Forged Alliance Forever

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T17:50:59+02:00

MikZZ wrote:
Muahahahahah
You could have just reset the gameplay scores. Instead, you disqualified my map marked "too many resources"
There was no rules "too many resources".
Concentrating on mathematical dispersion and harmonics, rather than being free to play style and variety.

This is the most absurd and meme solution for map tournaments.

Reset the gameplay scores? Don’t really know what that is supposed to mean. Anyway, your map would have a 0 for gameplay as it was submitted. It would be a last place finish regardless of what I gave it for aesthetics. You literally have like 7 digit e reclaim (or more I gave up after I reclaimed 200k and didn’t make a dent in the trees) on the map. Sorry, but it’s not worth a serious look with such an inherent gameplay flaw built into it. I can’t give gauge your intent from the map due to the fact there is just infinite eco on every square meter of it. What is supposed to be important? What am I fighting over? Where are the expected game paths? No one knows because everything is just infinite trees.

If you read the OP, I’m judging these maps as essentially submissions for the 2v2 matchmaker. Your map doesn’t meet the qualifications for me to even put it in the spreadsheet of potential maps.

There is no rule about too many resources, that’s correct. There’s also no rule about putting 500 mexes in your main base and a giant thermo-style wall between both teams. I would also disqualify that map.

Statistics: Posted by FtXCommando — 20 Jul 2020, 17:50

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T17:50:10+02:00

If any of the other participants wants a second opinion on the score, feel free to ask. Do remember, though: this was a tournament by FTX, and it in no way means a panel is owed to you for review.

Statistics: Posted by Morax — 20 Jul 2020, 17:50

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T17:48:57+02:00

Robustness wrote:
Hi. Thank you for the tournament. I will update the map based on your opinion. It's a pity that I only see YOUR opinion. I will be happy to participate again. Congratulate the winner.

Robustness, I really like your style and detail in the maps, but do have to agree the "free tech" is a bit concerning. I think it's a unique and thoughtful idea, but removing faction diversity by giving everything to a player on their doorstep screams "too easy" to me.

For your map, I would suggest making a little less crowd in between the mountains and place the "civilian engineers" at the center of the map so players have to "fight for extra tech" rather get it handed to them.

Statistics: Posted by Morax — 20 Jul 2020, 17:48

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T17:46:36+02:00

One further comment: you can get t3 air in like 7-8 mins on that map, Mikzz. We know very well as a community how dominant t3 air is, so getting that kind of tech so quick just makes the gameplay a bit lame. No one likes to see a good ground war go to waste because one strat takes out a power grid because of a 5 second better rush!

Statistics: Posted by Morax — 20 Jul 2020, 17:46

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T17:38:48+02:00

Rowey wrote:
I agree with Robustness. I would be nice to know What the Other Judges said about the maps.

For "Red Rocks,"

I think the aesthetics should at least get a decent score, but fully agree the reclaim amount and availability makes for very, very bad gameplay. Easy access to enough reclaim makes it pointless to expand much - if at all - and teaches terrible habits. This is not really a rule for the tournament, specifically, but it's just a common knowledge of the game in my opinion.

The above image shows a half-hearted effort to use more then one reclaim prop, and the amount is enough for an entire t2 mex in one, compacy area. There is almost no contest here available to stop someone from accessing it, too.

Statistics: Posted by Morax — 20 Jul 2020, 17:38

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T16:59:46+02:00

Noone else contributed to judging maps and the usual crowd were participating, and thus couldn't
Next time one of these appear, ask to help rate in advance.

Statistics: Posted by biass — 20 Jul 2020, 16:59

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T16:58:08+02:00

I agree with Robustness. I would be nice to know What the Other Judges said about the maps.

Statistics: Posted by Rowey — 20 Jul 2020, 16:58

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T16:45:50+02:00

Hi. Thank you for the tournament. I will update the map based on your opinion. It's a pity that I only see YOUR opinion. I will be happy to participate again. Congratulate the winner.

Statistics: Posted by Robustness — 20 Jul 2020, 16:45

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T16:31:56+02:00

Muahahahahah
You could have just reset the gameplay scores. Instead, you disqualified my map marked "too many resources"
There was no rules "too many resources".
Concentrating on mathematical dispersion and harmonics, rather than being free to play style and variety.

This is the most absurd and meme solution for map tournaments.

