Terrain is really bland to be blatantly honest, but this map is really, really fun!
I love the idea, and the gameplay is just really cool, watching the species play around together. At certain points in the game we had hugely thriving herbivorous species, and smaller packets of carnivorous ones that were living off picking out groups of herbivores. The first time we played an enormous army of skinks dominated the map and began to level rapidly. The second time, we had mammoths slowly growing in the bottom half, while a colony of 'zombies' (we liked to call them humans) inhabited the top right, and preyed upon the vast amounts of herbivorous turtles which, although they had four level 5 spells each, were submissive and often retreated when attacked, making them easy prey. There was a small pocket of ghouls at the top too, which would've died if it weren't for the masses of turtles. And we had a small furbolg colony in the middle of the map that was beginning to grow too.
I could go on and on about all the cool little things that happen in this map. It's fantastic, a really really fun map to play.
There are a few things that could make it even better though. Heres a few criticisms:
When I'm evolving a creature I like to see it grow and become really unique and different, and this game really does do that. I didn't get much/any advancement in size, but I don't know whether that was the games fault or mine, or just bad luck.
However, there were some things that took away from the experience.
The first thing was that there weren't many abilities, and some of the abilities weren't that good either. We had many species which had almost the exact same abilities. In addition to that, the species wouldn't often change abilities either. Every single turtle on the entire map had Web, Forked Lightning, Chain Lightning and Spiked Carapace. Every single one. It was a bit annoying that none of them grew different abilities. Our mammoths on the other hand were a bit more interesting, but still some more variety couldn't hurt. I understand it's something that takes continual work but I'm just raising awareness of it
It would be cool to see some ultimate abilities, very rare ones that you're really lucky if you get, so that if you can make them thrive you have a really powerful species.
The second criticism of mine is that the game doesn't really look that good. Terrain is pretty ugly, it's very blank and simple. Also, when units evolve, some attachments just look weird. Some of them jsut suffer from not being very prevelant, so the units don't really get a very unique identity. They might have a small glowing orb hiding away somewhere, but it doesn't give them a unique appearance (when coupled with the fact that many units had the same abilities, it made the gameplay a little less exciting than it could've been). With attachments and the like that is unavoidable, but some of them could potentially be changed. One thing I didn't like was Spiked Carapace - the only unit that looked good on was turtles. On others it just seemed odd.
I'd like to see creatures grow in strength a bit too, abilities on their own don't change the unit as much as they could. My turtles had alot of health and their chain lightning was fairly strong at that level, but they still only hit for five damage which made their offensive capability questionable.
Some more creature types would be cool too. Water creatures and flying creatures would be really fun if it were possible. Oh, also, where are the omnivores? Creatures that both eat plants and meat would be cool. Some extra kinds of activity would be fun as well, for example a Defensive behaviour - one that doesn't engage in fighting but fights back if attacked - I noticed sometimes my turtles would just sit there cowering in fear when attacked, when they could easily fight back if they wanted to.
Anyway, that's a fairly long list of criticisms, but they are really just minor despite the immense length I put into describing them
All in all, I love this map! Keep working on it! 5/5 from me!