Iron Maid wrote:But why afraid of Trafalaxy? There are maps like Patch Wars or Hive. First one makes no sense to me and Hive is taking ages. So if you get Hive at random I think it is even worse.
Hive is definitely worse. But just because there's worse out there doesn't make this an ideal experience.
I would definitely rank this among the horrible four, alongside Hive, Waterloo, and First Nations Americas.
Now, obviously I hate big maps, and not everybody does. I come home after a long day at work, I just want to de-stress, drink a couple beers and start clicking on some shit without investing a great deal of thought into it. If I wanted to make difficult decisions, I'd go back to work and at least get paid for making difficult decisions. Some other people have, I suspect, easier jobs where they come home at the end of the day with unused mental energy still available and they want to show it off. That's fine; I get it. Back when I used to get seasonal layoffs, I also used to want to tackle complex war-games to burn off my mental energy.
There are different reasons why the horrible four stand head-and-shoulders above other large maps and are particularly difficult. Generally these things involve visual confusion.
Trafalaxy is based on Trafalgar, and for a couple reasons is significantly more difficult to grasp. The first is naming. On Trafalgar, if the log says someone took Indomptable from you, even if you don't know where Indomptable is, you know immediately from the spelling that it's a French ship and so you only have to scan through the blue ships to find it. On Trafalaxy, if the log says someone took Gosorin from you, there's no indication of what kind of ship that might be, so you pretty much have to search the entire map before you find it. Also, after a few games on Trafalgar, you start to learn where the various ships are, whereas no number of games on Trafalaxy will ever make the made-up names feel familiar.
More important, however, is the riot of colour. On Trafalgar, the attack lines are a pale pastel. The ship colours leap out at you. Right at first glance, you immediately see where the major ships are and you get a vague idea of the strategic significance of the various commands. You still have to look at the attack arrows to see how to get to them, and it is a little confusing at first, but you get a sense of what's happening.
On Trafalaxy, by contrast, the attack arrows are rendered in bright, vivid colours and pretty much drown the ships out. I have stared at the map and tried to figure out roughly which area corresponds to which fleet, but the brightness of the many-coloured arrows always drowns out the ships and I'm soon bewildered. The only exception, I guess, is that area in the bottom left, which corresponds to the British reserve squadron and where all the ships and arrows are red. A little island of sanity in a nightmare of flashing lights. The last time I saw this many bright arrows, I was at a disco in Stuttgart, Boney M's 'Rasputin' was the Number One song, and acid was still popular.
For these reasons I rank Trafalaxy as much more difficult than Trafalgar, and I put it 4th overall on the list of CC's most difficult maps.
Lest you confuse me with the OP -- I am not afraid to play Random. A 1/60 chance of drawing one of the horrible four doesn't scare me.