Statistics: Posted by MikZZ — 20 Jul 2020, 16:31

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T05:50:12+02:00

GENERAL MAPPING STUFF:
- Please god stop the spam of navy mexes. GPG devs didn't need to use it to make navy important, early FAF mappers didn't need to do it, so I DO NOT understand why everyone and their mom in this tournament had to stick a mex in their tiny water ponds or directly in the water 20 feet away from a mex a frig can raid. People are not rats that can only recognize something as important if you add cheese.

- What's up with the civ stuff this tournament? One map gave both guys an engineer of every faction. Another made 4 flaks which basically denies any air response to navy turning a generic navy map into an even worse generic navy map where you cant even try to assist your frigate spamming ally through torps.

- A lot of you guys had such beautiful map designs. There were a couple in there that could be improved through spending 30 minutes to an hour adjusting mexes and instantly bump a map 1 to 1.5 in rating.

- You guys really need to understand the concept of expansions when designing maps. A lot of you simply dotted mexes around which really harms the long term health of a map as there is no real way to determine where exactly to drop down a strong base with factories, pd, etc. Everything is just generally equally important with singular mexes everywhere, so losing any map control is equally bad, and so you might as well as not make any sort of fallback position and instead just glob up tons and tons of units.

What you SHOULD be doing is creating 1-2 clear expansion placements for players as "chests" followed by loose mexes naturally extended as "arms" and "legs" for them to express control over. This leads to a much healthier game state overall. There was a huge habit of either making loose singular mexes or making loose singular mexes followed by 16000000 in the center/corners because you guys felt it wasn't obvious that the center/corner was important.

- Other than the clan war tournaments where I spent my time babysitting, this is probably the only tournament style that makes me end up feeling like I'm participating rather than directing. Takes 8 hours or so to give in depth comments on 10 maps, jesus. But I'm sure everyone spent longer making the map so it falls on deaf ears imfine.

Statistics: Posted by FtXCommando — 20 Jul 2020, 05:50

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T05:42:00+02:00

COMMENTS:
1) Adaptive Oscar's Graveyard
(4.5/4/3.5)

I like the unique design, the map is interesting on a first glance and it keeps my attention as I play. It doesn’t seem to follow any monotone color scheme, though I do find the brick texture of the top of the ledges to be strange and not really fitting the sort of environment for the map. Other than that, I feel like the far right ledge where you have an access point into the pond is kind of unclear as an access point into the sea. It just seems like there is no granularity in moving from the cliff to the path and some sort of (I think) lighting problem on the map makes it look pretty dark and unpassable. I only realized that it was possible to go down into the water because it is a lot more obvious on the far left, which makes me think it has to do with the way the map is lit.

Gameplay-wise I think the map is going to be pretty interesting because of the way it seems that importance shifts as time goes on. Early on you’re likely to send your ACUs into the corners in order to safely secure the expansion areas, but beyond that you can begin moving further into the middle with either hover, ACU, or both in order to succeed with pushes. It also heavily rewards cooperative play in the sense that you can very quickly go through the open mid to assist your ally in the more turtle-based corner gameplay. Controlling mid itself will also open up a lot of viability with drops and tmls to harass the enemy. The ponds themselves also make ACU aggression a lot less punishing as there is always a place close by to retreat into so long as you have some mass in units that you can use to prevent your ACU from being encircled.

Variance wise I think the map isn’t going to be the greatest but it also won’t be entirely awful. The problem is that early on I don’t see a lot of viable paths off the potential meta due to the shaping of the expansion paths, but later on once those expansions are secured a lot of potential gameplay paths are available depending on the game state. It seems like a lot will rely on the control of the open mid which naturally opens up a lot of gameplay tools.

2) Turtle Rocks
(3.5/3/2)

Like the look. It’s a generic color palette but things are generic for a reason. The map is pleasing to look at and still has memorable map characteristics, even though it does seem like a spin on forgotten facilities. It doesn’t seem to have any gameplay issues caused by the terrain and I like the stonehenges on the corner islands. It is a strong map aesthetically, but I don’t think it goes above and beyond.

