So I know we've talked about terrain before, but I think it's time for another look at it.
Let's start with the -stride attribute. There's currently 5 ents with foreststride (22% of sylvan creatures), craig scout and animate boulder have mountainstride (8% of MF creatures), dust devil has desertstride (6% of elem creatures), and DL have no -stride creatures. Right away there's a clear imbalance here with one race getting the biggest chunk of usable -strideable creatures and the rest lagging badly.
Also when we look at the maps the random map generator gives us, it seems that it's typically 15-30% forest, 15-30% desert, 20-35% hills, 0-15% mountain (I've seen a few with none.. and when they are present, they tend to cluster at the edges), 0-15% swamp, and 10-25% water. This means that foreststride is going to be the most universally useful of the -strides.
Here are a few suggestions to be made for balancing things out a bit:
* give DL swampstride (it makes sense even if it sounds funny)
* add -strides to more creatures to better balance between races
* better balance the amount of forests/mountains/swamps/etc so you don't give one player a huge advantage that isn't accounted for in card costs
* please for the love of god make the "forest of doom" that covers 1/4 of the map less likely to happen
* and this may be just me: but ensure all flux points or one of their adjacent hexes is reachable by land
* ensure that all terrain types are present at a minimum of 5% of the map hexes (156 hexes in a normal map, that'd be 8 hexes each minimum)
* if all that isn't enough, incorporate one of the ideas for altering the starting areas (one free hex of naturescaping, select a preferred type before beginning, etc.. see the other thread for more ideas)
any other thoughts/requests/complaints? Hopefully I've put up a few good ideas, I'm sure you'll all tell me which ones don't pass muster
edit: changed the bits about desertstride