thoughts about map design for anyone interested in MA map making

[Citabria]

Ive been asked by a couple people interested in tips on Main arena mapmaking. so heres some thoughts on map design and the differences in a lot of maps in their design and layout and the results in terms of fights and resetability due to various configurations.

ive come up with two general categories of basic design based on layout... "barrier design or convergence design"

the first and origional beta map "barrier design" is with a barrier for the center of the map which is made of either vast distance of water or mountains and generally uncrossable or unused for normal flights and playing. maps in this category are: betamap, SFMA, trinity and bigisles.  baltic and akdessert have a variation of this on a smaller scale though akdesert base ownership almost puts it in its own category.

the second "convergence design" has a point in the center in which all 3 countries converge and the heavy fighting is centralized and mixed in between all 3 countries. maps in this category are mindanao, ndisles, ozkansas.


with the barrier design it seems countries will generally not interfer directly with eachother since all action happens at the flanks and attacks are separated on each front. this configuration when used in the small maps the fastest resetting map with sfma but there is another large factor in resetability that goes beyond basic category design.

this aspect for lack of a better defenition could be called an "expanding or contracting front"

on a map with an expanding front in the simplest example is when a front row of bases is taken by one side the row behind it has more bases than the row in front. thus the front grows in size. but more precisely the effect is the attacker has 1 base to launch from while the defender has 2 bases or in some cases more. this aspect has a very large effect on resetability. though no maps fit in exactly in every way in this category the general effect of reset difficulty can be seen and be more pronounced on pretty much every 512x512 map except akdesert which again due to base ownership does not fit in any group. the most clearcut examples of this are 512 maps such as trinity ozkansas bigisles.

contracting front maps are the exact opposite in which defenders have less bases to up from as they are pushed back as they loose successive rows of front line bases and the attackers using these captured rows of bases have more places to attack from. the most clearcut example of a contracting front map is sfma and it is a large reason why sfma can be reset the quickest. simple numbers advantage in bases usable by an attacker for an attack on a single defender base.

there is a catch to this contracting front setup: bottlenecks. a clearcut example of a contracting front setup with bottlenecks is festerma. and bottlenecks ussually turn the contracting front into an expanding front giving the advantage back to the defending country after the attackers reach a certain point. further progress is impeeded by the numbers advantage in bases the dfender has. also field porking will cripple an attacker at such bottlenecks making resets more difficult.

hope this information is helpful on base setup. Ive not gone into base spacing which is a whole nuther can of worms and I will just say 1 sector spacing is plenty and make no air bases closer than .75 sectors from eachother if you want good furballs and reasonable travel times.  and consider any bases more than 1.5 sectors apart to have a small barrier or bottleneck between them as not much action will happen at these bases if closer bases are available.

[BlauK]

Very good points!

I was looking forward to the issue of base spacing. U had valid reasoning there too, but IMO the theory of "expanding and contracting fronts" or "bottle necks" does not work alone. They are always depending on base spacing.

Any one base can be destroyed on expanding and contracting fronts, but capturing (or keeping) it depends on how close the next bases behind the front  line are. If they are close enough, one can easily defend the front base from a next line base... and especially if that front line base is a bottle neck.

Some good examples are the west country in Mindanao and North country in sfma. I have never seen them conquered.. prolly has been done, but such would be very rare.

Often the visual geographical borders also have a huge psychological effect on base capturing. On Baltic map the water means border.. even when bases are close to each other. If enemy captures a base on your shore, you get plenty of country mates to counter attack. If there was no water on the same map, it would not look so threatening and the loss of that base would not seem so drastic. On some maps the mountain ranges have the same effect. On akdesert the waters sometimes seem to fool people to forget that half of their original area has been lost. They are happy to occupy one slice completely and let the enemy bounce the unprotected HQ in the corner of the slice.