Gameplay wise, I feel the impact of the navy is overstated with the combination of water mexes and tons of frigable mexes on the mainland. Investing a lot into land seems like a mistake and you should instead wall off the mainland with PD and your ACU where you only have 1 or 2 pathways to worry about. Navy is the source of harassment alongside air control. The lack of early mass also means that the navy is likely to be seen early on, mainly because I’m not too sure what gain you get from additional land units. Beyond a factory for engies and a fac for some tank/arty, additional land investment seems totally pointless. Even if you get pushed back and lose a corner on the mainland, you can still basically raid the expansion through the navy to deny the mexes and ideally would then be able to push an advantage in the navy to secure some tradeoff for those mexes. I think it has the potential for some interesting games individually, but the variance in tactics the map is open to itself seems fairly low. If you aren’t a fan of frigate and sub spam, the map isn’t gonna be for you.

3) Sun Dragon Temple
(4/2.5/2)

Navy seems insanely OP here. 10/14 mexes from the navy player are in frig range and there are also 3 land player mexes in range. This will lead to terrible frig spam gameplay. If you don't build enough enemy will just snowball into a victory and because of this neither player can really eco. The navy player probably has to build some semi quick trans to get his mexes quickly and to drop the top left but once again all top left mexes are raidable by frigs too and are basically worthless unless you have navy control there.

The land slots seem like mindless t1 spam + t2/gun acu. Control over the chokepoint is pretty important since it basically grants you 7 free mexes so you can't really skip out on it.

The textures look really nice but i dislike the way the cliffs in the middle look. It is like it's trying to do some combination between natural looking terrain and manmade terrain. Especially the 2 straight cliffs with the small circular towers look really bad to me. There are also multiple locations were units can walk halfway ontop of a cliff.

4) Jabka_2v2
(1.5/3/3)

Get rid of the water mexes, the general rule for water mexes should be to avoid them unless they add additional weight for incentivizing naval play. These are small ponds that just have mexes thrown into them for the sake of filling empty space. Be confident in less mexes and your expansions leading to active gameplay, you don’t need 15 single mexes thrown everywhere to tell players that everything matters.

Meme quote time: “if everything is important, nothing is” or rather, “if everything is important, just end the game with massive land pushes”

You have a lot of interesting terrain play and I think you need to realize that the fact this terrain gives you a map control advantage is enough to make it important. Group some of the mexes you throw around there. For example, that giant ledge in mid where you can shoot down on mexes below it, you can put more mexes on the bottom and allow control of the top to allow for successful raids that cannot be stopped by the major land unit/ACU buildup on the bottom where mexes are.

Some of the raised ridges are quite small and will likely lead to painful unit pathfinding issues, I would likely just remove those. I’m mainly referring to the one behind player 3 and 4’s base.

I think the texturing of the map is pretty mediocre, but it’s definitely a map I would consider for a 2v2 matchmaker. Just do some serious texture work to make it a bit more refined rather than the same monotone of green and do some minor mex readjustment and it would be a solid map. You have the terrain foundations down, just work on making it look good.

Options for land pushes, turtling, cooperative play, airplay, hover abuse all exist. However, I feel the map would be a lot better if more of it was “open to play” and I don’t quite understand why you basically have 60% of the map safe behind the enemy spawns.

I’ll also have to mark you down a bit on aesthetics for the map name, that’s the name of the draft you save on your PC not the one you upload to the vault.

5) Adrasil
(2/2.5/3)

What i immediately noticed was that the mountains had very big foothills. Although this looks realistic, for gameplay it is a disaster because of 2 reasons. First of all it means that units will walk onto the lower part of the mountain which causes pathfinding and shooting issues. Secondly it prevents you from placing down factories in lots of places because of the slight elevation difference and this isn't always clear to the player. As in this case there are quite some locations were i would assume i could place down a factory but i couldn't.

There are also other hills placed in some parts of the map. They are properly communicated towards the player with textures which is good, but they have the same issue as before: In some locations you can place facs down and in some you can't.

Units are also able to walk ontop of the mountains. Testing for this should always be done before uploading a map because the ozonex editor isn't too accurate with the slope tool. You can either use the old map editors slope tool which is accurate or brute force it by manually checking all the locations and changing them if units can walk there.

When fully zoomed out and trying to zoom in the water decals are flickering.

For a 2v2 setup it seems like the gameplay will boil down to 2 1v1's because both water and 2 giant mountains are seperating the 2 sides. There is also quite the imbalance between the spawns. The mid left and mid right spawns basically have 7 safe mexes while the other side have 3. They also spawn closer to the islands making them more likely to get those as well. Generally the slots look quite a bit stronger which is very bad considering the gameplay will mostly be 2 1v1's. It will lead to 1 dimensional gameplay were the player having the advantage will try to crush his opponent before his teammate falls to his opponent. If this leads to the player in the worse slot having to turtle up it will just lead to t2 air snipes ending the game.

