Blizzard has done their first map rotation as Shakuras Plateau and Jungle Basin have been added into the mix with Blistering Sands and Kualas Revine being removed.
I’ve been playing A LOT of Shakuras Plateau so here are some thoughts on it.
Sweet Rocks
With four possible spawn points these rocks may or may not play a big part in the game. If you are east-west adjacent from each other you have two routes of attack. You can rush him through the rocks or you can walk all the way around the map. The rocks are a pandora’s box of course because once it’s open you’ve opened his ability to swarm in at you.
The rocks are also pretty heavy for protoss players wanting to use void rays. The rocks are very close to the command center/hatchery/nexus. This means a protoss player can charge up on these rocks and almost instantly annihilate your main production source with target fire.
Towers and Grass
There’s two Xel’Naga watch towers which are powerful at mid-game because they give you vision on two expansions each. They are located at the middle of the map and are protected by rivers so a person is forced to engage them in the middle.
They are also protected by a long patch of grass. The grass is pretty pivitol on this map. You can hide forces here for ambushes and since you have the tower you’ll see them coming. But of course only zerg will want to fight out in the open.
The bases are protected by narrow choke points meaning that force fields will be extremely potent and terrans will be able to wall off the natural instead of the main. This also means if the rocks were to get broken open you can just throw up some static defense at the back
Scouting
This map is HUGE I didn’t find my opponent until the 3-minute mark. By this point he had units up. There’s no secret entrances or anything so if you want to sack harvesters for scouting information you have to actually get up those narrow chokes.
This means to scout each protoss will need a robo, terrans will need an orbital command and zerg will need an overseer.
There are quite a few expansion options on this map. You have your obvious natural expansion near your base and easily defendable. There is a super cool narrow choke (not so cool for zerg) which terran/protoss players can abuse.
The next expansions you choose are kind of up there. You can break the rocks and take the middle expansion if your opponent isn’t on the other side. In the middle there is a hard to defend point that is protected only by brush. You can also take the other main bases with their choke points which are actually pretty easy to defend if they are north-south.
TheGameGuru.Me 