MA Terrain Rules and Guidelines

[Greebo]

AH3 MA Terrain Building Rules

For game play and frame rate reasons Aces High Main Arena (MA) terrains are subject to these specific rules and guidelines. I suggest reading the manual for the Aces High Terrain Editor (TE) first to help make sense of this document.


Map layout

Start by laying out your map idea on paper with the fields, coastlines and mountain ranges drawn in and then showing this to HTC and other terrain builders in the Terrain Editor forum. Point out anything unusual, especially if you have not seen done on any other MA terrain, as this may be because it is not allowed. Its better to find out any problems before you do work in the terrain editor than have to redo it later. There are a number of things you should bear in mind when laying out a map.

An MA map's three countries should have equal numbers of fields of each type, so the same numbers of each size of airbase and vehicle base, as well as ports and task groups. Each country should also have a full working strategic system; HQ, city, ammo, fuel, training and radar strats.

Up to 255 bases can be supported on an MA map but the small 256 mile MA maps currently being accepted by HTC are only big enough for around 150 bases. You can have fewer of course, but bear in mind the map will be won when a country has gained 20% of the other two countries' bases. So the more bases your map has, the longer it will be up before it is reset.

The three bases nearest to a country's HQ must be made uncapturable and the base closest to the HQ is the only one allowed to spawn the Me 163.

More than three task groups in a small area of ocean can cause a frame rate issue for some players. So if you intend to have more than nine of these in total I'd suggest spreading their ports out across the map or even splitting the ocean area into three or more enclosed seas.

It is not a rule but I would suggest limiting a player's choice of spawns to enemy bases or choice of nearby enemy airbases to between 2 and 4 per front line. Having too many choices tends to dilute the action.

The map should be fair to each country. Not necessarily a symmetrical layout but it should not favour one country over another. Examples of unfairness would be one country's strats or ports being much nearer to the front lines than the other countries' or one pair of countries having a really long front line and another pair a really short one. Also an airfield with a much greater altitude than similarly placed fields in the other countries or vehicle bases with more or better spawns than the other countries. You don't want players saying “Oh no, we've got the south country again!”

All land should be at 20 feet altitude or higher, apart from coastlines where it transitions down to the sea at 0 feet. This is because some STOs like towns or vehicle bases will show as water if placed on land that is too low.





Objects that can be placed in an MA terrain

Above is a list of objects that can be put into an MA terrain and what properties should be assigned to each in the Object Properties box of the terrain editor. No other objects in the TE or any custom made objects can be put into an MA terrain.

Many of these are square tile objects (STOs) which are actually collections of many smaller objects like buildings, guns, roads and vegetation designed to fit exactly into one or more of the mile-wide squares shown in the terrain editor. STOs may be rotated exactly 90, 180 or 270 degrees from default (set snap to on) but not to any other angle.

The non-STO objects like shore batteries can be rotated to any angle and positioned more freely on the map, although with the specific limitations listed above.

The small, medium and large airbases are all actually all the same size, one mile square. Which to use is really just a question of how easy you want the field to be to close down or take. The larger fields have more AA, hangars and resources than the smaller. In general having smaller fields at the front gets the strategic war going and larger in the rear areas stops it becoming a walkover. Each of these will need either a town placed nearby and linked to it or a map room object placed on the field itself for enemy troops to run to.

The super-large airbase is 4 miles on a side and has its own built-in town and map room. It is quite impressive to look at but is a frame rate hog for players with marginal PCs. So I'd suggest using it sparingly in rear areas not likely to see any fighting or preferably not at all.

Airbases should be placed no higher than 6,000 feet altitude because a fully loaded Lancaster will struggle to get off the ground any higher than this. Ensure there are no steep hills or trees blocking the ends of runways that would make take offs and landings hazardous.