Most mexes on the coast are barely out of reach of all frigates except aeon frigs. You either want all frigs to be able to kill the mexes or none of the frigs.

6) Benthos
(2.5/2/2)

Call the map adaptive if it uses the adaptive script

Big craters are entirely walkable but on the map they look like they have such a height disparity that you wouldn’t expect a unit to be able to just walk into it. My natural inclination was to make a transport to drop the reclaim in the craters.

Waterways are super small, it’s going to be a pain to navigate frigates through such tight corridors and likely result in them not being too impactful for the game. It’s going to be a hover dominated map in my opinion.

The combination of crater and tight waterways make zthuee massively powerful on the map relative to other factions.

Still don’t really see the point in the hydros on mid, they will always be getting destroyed by arty that retreats into the crater.

Feel the map could use some natural expansion blocks with grouped up mexes rather than the singular mexes thrown around the whole map. With natural expansion areas on the land, it will be easier to halt the supremacy of zthuee as you can simply protect those areas and use frigates to protect the reclaim around the coast. With this current set up, you need to invest so much to deal with the universality of zthuee spam everywhere.

7) Adaptive Rainy day
(3.5/2/1)

I like the moss on the map as well as the fog aesthetic which gives the map a unique hot spring feel. I wish the name would emphasize something about that rather than it being dew after a rainy day, but I guess it being a rainy day is fine.

I dislike how uniform the mountains on the map feel in texturing. It seems very robotic in the sense that all non-crossable terrain is one texture and all walkable terrain is another. I’m also strongly against this idea of tight pathways between your mountains. It might seem cool on the perspective of a person just looking at the map and appreciating it, but if you need to play the map and send raids it’s the most awful thing to possibly experience. It will lead to ruined order pathing as units go through one at a time unless babysat to specifically go AROUND all these locations.

I’m also strongly opposed to giving engies of each faction to both teams. Regrettably I need to take this into account as it was how the map was submitted, but if it weren’t for these engies I think this would have been a top 5 map in the tournament. I also feel that the cliffs around the water in the middle seem to destroy variance rather than create it as it means I cannot utilize the middle pond to be aggressive with my ACU and I have two predefined ways to get into the pond. Both of these ways are also very inconvenient to use which makes the middle even more of a turtle zone.

Game will likely result in t2 airplay determining the outcome. The map structure heavily favors turtling and it is quite easy to gain a lot of ground with no real resource benefit coming from it. Quite easy for some pd and an ACU to entirely protect the land aspect of the map. The spread of the mexes will also make an air loss quite painful.

Also I’m not the biggest fan in the world of constant mex dropping. It doesn’t really do anything for making air more important to control and instead emphasizes the most annoying parts of the game. Mainly, it puts more emphasis on those early air fights which can quickly snowball to domination yet often rely on luck, and it also relies on constant transport micro to deal with ringing/upgrading mexes. I never see what the benefit is and rather keep it for rare use on maps.

8) Saintar Seytii
(4/1/1.5)

Love the look and absolutely unique atmosphere of the map. It has some things to adjust to make it a 4.5/5 or a 5/5 in my book, it’s one of a kind and just so close to attaining that level. Get rid of the aurora in the sunken Aeon base, it ruins the tone of the flooded base and just makes it awkward. Fix some terrain texturing on the mountains in the bottom right corner, it seems you have the trend of white mountains being impassable but some of the mountains there are not white so you could think you can climb up on that plateau. Also, the orange stuff in the water, while sexy zoomed out, looks like orange coom when I zoom in and will get old extremely quick if it’s not possible to make it less “in your face.”

Need to fix mex placements, the map has nearly nothing for a player to build their play on. 7 Mexes in a map where you need to control navy and land nearly immediately is not gonna cut it. I also see no point in that expansion hydro and think it’s only there because you felt something should go on the plateau but for some reason felt mexes would be bad. The map is mass starved and you moved the mass efficient e building so far away it cannot be practically included in any build order.

You also dumped so many mexes in the “conflict zones” of the navy and two corners that basically means losing those areas to early aggression is unrecoverable. You simply do not have the ability to mount a counter offensive against a player that now has double your mexes for merely getting 55-60% map control.

