My ideas for improving the map and civilization settings for matchmaking in DE:

Civs

If the use of a map pool was intended to require players to be more well-rounded, then it fails because of how you can pick the same civ every single game. Even if you would rather go random, you are going to feel like you are putting yourself at an unfair disadvantage by doing so which is no fun. But nor is always playing with the same civ.

Now I would be perfectly happy with random-civ. However, another option would be to have a randomly generated civ-pool for each match. This would be a pool of, for example, 8 civilisations for players to pick from when choosing for each match. This would be good for creating more variety, whilst also being accessible to people who would find random-civ daunting. With this system, people should always be able to choose a civ which they enjoy and which suits their playstyle.

Maps

Arabia

There's a reason why some 60% of games played on Voobly are on Arabia. People have had many years to figure out what settings lead to the most fun and varied games, and Arabia random civ has become the standard. Arabia is great because...

- It is the map with has the best civ balance - most civs will perform quite well on this map. The best civs are only a bit better than average, and vice-versa for the weaker civs. This means you can go random civ on this map without having a high likelyhood of an extremely imbalanced matchup, and this means you can have more (civ) variety.

- It the most consistent and fair map. Arabia is the place where you can really refine your build orders, and is considered the best single map to improve as a player.

- It has a wide variety of viable strategies.

- There is action at every stage of the game. Pretty much every unit from every age can be used on this map (except for those few which are never used anyway, and ships... but there's a reason why people don't tend to like those much).

- Having a map which most people know how to play can be better for team games, since games can otherwise become very one-sided when some players don't know how to play a map - which is going to be more common with a map-pool.

Map-Pool

That said, playing on other maps is both fun and important, and a matchmaking system is a great opportunity for encouraging this and making it more accessible by having a really well crafted map-pool.

One problem with many of the interesting maps that aren't Arabia, is that they often tend to more heavily favour a small number of civs and strategies. So a relatively small map pool such as we have at the moment can actually lead to less overall variety. Another problem is simply that there are bound to be maps which people dislike.

Both these problems are largely solved by just having more maps. I'm thinking like 20 maps - or better even more! A lot of these maps are disliked because they can quickly become samey if you play them too often (i.e. Steppe, which has a clear best and 2nd-best civ), but this isn't so much of a problem if it only comes up once in every 30 games. Having more maps also means pick civ is no longer such a negative (though I would still prefer a civ-pool). This is also an opportunity for the devs to seek out and showcase some community created maps (shameless plug) which could have real potential as competetive maps.

Black Forest, Arena, Nomad

These maps also have strong followings, but tend to have more 'niche' playstyles. For this reason, it would probably be better to not have these on the same elo-ladder. Allowing players at least the option to host games with elo being displayed would be necessary improvement for enabling these communities to move to DE, so that they are able to host balanced games. Separate matchmaking systems for these communities is perhaps unrealistic to expect... but it would be nice :)

Summing up [TLDR]

My idea - 2 options for matchmaking:

(1) Arabia: either random-civ or civ-pool

(2) Random Map Pool (or a more fun name): either civ-pool or pick-civ. And with more maps (20+).

These could either use the same elo-ladder, or separate rankings.

Additional options for Black Forest, Arena and Nomad would also be welcome, but being able to have Elo displayed in custom lobbies is a must.

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Have I solved DE matchmaking? Or are my ideas terrible... please share your ideas for improving it :)