Carrier and battleship task groups (TGs) must each have an assigned port and map room. You can link more than one TG to a single port. Each TG must have a looped default path assigned to it in the task group tab in the TE. This is the path a TG sails every time it respawns at its port until a player changes it. When placing ports bear in mind how long it will take the TG to get back into the action after it is sunk. Linked port and TG's numbers should have the same number of digits, so P98 linked with C99 or P100 with C101 are both OK but P99 with C100 is not.

The tiny vehicle base is only 1/8th of a mile across, which lets it just fit between four of the closest altitude vertex points on the map when unrotated. With only a couple of AA guns, a map room and one hangar this base is easy to take but its small size lets it fit into narrow canyons, or atop narrow ridges or land bridges. It can be rotated to any angle but it must lie entirely on terrain that is completely flat. I find it best to use the wire frame mode of the TE to see where the altitude vertexes are when positioning these.

The small and large vehicle bases are respectively 1 and 2 mile square STOs and have their own map rooms. As with the various sizes of air base use the larger base if you want it to be harder to take.

Spawn points (SPs) must not be placed in such a way that they can come under fire from a field, strat or a train's 37 mm AA guns as soon as a player spawns in. These guns have a range of 1.5 miles so the nearest edge of your spawn should be further than this from the nearest AA guns. The normal distance used for incoming MA SPs is 3 to 3.5 miles from the the centre of the spawn to the centre of the base. Only an SP that is from the nearby base can be closer than this as in this case spawning players will not come under fire from their own base's guns.

Shore batteries (SBs) should be placed close enough to their base that they show up in the base's manned gun selection screen and so that enemy players can easily associate it with that base. It should also have a good field of fire, not be blocked by trees and not be able to fire on its own base's map room. It is best to place them on flat terrain as this prevents gaps around its hill base that vehicles can fall through.

The bridges are a mixture of flat topped and arched stone bridges of differing lengths. It is difficult to use even the longest of these to bridge a narrow stretch of ocean as coastlines placed that close together tend to merge. Instead these are normally used to bridge the narrow rivers that are part of the strat supply system.

When positioning these bridges it is important to make sure the ends of the land sections attached to either end of the bridge sit below and not above the terrain itself otherwise it leaves a gap vehicles may not be able to climb over. This is quite tough to spot in the TE so check it in-game too.

The revetment shape can be positioned on any completely flat land to give a protected place for vehicles to fire from. You should avoid placing them on top of an STO though.


Square Tile Object separation rules

There are a number of rules and guidelines regarding how STOs can be placed in relation to one another:-

Any two STOs must have at least a 1 mile gap from each other (i.e no corners or sides touching).

No two STOs can be placed into the same 4 mile red square as shown in the terrain editor. This is usually only an issue when placing towns near airbases or flak bases near to strats.

Airfields, vehicle bases and ports should be placed between 19 and 31 miles apart from each other. A more isolated base that can be easily reached by carrier task groups might be acceptable but you should check with HTC first.

Because of its long range puffy AA guns a strat should not be placed any closer than 8 miles from an airfield. Also no closer than 3 miles from a vehicle base or port. It can theoretically be placed as close as a 1 mile gap from another strat so long as both are of the same country. However I'd check first with HTC if doing this.

Flak bases should not be placed any closer than 8 miles from an airfield and no closer than 3 miles from a vehicle base or port. However up to two flak bases may be placed as close as a one mile gap to a strat so long as the flak bases are of the same country as the strat and are set to be uncapturable. Apart from the three nearest bases to the HQ, flak bases are the only type of base that may be set to uncapturable.

A town should not be placed so far from its airfield that enemy players can't easily associate the two but it can be as close as a 1 mile gap if you want to help the defence of the field.

The two mile square tank town STO is just some interesting terrain for tanks to fight over and has no AA of its own. This means it can be placed at close as a 1 mile gap to any other STO.


Strat and field supply system

MA terrains must have a working rail, road and barge supply network added after all the strat and field STOs have been placed. The TE's default setup simply runs dead straight 10 mile long railways and roads N, S, E or W from the strats and fields. When editing these routes to run them around mountains or water etc. avoid running any part of a route across an STO. Also avoid crossing any spawn points as a vehicle could spawn either into a river or onto a road and get immediately hit by a passing truck convoy.

