cn2mc

Mostly this. An open field certainly looks bigger, but adding a maze-like structure between opponents, even a very simple one, actually makes the maps feel bigger because units need to travel farther and expansions need to be carefully planned. Even with the obstructions you placed on the two maps in your first post, they still look less like mazes and more like open halls with a few pillars supporting the ceiling. When you reach one of the obstacles, it doesn't really matter if you go left or right of it. Tiberium is everywhere, so it doesn't matter where you expand. Offer people actual choices: should I risk expanding to the big tib field that's far away or should I stick with the smaller, closer one? Do I push out of this spot, or do I defend the choke because it gives me an advantage? Do I go for a frontal assault, or do I sneak troops in from the back entrance? Do I tech or do I tank? Etc... Now, all of this is much harder to apply in practice for 6P maps than it is for 2P and 4P. There's just not enough room. With that being said, the circular design is a very bad one if your aim is to maximize space. Just look at all the wasted squares around the edges in the first map. If you're so keen on making 6P maps, maybe try a diamond shape of start points? Have two spawns in two extreme opposing corners and the remaining four near the middle of each side of the map. That way, besides the common mosh pit in the centre, players can also have smaller battlefields between their starts, with everybody sharing two smaller tib fields with two other guys. Your Tiberium Garden remake is actually not a bad example of this. IIRC, Oasis, even though it's a 4P map, also has nice interactions between starts on the side, but I might be remembering wrong. EDIT: Here's something quick I made to illustrate what I mean:

I see very little to no advice of mine or White's implemented in these maps. Adding eye-candy around the edge of the battlefield, like in the first one, does not give the map more strategic depth or the player more choices on how to proceed with the game, nor does it change the fact that it is a completely open and tib-infested circular affair, no different than most maps you churn out. Second one is basically Matt's Sierra Nevada: Remastered. About the 'pollution' effect you have on CnCNet's map-sharing system: If I were you, I'd pick the maps I want to stay and kindly PM Funky (or whoever currently runs the updates for TD/RA) to ask if it's possible to delete all the obsolete ones from people's folders automatically, or at least to exclude them from the map selection list. It is indeed swamped by half finished and mostly samey maps of yours, which probably make up a good 40-50% of it.

SSMs kill off troops and make everything, especially bikes, more effective. Bikes are better off in a different group, flanking the enemy, picking off tanks that are out of position, etc. At $300 buggies are good fodder, yes. But they're better used in a separate group, like the bikes, to delay the GDI force by sniping men and by trying to get the tanks out of formation so you can pick them off more easily with the bikes. In an engagement like this you can afford to lose a bike and a buggy if you manage to kill a tank in return. Even if you trade bad, you still slowed the push and probably sniped some men along with the tank. And GDI can't just roll a new tank up to the front like you can do with bikes and buggies, because you can snipe it if it moves alone with no escort. You basically want to stretch out the GDI tanks into a line. Pick at the back with bikes and buggies and hammer the front with the light tanks and infantry.

No. Too cumbersome for TD/RA, in my opinion. Just let people change the order construction options appear in at will. I already said something to that effect in a reply to one of the previous questions.

5 is suicide against a good player. 4 might just be possible to pull off under certain circumstances, by base crawling and smothering the enemy with barracks perhaps. On smaller and more open maps even 3 ref builds are a bit of an overextension. So, yes, confine this to FFA gambles. No serious 1v1 player will leave you alone long enough for the income to kick in and let you get away with spending all your starting cash on refs without punishing you. My scouts seeing 3-4 refs in the enemy base at the start means I attack ASAP and I either scale down the economy or just tap them out if I went for a faster build or sent more scouts.

Talking about TD here. If I have to name just one thing, it would be more unit control. What more unit control amounts to in my mind: - Fully selectable and controllable units. My main issue is that currently you can't select air units in flight unless you have them in a team, and you have no way of targeting enemy air units with any precision, or targeting them at all with AA-capable aircraft of your own (no way to put aircraft on guard mode). - Having a button/click combination that makes men go prone, just like we can now double-click them away to make them stand up, would be nice. Maybe also a 'cease fire' key, which prevents units from firing on their own at all (like stealth tanks and commandos). These should be easy and C&C-like commands. F.ex alt+double click to send men crawling somewhere, alt+s or double-s for 'cease fire' as an imperative version of the regular stop command, etc. - I would not mind having Q-move in TD. If the original stats and balance are kept, the tanks would still not be as OP as they are in RA. Same goes for the loading of transports without having to send units in one by one. You can and should still micro that if you need men to come out in a certain order. - Some units just don't work exactly right mechanically. APCs bug out and refuse to unload if they're under fire, bikes, which should be crushable, are notoriously hard to crush and it mostly, if ever, happens by pure chance, units with secondary weapons and/or burst capability will behave in weird ways, etc. - The option to turn off structures from the power grid, as in TS, perhaps. Instead of more control, I was considering writing about the crucial bugs like South advantage, but then I remembered I already posted about those in the first thread. Hope that didn't get lost in all the spam there. EDIT: Of course, I forgot to mention the wonderful additions cncnet has already made to unit control, which need to be in, like the remappable hotkeys and the brand new hotkeys for sell and repair.

