Slapshot said:I met Bullethead at the con, and I believe that if he is on the path of creating a new map for the MA, he will try to make it work for EVERYBODY, so we all can have fun ... right Bullethead ?
Well, that's my eventual hope, but it might not ever see the light of day. Making a map, especially one the size of Pizza or Trinity, is a gawdawful amount of work. That's why we don't see new maps very often. It's not the fault of the editor program, either. That might not be the most user-friendly software out there, but it's still pretty simple to get the hang of. Even folks with a furballer's attention span
can, with a day or 2 of effort, begin turning out tiny H2H maps that work just fine. Making a bigger map is really no different except in size.
That's the problem--the nearly unimaginable number of things you need to put on the map, and check, tweak, re-check, and re-tweak ad nauseum. Those who have never tried making a map just can't appreciate it. That's why it kinda bugs me to see the Pizza map slammed so hard all the time. Don't get me wrong, I don't like that map much either, but I know full-well how hard it was to make, and I've not yet done anything comparable myself, so I feel the only people who've earned the right to damn it are those who have made an equally big map.
And that, IMHO, is the bottom line when it comes to map-makers vs. fliers. Because making maps is such an enormous investment of time that could be spent killing dweebs, chasing women, drinking, etc. (I'm talking MONTHS), those who build maps to completion get the opinion, and IMHO justifiably so, that the map should suit their own preferences above all, and if you don't like that, go build your own damn map. The editor's there for free, all it takes is commitment.
So, if I ever manage to get a big map built, you can be sure it'll emphasize the things that I personally like the best. At the same time, however, I want to make the map as attractive to everybody else as possible. Which is why I asked for everybody's opinions in this thread. However, there are real limitations to what you can do within the context of the overall strat, capture, and reset systems, so I can't implement everything I thought was a good idea. And like I said, I might not ever complete my dream map. Still, this thread IMHO will be worth it anyway because a) existing map makers might take its ideas into account, and b) it might encourage some more folks to make their own maps.
Now, finally getting to your specific question....
I don't really think it's possible to make a map that "works for EVERYBODY" simultaneously. The land-grab/reset and strat bombing things are inescapable due to the underlying game systems, and CVs are pretty easy to work in. The hard things are finding places for both furballers and GV vs. GV battles, where those types of fights can go on for a long time, and folks logging in at any time will usually find them available. In fact, I'd say these goals are well-nigh unachievable as the game currently works.
The basic problem is, the GVs and furballers need fields to launch from, and in AH you can't make fields uncapturable. So no matter what you do in the basic map design to make space for this type of action, the vast herd of landgrabbers who want the reset will eventually capture the bases set aside for these purposes.
On top of this, you have the problem of AH geography. Using terrain features to protect GV or furball areas causes other problems. Look at Trinity and Pizza, which use terrain in different ways to protect GV areas. On Trinity, the central GV area is surrounded by high mountains to deter planes from messing up the GVers' fun. Problem is, these same mountains keep the furballers of all 3 sides from getting together in 1 place very easily. Pizza, OTOH, has the canyons full of GV bases, hoping folks won't want to blow so much alt going down in there, and thus leaving the central area free for furballers. However, the problem there is that to create the canyons, which can't be below sea level, the surrounding land has to be at very high alt, and to avoid big mountains the AKs sloped the ground up smoothly from miles away, so many airfields are at bizarrely high alts.
The other alternative is to put furball and GV area off in corners, so far away from the main play area that nobody from there could capture or pork them. But this can't be done with fields out there because the fields have to be captured for the whole reset system to work. The only way this might work would be to not have actual bases out there, but just spawn points from bases that logically should be among the last to fall in a reset. But the problem then would be letting folks know about these corner areas, at least for plane spawns. The plane spawn arrows wouldn't show on the map, and there wouldn't be field icons out there, either.
