I know that most people find this new approach great, but I'm not really a fan of this change.
- If the fighting happens a lot in the same region, it means that the same map will be seen a lot, becoming pretty repetitive.
- The battle maps representing a whole region tends to make the strategic map feels a lot smaller.
- Doing so many maps has (and/or will) cost a lot of man-hours. I know artists aren't engine developers, but overall I feel like a good procedural generator would have taken less work than doing all these maps, and a procedural generator would be much less restrictive.
- And the main point that's worrying me : by making battle map linked to the strategic map but hand-made, it means :
1) We're stuck with the atrocious strategic map that is in the game right now.
2) It's liable to not be fixed because change in the strategic map would need to be replicated in the battle map.
3) Mods with custom maps would need to implement tons of battle maps rather than them being generated on the fly.