[eropple]

> On the contrary, they always want to redo what community did to drive off their creations...

While they've missed a few here and there, their development strategy has served to make them approximately a hojillion dollars.

As a fan (I built tower defense, RPG, and Diplomacy maps as a kid--MAN do I miss Diplomacy maps, those were great), I kinda wish they would return to encouraging that stuff and push it to the fore. But I get why they don't.

[derefr]

What is/was a Diplomacy map? Anything to do with the strategy board game of the same name?

[eropple]

Inspired by and vaguely similar to. Widgets (usually those gray domes) would be placed on a map that may or may not look like, say, Europe, and you'd have N players whose goal was to possess (own structures by) as many of them as they could manage. Structures were usually super expensive, and resources (or, in some versions, units themselves) were acquired only by owning those control points. No allied victories.

Once the balance was dialed in (lots of maps had nation-specific special units and stuff, which made it tough), it could create some of the most interesting, dynamic UMS games I ever played. Sometimes they'd go literally hours. Early land grabs followed by huge back-and-forths, usually only limited by the sprite limit (my own maps avoided sprite-y units like Carriers, Goliaths, and Valkyries because of it; lots of Marines and Firebats, trying to make them feel like Diplomacy "armies" that could plausibly bounce off one another).

The only games I can recall that were more fun were Last Man Standing Regicide ("Shimo-style") games in Age of Empires II.

[Sacho]

Kinda. I remember mods which featured a World map, where units would spawn at your capital in set intervals, and you would use them to capture everyone else's cities.