9) Flooded Plains
(2/2/1)

It seems like you followed the typical regor highlands color palette, which isn’t a problem in itself but the map also doesn’t really have anything particularly impactful terrain wise for me that makes it instantly recognizable. The closest would be the mountains with the 3 mexes on the top of them, but their gameplay purpose just functions as lane-creators rather than something interesting.

I don’t quite understand the point of the absolutely tiny pond in the middle, it is so difficult to get an ACU into it and abuse it for safety and even when I do, why does that really help me? It’s really far into the enemy base or really in the safety of my own base. I would rather put it against the middle ledges where I could then utilize my ACU to assist my expansion on the sides by cutting off enemy units trying to reinforce there. I would also make it deeper so my ACU doesn’t have to find the exact 1 pixel where it can successfully hide in the water.

The problem also seems to exist on the ponds on the far bottom and far top where the mountains are. It’s a major bummer if you plan an attack assuming the purpose of those ponds is to provide protection for your ACU, but they don’t and are instead there merely to make a map look prettier. I also feel like the giant lake near your spawn is totally useless. What purpose is it even meant to accomplish? It feels like the lake in loki but at least on loki you could hide wagners there after raiding an expansion and use it to keep raiding a 2 mex expansion. Here it’s pretty hard to abuse unless you already won the game and are in the enemy base.

I also see you put a needless water mex, why not just make it a mex near the water instead? Then you can ring it and actually attack it with raids.

The TMD in the civilian bases is sort of interesting. I guess it’s a tradeoff between safety and the additional reclaim?

Overall gameplay wise, the map seems to be one decided extremely early on. There is no real reason to send ACU to the left or right as you can very easily secure that singular lane through PD and a few units and the center of it doesn’t really have anything relevant to fight over. The control of it opens up nothing new either. Control of mid however, let’s you pincer enemy players, gives you 8 mexes, and just an immense amount of activity. If you aren’t sending your ACUs to mid, then you will lose all of that and in turn lose the game very easily to a grinding eco style. This means that all 4 players need to go mid, which in turn opens up the game to huge early game cheese which is likely to result in a game win. Either ghettos, jesters, early t2 air rush, tons of spam doing nothing but going directly into mid. There is no area to safely retreat into with your ACU, so there is nothing discouraging this playstyle.

Variance wise, I just don’t see the game going beyond much other than choosing how to best cheese an early ACU kill. If your map forces both ACUs to go the same space, it really cuts down on the viable options of play.

10) Red mountains
(0/0/0)

Could not be given a fair consideration due to the absurd reclaim. The map would not be considered for tmm without an extremely massive reclaim reduction that, depending on locations, will also lead to varying conclusions about the map gameplay, variance, and aesthetics. When I’m saying massive, I mean like 75% less tree reclaim on the map, maybe 33% less mass.

Statistics: Posted by FtXCommando — 20 Jul 2020, 05:42

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-20T05:36:15+02:00

Alright finally,

LIST OF WINNERS:

1st: Adaptive Oscar's Graveyard by Petricpwnz (3.975)
2nd: Turtle Rocks by Saske (2.825)
3rd: Sun Dragon Temple (2.725)
4th: Jabka 2v2 (2.625)
5th: Adaptive Aldrasil v10 (2.525)
6th: Benthos Bergschrund (2.125)
7th: Adaptive Rainy Day (2.075)
8th: Saintar Seytii (1.9)
9th: Flooded Plains (1.7)
10th: Red mountians (0)

Also, I'll hand off a "Winner of Hearts" to MadMax for Saintar Seytii purely because of the immense potential in the map if it's given some work on the gameplay side. 1st through 3rd can PM me about their rewards and I'll work out how to deal with funds with Rowey.

Statistics: Posted by FtXCommando — 20 Jul 2020, 05:36

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-13T19:31:31+02:00

Sunday is observed as the last day of the week in many cultures.

Statistics: Posted by ThomasHiatt — 13 Jul 2020, 19:31

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-13T17:25:25+02:00

FtXCommando wrote:
CaptainJabka wrote:Mr FtXCommando where is the result?

Give me until the end of this week.

Statistics: Posted by Rowey — 13 Jul 2020, 17:25

Re: Mapping Tournament 5 (10x10)

2020-07-13T17:02:36+02:00

Hi FTXCommando where is the result of this tournament time's up.

Statistics: Posted by CaptainJabka — 13 Jul 2020, 17:02