| “ | Scattered gold shimmers beneath high mountain ridges filled with wildlife. With gold scarcity threatening to diminish the progress of civilization, nearby factions take the opportunity to seize as much as they could[sic] get. | ” |
| —Age of Empires IV description | ||
Carmel is a land random map introduced in Season Ten with Age of Empires IV: Knights of Cross and Rose[note 1]. Small rock features dot an otherwise flat, open map teeming with food.
Features[]
Carmel shares some similarities to the map Lipany, being a pure land map with cliff features spread throughout, but there are several key differences. Carmel generally contains more empty space, especially around the edges of the map, and features and resources are more clustered around the center. By contrast, Lipany features and resources are more evenly spread out. Lipany cliffs are also more variable in size and length, sometimes enclosing significant portions of the map, whereas Carmel rock features are usually smaller. Players also spawn more randomly on Carmel in team games, with more variability in the distances between allied players, and between players and the map edge. They do not spawn in the regular, evenly spaced arc of Lipany and other maps. On Carmel, teams will spawn in one set of opposing corners, and the two Sacred Sites will always be located in the other set of opposing corners in between teams. Carmel also has a very unique, variable Trade Posts distribution, with each Capital Town Center spawning with an associated Trade Post nearby and along the edge of the map. This theoretically results in a maximum of 8 Trade Posts on 4 vs 4 games, but spawn conflicts can often result in the full number not spawning. Relics spawn fairly evenly distributed among the map but are more likely to spawn closer to the central map axis in between teams.
Resources[]
The differences from Lipany and other maps are even clearer when it comes to resource distributions. The map is tagged with 'less gold', but 'less stone' would also be appropriate, and 'extra food' even more so. Carmel contains a huge abundance of food, with more Boars than any other map (two per player), as well as significantly more Berry Bush patches and Deer than average. Currently, the spawn of extra large Deer Packs is bugged, causing none to spawn at all on some biomes. The food sources are more concentrated in the center, but can also spawn around the edges of the map. The abundance of food is compensated by a lack of gold and stone, with only a single Large Gold Mine always located in the center of the map, and all the rest of the mines being of the 1600 gold variety. There are also no Large Stone Outcroppings, and no additional Small Stone Outcroppings to compensate. Of these resources, players start with one medium Berry Bush patch, one small Deer pack, one Tiny Gold Mine, and one Small Stone Outcropping within range of their starting Town Center, and one additional Tiny Gold Mine nearby. Each player also starts with two large circular woodlines, and the rest of the wood is distributed in irregularly shaped patches in a roughly ring-shaped area around the center Gold Mine.
Changelog[]
- Originally, 3 'large' Deer packs of 7 spawned for each player in addition to the small packs. With patch 13.1.4420, this was replaced with 2 'extra large' packs of 10.
Notes[]
- ↑ Though owning the expansion is not required to play this map
Gallery[]
