Very interesting. Thank you for your input.
The Colony defense map in particular features no randomization whatsoever, and was thoroughly tested as this is the most 'competetive' map.
This part surprised me a little, though.
From Age of Wonders III players a regularly recurring bit of feedback was that the city sieges got repetitive and boring after a while, because they all took place on the same map and usually required the same handful of tactics to deal with the walls.
It's a bit less of an issue in Planetfall, mostly because the AI at least tends to charge out of the colony first chance it gets.
But the general point stands: the colony map is the SINGLE most common battlefield in any game. A landmark will only occur in one or two spots. There are lots of different maps for open terrain. But EVERY game will feature a dozen or so colony sieges at the very least. And we don't even have the different levels of wall (stone, wood, none) anymore, so turret types aside all colony maps are exactly the same.
So why was it decided to make all the colony maps the same? I do not really understand the competitiveness argument...
Making two or three new colony battle maps seems like it would yield a MUCH bigger divident from a player's perspective than making even 10 new non-colony battle maps, simply because the colony maps happen so much more often.
Even something like 1 colony map per colony size (if a random element is considered a problem) like we had in AoW1 would make it less... same-ish.