Prison is horrible because there is only one viable tactic on it - walk together and destroy the enemy in full-team-vs-team fights. From level 1. There is nowhere to run and it's possible to easily lure the creep waves to one point, while keeping all the flags and locking out the weaker team in their base. Since it's basically just a one lane map, split tactics are ineffective.
The bigger maps are typically too big for 3v3, and also suffer from the same problems if you play 4v4 or 5v5 - Brothers is simplistic and bad, so you end up with about 1 map option for every team size.
The most popular and best designed maps right now are still behind the DotA map in gameplay depth - there is very little opportunity for surprise attacks or active use of the fog of war. Comparisons to other popular Team PvP / Strategy games will also be generally unfavorable.
The reason for this lies in the design of the Demigods - how they are scaled compared to the map. They are slow giants, effectively making the lanes very narrow, while at the same time not being able to move around fast enough on bigger maps.
This is why Cataract is so popular and many players request "fast game speed" setting on bigger ones, or compensate by stacking +movement speed items.
Suggestions:
- The optimal solution would be to rethink that balance and make both the maps more complex and large, and the Demigods faster moving to match that proportion. You will also need to buff up blink distance - as it's already severely underpowered.
- Failing that, at least increasing map veriety by re-designing the unpopular maps to have more gameplay depth (support for a greater veriety of tactics then just team deathmatch at the push points).
Ex. In cataract you can bypass the side flags to capture the gates, a way to reduce the momentum of a hyper-offensive and momentarily superior opponent that is trying to rush middle.
Perhaps you can just increase all Demigod movement speed by 15% and remove Anklet from the game (effectively giving it to everyone, and allowing other favor items to be used).
