From my perspective, the most annoying thing in Polytopia is the map generation.
It is not rare, that I get a map like this. My oponent gets the corner + much better village spawn. If we are equally skilled what is my chance of winning here? I would argue that it is less than 10%.
I do believe that fixing these kind of spawn is the single biggest improvement that developers can do for the game.
Simple rules such as. If one player gets the corner, other one gets it as well. There must be at least one village not more than 3 tiles from the capital, ect…
I don’t think that with these kind of spawns we will get a strong competitive scene. Since winning is more based on the luck rather than player’s skill.