Here is a high resolution map of Hommlet, recombined by Lilura1 (3 megabytes):
#Temple of elemental evil full
What Troika should have done is downsize and abstract the village areas, and turned the campaign into a full Gygax tournament-style one. Indeed, the faithful recreation of Hommlet and Nulb no doubt took a lot of time out of the dev-cycle as well. Troika needn't have bothered with OVs at all I can only imagine how much time they took out of the dev cycle. Instead, they should have allowed for some breathing space and time for buffing/equipping, as no party is so stupid as to walk into battles unprepared. In fact, for those noble souls who do not min-max, and who also lose initiative badly, OVs can result in TPK, and that's just poor game design. If the enemy wins initiative and fires a bolt into the Wizard's guts, this can result in a death before the player has even had a chance to do anything. The Lawful Good OV can be problematic for players in that it pits the party against aggro straight off the bat. By way of dialogue, FMVs and combat encounters, what these do is set the scene as well as set up the initial questing in Hommlet: the party's reasons for being there. There are nine opening vignettes representing each of the alignments in D&D. One does not become a tactician unless one is forced to. Ironman is the best mode of play available in tactical RPGs because it forces sub-optimal stats and makes us consider every action we take in combat.
Point-buy is also not an option: we get one roll per character only, and we must accept that roll, but we can choose which roll to assign to each stat.