You can alter the length of the routes from 10 miles but try to keep the other countries' similar routes the same length for fairness reasons. The game spawns convoys at regular times so a longer route has more convoys to hit. Also don't make your supply routes a lot longer as too many convoys in play at once could exceed the game's maximum object count.

It is permitted to have extra “vis only” routes in an MA terrain for visual or game play reasons. You might for instance place a “vis only” river across enemy vehicles' likely path and then place a bridge across this river to create a defensible choke point.

Apart from where they transition down to the ocean I suggest you run any supply rivers over flat terrain, as on sloping water reflections of nearby objects like trees can become misplaced.


Weather

If you build a cloud system for your terrain going too heavy on cloud cover can cause frame rate issues for players with marginal PCs. Cloud types 1-7 in the cloud editor are less taxing than the heavier types 8-11. Maintain a gap of 40 miles between each block of clouds at all times and do not stack one block above another. Mountain peaks can touch the clouds but in general allow at least 3,000 ft between the clouds and the land below it. Overcast layers should be set to over 35,000 ft.

[Ciaphas]

great guide man!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[bustr]

Greebo,

See if Hitech will give a ruling on using the none berm end bridges ganged together say 2-6 of them with a view only road across the top set to hide segment. At each meet point of bridge objects your GV sees down through which is distracting but nothing else. Other than that, and the long exposure to enemy's, you can span an island to the main land or a train track across a wide canyon.

I was looking at the coast of Norway and Svalbard recently and considered some interesting town and airfield placement ideas from airfield locations there if we are not limited to the berm end bridges. They limit your use of the river path based on width to fit the berm end bridges. Still, has Hitech given a max width limit for the river path for the MA? You can create reservoirs and lakes with that path at different elevations coming down out of mountain ranges.

Too bad you have to manually input widths instead of being ably to drag the edges of a river out to form complex lake shores as a sub function to setting the curve shapes of that path object itself. Then all you would have to do is make sure your lake area was flat including it's complex shape and drag the river edges out to fit those contours within the limits of the object's shape tolerances.

The document looks great and covers the basic a,b,c's for new terrain builders. It is more helpful than having to open an old terrain and hunt around looking at object properties to remember things like this. But then I always forget, is it 90 degrees right or left before exporting out of Krita in .r16 for a raw unsigned conversion.

Thank you for this document Greebo.

[Greebo]

I'm not sure why you'd want me to ask HT about non-berm bridges Bustr as I haven't experimented with them at all. He is no more likely to discuss it with me than any other player. I've had very little feedback from him or anyone else at HTC regarding this guide. If he does rule on them then that can be added in a subsequent post in this thread.

I remember using Krita to do height map conversions. Figured that was way beyond the scope of this guide though, even if I could remember exactly how I did it.

Skuzzy, could we please have this thread stickied and the other out of date MA terrain threads un-stickied?

[bustr]

You export a Krita 16bit grayscale png as .r16 with a 90 degree right hand turn, then change the extension to raw manually. Import into ImageJ and export as RAW. Then import into the terrain editor as an unsigned RAW. Sea level = 1000 grayscale in Krita, with AH max elevation 32000, Krita 33000 grayscale. Krita 4.1.5 is out with some nice updates.

I'm really liking arctic circle area granite islands like Svalbard becasue the slopes on mountains are more like walls and geometric shapes due to the lack of year round rain fall cutting run off features. Temperate regions and tropics everything has water runoff created features which eat up construction time. Especially with large deep canyons like I filled into the back feilds of each country on riftval.

I get nervous posting I am putting something into a terrain for the MA and the validation is the lack of subsequent input from Hitech. Look at the fiasco that created with the roads, bridges and water paths on riftval. Then how many time Hitech had to pull it from rotation for issues. I was getting worried I had made it onto his permanent Christmas naughty list for life.

[Greebo]

Yes that process rings a bell. I think there was another conversion step when I did it because PSP did not export the right file format or something. I can't see many besides the two of us building a terrain that way though.

