This zip contains seven maps. The original Hard Passage has four corner castles that all connect to a center castle island. The center island is defended only with wood defenses and contains the only iron on the map. Corner castles can only attack the center and all corners have stone. So you can take the easy path and play corner, or challenge yourself to the middle. Hard Passage2 splits each corner in half with an estate, were the estate has the stone and bridge. Hard Passage3 is the same as Hard Passage2 except the middle castle is upgraded to stone defenses. Hard Passage4 is the same as Hard Passage and has no estates but gets upgraded to stone defenses.
Update (these three all have estates):
Hard Passage5 connects the sides, ups the challenge and takes the pressure off the center.
Hard Passage6 deletes the walls protecting the center castle.
Hard Passage7 gives everyone on the map Iron.
Playability: 3
A good five player map pack, with a king of the hill style concept that gives the player in the middle a slight disadvantage in resources but makes up for it with an ease of defensibility.
Balance: 2
I'm giving the balance a 2 because while you do have a choice to use the resource imbalance or not, the biggest problem is the fact that the player in the middle is pretty much the focus of everyones attention and they're the least able to defend themselves effectively..even with the ease of defensive choking at the bridges, the middle player is more or less under constant attack from the other four players because for them to get the iron, they have to remove him..also to most effectively stage to attack each other..they have to remove the middle player as well. Due to geographic and resource boundries, the outlying four players more or less never have to worry about each other until the player in the middle falls.
Creativity: 2
This map is fairly creative, the author giving the player(s) the option to choose between 4 different styles of play (though the double estates version seems bugged) but all in all the styles work out to roughly the same thing, a four way assault on the player in the middle...with the outlying castles more or less safe from each other until someone successfully removes the player in the middle. Overall its fairly linear, the middle player will lose first, then its mostly a four way struggle to determine who will continue to control the middle estate and make war on the others and whether they can keep it under control while under assault from the remaining players.
Map Design: 3
Good use of terrain and decoration, as well as sound, its still slightly cookie cutter, but overall its got a good solid design. My largest complaint about the map is that while it gives the four outlying castles plenty of room to build...the overall resource spacing is pretty wide, with a huge ring of trees around each estate and the stone all in one area. It makes for efficiently designing a castle fairly tough because to maximize resource collection/food collection efficiency, you have to place your stockpile and granary quite a ways from your main castle...this eventually causes production to drag because producing weapons requires production to be near the stockpile, but the armory (of course) has to be inside the keep where its well defended...this creates a lag time between resource collection and weapon production which more or less hurts the overall game play.
Story/Instructions: 3
Good instructions for this map set, detailing out the situation as it stands between all four maps.
Additional Comments:
I like this map set, and I appreciate the time the author took to provide varying scenarios on the same concept. There are some small bugs, like quite obviously flat land you can't build on and some overally simple chokes which I think should be expanded, the center island should have a tight defensive as it does, but the other estates shouldn't be more or less free of threat for the first part of the game either. Overall this map is good and would probably be best enjoyed by an experienced player playing the middle against four slightly less experienced friends. Keep working on it..its a great concept but its not quite finished yet.