I've been working on and off on this MA terrain for about six months now and have just finished laying out the fields and strat. The towns, spawn points, shore batteries and weather still need to be done. Before going any further I thought it would be a good idea to ask this forum for feedback. To that end I have drawn the initial country borders and my intended spawn points on its current TE map.
To avoid balance issues I've gone for a symmetrical field layout, although each country's clockwise half is not a mirror image of its anti-clockwise half. The bases are at around 2K high near the crater rim dropping to near sea level at the coast. The island airfields are at 1k. One thing HTC might take issue with is the high number of bases, 33 per side.
The central crater rim is about 15K high. It splits the countries at the centre of the map and acts as a deterrent to planes griefing tanktown in the middle of the crater. Three mountain range “spokes” radiate out from the crater and form the initial country borders. These mountains are about 9K high but are split by numerous valleys. You can cross the range between any two adjacent fields without making a major detour and not need to climb to more than 3-4K. A cross-range NOE goon run typically takes less than 10 minutes.
The groundwar is centered around V base hubs which in turn spawn to most of the airfields. There are also coastal spawn paths that end at the city, HQ and mainland port. The defending side has spawns from its uncapturable fields to many of the V base hubs, so these strategic bases are likely to see a lot of action.
Each country has two large islands near the borders with an airbase, a V base and a port on each. With shore batteries and PT spawns in the narrow channels either side these are going to be tough to take by CV and are fairly isolated from mainland airbases. The third CV can be used to retake an island if necessary.
I've created some new rock and snow textures for the mountainous areas, these are designed to merge with the default forest texture. They are fairly simple textures, with few colours and low resolution to keep them as small as possible. In total they make up 1060K of the 1666K res file size. The flatter areas are broken up with rivers and lakes. I realise I'll have to be careful where the roads go.