I lost count of how many times I redesigned CraterMA because it turned out some clever thing I'd done with it was not allowed. Dispirited, I'd put it away for months at a time. It took me four years to get that terrain into the game in the end. I'm still mucking things up too. My current terrain Bearpit has some V bases closer than 18 miles apart so that will all have to be redone when I get interested enough to work on it again.

Hopefully the above guide will stop other people making the same mistakes.

[Ciaphas]

Krita?

The 2d studio software?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Easyscor]

I am sorry Greebo, I did not notice this before:

No two STOs can be placed into the same 4 mile red square as shown in the terrain editor. This is usually only an issue when placing towns near airbases or flak bases near to strats.

Towns must be at least one mile from a field, but are not required to be outside the 4 mile red square unless you were told this by HTC. I believe that the 4 mile rule might apply between default strat objects.

I can check the flak base to strat distance on the small pizza terrain. I submitted all my MA updates with only 1 mile between them and if HTC didn't change that, then they left them at 1 mile.
CONFIRMED in the terrain even for the HQ.

[bustr]

I'm not sure why you'd want me to ask HT about non-berm bridges Bustr as I haven't experimented with them at all. He is no more likely to discuss it with me than any other player. I've had very little feedback from him or anyone else at HTC regarding this guide. If he does rule on them then that can be added in a subsequent post in this thread.

I remember using Krita to do height map conversions. Figured that was way beyond the scope of this guide though, even if I could remember exactly how I did it.

Skuzzy, could we please have this thread stickied and the other out of date MA terrain threads un-stickied?

I learned from BowlMA to first create my finished land blocks that would be the foundation of all things on my 4096x4096 blue print. Then I lay out my feilds, towns, TT, strats and ports 8pixel=1mile on the blue print so when I import my RAW file generated from it, I create a CBM and transfer those onto it. Then I lay down each location as a 1x1, 2x2, 4x4 square in some off white tile. From there those off white squares dictate everything while I create the finished 3D terrain. And they dictate where I will run river paths to take advantage of bridges. Because of all that, I've already laid out my fronts and helping players to congregate and move through the terrain as initiatives. ACM only players are supported by doing everything I can to keep the majority of airfields 19 miles apart to shorten their turn around time. And then for GVers there is that 6mile diameter area around every field of micro terrain to give them something more than just trees. It's amazing how much a few feet of random land elevation changes makes GV combat inside of the small combat area off a spawn need less trees to clutter things up. From watching tank battles over the last few years and talking to the players during the battle, I've come to doubt that many GV players really want many trees in the combat space. I've run into players who think the sparse scrub hill country areas on riftval has too many trees. But, they were a bit emotional at the time becasue someone was sitting in the bushes just back of their spawn.....AH2 suicides pawns anyone.

[Greebo]

I am sorry Greebo, I did not notice this before:

Towns must be at least one mile from a field, but are not required to be outside the 4 mile red square unless you were told this by HTC. I believe that the 4 mile rule might apply between default strat objects.

I can check the flak base to strat distance on the small pizza terrain. I submitted all my MA updates with only 1 mile between them and if HTC didn't change that, then they left them at 1 mile.
CONFIRMED in the terrain even for the HQ.

Hmmm....I am pretty sure HT told me "only one STO per red square" during AH3 beta. Unfortunately the terrain editor thread in the beta forum is way too long for me to check exactly what he originally said. I've always been careful to stick to that rule even when placing towns or flak bases close to their field or strat. If what I wrote in the OP is wrong I am not sure what to do about it as I can't edit it now. That's why I did all those edits in the other thread before starting this one and also why I asked HTC a couple of times to review it for errors.

[Easyscor]

Right. PM on its way.

[Greebo]

Easyscor's kindly checked with HT regarding my guide and it seems I got a lot of things wrong. So I am going to rewrite it and post it in the old guide edit thread I started. So Skuzzy please don't sticky this thread and ideally delete it.