Definitely not for buildings, in the sense that you shouldn't be able to pre-build f.ex. 3 turrets and then place them all at the same time. Same with walls. This would be game-breaking. For units, I can deal with it, but is it really necessary? C&C and RA are great in the interface department in that they give you all options with a single scroll of the sidebar. The most I figure that system can be improved (short of single hotkeys for every unit type) is if you let players customize the order in which their construction options appear. A Nod player might want to always have the bikes and buggies on top when he has an airstrip. Many RA players will sell their barracks after building a factory so that the tanks are at the top of the options list. As GDI I'd like to have tanks and grenadiers next to each other, etc. Come to think of it, this really isn't a particularly crucial question. Actual game physics and behaviour are much more important than UI details.

SCII sucks, you know, compared to BW, right? I play neither, but obviously BW is the better, cleaner, more entertaining game, to both watch and play. Definitely more tasking and competitive in terms of micro. Anyway, we have better odds of Nyer or someone else savvy hacking some of the fixes we want in, than EA actually putting out something decent, or even reminiscent of TD. Especially if they're talking out of their ass with all of this 'remaster' stuff, as I'm now inclined to believe. The reality is that, without the original source code or knowledge thereof, no game, mod or remaster is going to feel and play like C&C. TDA goes close only because deep within the TS engine there's the Dune II one, which evolved into the TD/RA one, etc.

Just doesn't play like TD. Even if unit stats and weapon effects, etc. are all 100% replicated. And I'm pretty sure they're not. Just a different engine, the TS one, which, for all its capabilities, has a few surprising setbacks compared to the older RA/TD one, which it's based on. Still, DTA is probably the best approximation of TD gameplay that is not TD. Ironically, it has to sacrifice most of the huge potential of the TS engine to achieve this. I cannot answer the second question. I've played a bit of skirmish on DTA and am not inclined to switching to it from TD, but then again, I'm always wary of mods and remakes.

It shouldn't, since it's a move command. If you keep holding Q and attack another target though, that will scrap all previous waypoints you made, unless I remember wrong.

It's definitely much less of a problem than the no-infantry zones but no base creep does somewhat affect balance, yes. The thing is, I believe you have it the other way around. It's GDI that actually needs base creeping more, Nod can control the map and defend their base and harvs with light units just fine for a big chunk of the game.

So, it plays like it should. The idea is that tib looks close, but is actually far away, and you must choose a direction to expand to at start and kinda stick to it. Horizontal expansion is safer, vertical is a bit more risky and rushy.

You don't.

I actually make my maps in like an hour or two. Also, what people like is not necessarily the best for them. Or the best in general.

Tiberian Dawn, the first C&C, which is the game that actually has a 25th anniversary the soonest (2020). I agree harv micro is a very, very important part of the game, and should remain so, but the thing is that harv logic in TD and the first Red Alert skews the balance. Southern players' harvs will wander North and thus slow down income if they aren't constantly kept under eye, while players in the North positions need to micro their harvs less. I'm not sure that is the case in TS. No problem about the 'conclusions' part, you'll also surely maul me if we play TS. Back on topic. In my first post I forgot to say I'd like bigger maps, maybe because I've already said it in like 5 other threads about that. What I'd like to see as options in a potential TD remaster is: - Fog of war - I've always wondered what this game would play like with true FoW. - FoW would also mean giving aircraft vision. - Giving helis vision alone is also not a bad option to have. - Loss of tech/'requirements actually required'. Currently you can build and sell tech buildings, but you still retain the new construction options until you lose all related construction facilities.

Was just a drunken jab at 5 AM. I avoid games larger than 2v2 in general because of clusterfuck, and because maps in TD are too small for that, not because they're ugly. Also, a map can be a 'money map' and still retain some semblance of actual terrain and not be just an open field, covered with tiberium. Don't bring RA money maps into this, it's both a different game and a different concept with the endless ore patches, which I also do not like BTW, even though I could care less since I haven't really played RA this century. PS: Also, where'd you get the idea that I don't like symmetrical maps? Basically all the maps I made are symmetrical.

They also aren't pretty.

Fix South advantage, make air units selectable/targetable, fix harv pathfinding. That's it. People talking about balance changes etc. with their walls of text don't appear to know what 'remastered' means. Keep balance the same and only fix bugs and control issues, this means no unit/building stats should be changed.

I am very sorry for your loss. He was a good player and will be missed here too. Online you don't really get to know the people you play with, but for what I knew about him, a man who kept his love of the game alive for most of his life, I have only admiration. My condolences, again.

No real testing, but I don't think it needs it. Here it is: teardrop.ini teardrop.bin

Will release after sufficient hype. I almost let it loose a night or two ago but the other guy demanded me to choose a bigger map, so he got pummeled on Bushlands and missed the golden opportunity to be patient zero. It's really my take on the square-cube law, C&C style, and also a proof-of-concept thing. If it turns out to work OK, similar designs can be implemented in larger maps or parts thereof. After all, this has less than half the square count a full 62x62 map has.

43x43, IIRC. The entire idea behind it is cramming more fighting space in less actual map space, without making the map an impossible to navigate maze or a wide open wasteland.

I knew I should've made the spermatozoa tails longer...

I only play, and map for, and fiddle with the first C&C so this post isn't really in my domain, but I still feel the urge to congratulate you on your decision. OpenRA is a massive undertaking worthy of respect. It is also a massive abomination as far as the C&C name and spirit are concerned. The more people realize this the better.

It is intended as an exercise in minimalism.