that half your army is in one path whereas the rest is in another and not engaging. The paths are all so far apart and inaccessible from each other, so you need to go a long way around to cover a path, and you often won't know about the attack until considerably later. Because the watchtower only covers the very central paths you don't get much of a chance to hold off large attacks. This isn't so much of an issue early game where the fastest path is the centre, but late game when the fastest route between bases could be on one of the wings and out of watchtower vision it becomes a lot more problematic. I often had problems where I would lose a base long before my army could even get anywhere near to deal with it. It makes it really hard to maintain the bases on the wings. This is kind of made worse by the base layout - my opponent's third could in theory be right next to my fifth, and at the point in the game, while my army is trying to cover my main, I can easily lose my mining bases to a quick attack outside of my vision.

Most importantly is the raised base at the 3/9. The defender enters that base through a tiny single ramp choke point, whereas the attacker will likely enter through a much wider choke. More worryingly, because of the paths in the middle they'll quite often be in the base before you get there to defend, so you need to fight uphill in to a choke. That's simply not possible a lot of the time so holding that base in particular is really difficult.

All that said, I really did like this map. I love the general concept behind it and I liked the way the paths work in principle - it's just a little much to have to constantly pull back from the centre to defend against an army after it's killed one of your bases for free. I thought that the idea of the zones that you need to hold on the various areas of high ground was really strong. I feel like you could make the map work a lot more by having two towers on the wings instead of one in the centre - have paths which aren't in their vision but make it so that it's feasible to hold off the aggression in the mid-late game. I felt taking bases was really hard late game on this map but the map is definitely workable and could be made really strong if you just deal with the ambiguity of random attacks just killing everything.