Why do people even bother playing town/river crossing maps such as Ligny and Dresden, where the ONLY strategy involves howitzers and waiting for ones opponent to commit suicide by rushing a well defended bridge crossing?

Not much room for variety or flexibility there if one wants to be competitive on certain maps one must design the army to suit the map EXACTLY. On many maps an army will be designed to take advantage of certain terrain features and deployment locations. In most cases the maps involve a race to high ground in the centre and/or control of choke points, or in the case of incredibly artificial maps such as Austrian Pinnacles or Homestead, a set plan about what units will rush where at the start of play while the only truly open map, Grassy Plains, is totally devoid of any interesting features. The variety of maps in multiplayer is pretty poor IMO, and the limited variety tends to lead to formulaic army design and boredom. Is it my imagination or are people online generally bored with NTW already. Nothing radical would be necessary just a few gentle rolling random hills occasionally. Just a little variety occasionally would be great.

I really, really wish that Creative Assembly had included a random map generator for the multiplayer online games.