cn2mc

One question: did the guy(s) who invented chess think of every possible opening and strategy?

Sorry if it came out as word-twisting. I did not necessarily mean you as a person, it's just a (legitimate) manner of expression. Also, if anything, you yourself did not in any way specify you were the Nod player in your initial post. The sentence 'I focussed fire. But am sure that those guard towers did not. After this. I only lost 1/3th of them. Some where lightly or heavely damaged' does not clear things up either.

Not firing on the buggy you targeted probably means it went out of range and the tower forgot it. Don't place towers in such a way so that they can be easily swarmed, back them up with men, and you'll find they're actually not bad vs. light vehicles.

Not that much of a problem in that case, but a good player will still see them and make it a point to kill them in the most cost-effective way possible. An APC with a few flamers/grenadiers goes for around $1500-1700. You only need to kill 5-6 guys to break even. Otherwise, anti-air deterrence is OK, but sometimes you actually want the choppers to come and not to scare them off.

I'd say GA, Eye of the Storm, Village of the Unfortunate, Nowhere to Hide are decently balanced even with the random starts. I'm tempted to also put Red Sands in the list, but... reasons.

Protip: don't spam rocket men in advance.

Second option is better as towers can kill engis quite well, while turrets miss men by a mile and they're more of a buggy deterrent at this stage. Have the barracks/HoN on top of the CY* and pop the gren/flamer when the APC stops to unload. Having it there beforehand will only result in it being crushed, and possibly killing or damaging your own men. * replace at will with whatever exposed target you have for the enemy engi.

Grenadiers are for killing the engis and not good at all vs. the APC itself. Use mass minigunners and the occasional bazooka man instead. I've said it in another thread: a helipad builds quick and a heli can damage the APC before it reaches your base. If the map has tight entrances or bridges, a heli can also block the APC. This is all, of course, in a no WF/airstrip scenario. Having buggies and bikes or humvees is certainly better.

A different tool for just editing .bins sounds much more streamlined, yes. Is the .mix thing really needed for anything besides hacking in new tiles? Because the way I see it, if you have a tool that can open and edit template files with simple draw and copy/paste functions, you can just have the corresponding bytes for every tile and store them as a standalone palette or something, or am I wrong? Anyway, this is kind of going off topic. I'll maybe show 'long bridges' later. I'd like to hear ideas for more things to do with maps, because I like this thread.

Yeah, but the copy-paste function for tiles sounds tasty. Couldn't that, or a 'deconstructed' template section where you can choose 1 tile out of a set be added to one of the existing editors for TD?

Easiest thing to do in TD's limited map space is to keep your fast units not between your defences and the enemy army, but between the enemy army and his base. That way you threaten him too. If he attacks your base, you have two fronts on him. If he goes back to chase you, you slow him down, his formation gets screwed up and you can pick units off. If he tries to reinforce, you can intercept. Etc.

The correct answer is: don't let them build up that much. Letting GDI reach a position where they can steamroll you unmolested is suicide. Also, look up 'defeat in detail'.

Here it is: a land bridge in the desert theatre. Only the two top waterfall cells needed actual hex editing, the East part I did by simply overlapping tiles in XCC. Maybe there is a suitable cell in the river tileset that will mask the lack of shadow and blend in with the cliff better than the dumb tree solution.

Small lake is only rivers, I think. Island probably too. The fjord itself is a combination of shore and river. It switches to beach in the West. The idea came to me before, when I was one time making a similar fjord-like mission, and I wanted to have cliffs as near to the water as possible.

Beach-less islands and lakes are also possible in temperate and winter by carefully combining river and river-to-shore tiles. See my Fjord map for reference. I had an example, but on another computer: I might later post a pic of a land bridge in desert. I.e. faking a river going through a tunnel under a cliff. Rudimentary stuff, but with some hexing it can work better.

Middle on GA is obviously a very good, possibly the best start on the map, but I'm talking about cross spots, they're still very easy to expand out of, and you can offensively expand right off the bat. In contrast, Sands is a whole lot more closed and convoluted geographically. You basically only have economic expansion choices if you start in the sides, and even the two middle positions can only base rush a couple of others. Expanding here is also kind of forced away from the opponent by both ridges and resources. Even if you do successfully base rush the enemy, they always have an avenue for flanking you. If anything, Sands plays much more like Marooned than like GA on the tactical level. I'm referencing Marooned for another reason. Even without middle starts it's a 'middle rules' map. So no, I'd say it's not the middle starts at fault, but the availability of space for offensive expansion. With all this being said, knowing the map-specific builds and placements on GA, which are quite intuitive, evens out any visible geographical imbalances. I'd give it a pass for ladder or tournament. Well, maybe not for the finals stage. Not so sure about Blistering Sands. Definitely against Marooned, as it is too complex and different spots need very differently executed builds.

Many maps limit base creeping towards your opponent by using various methods: constricting or twisted geography, unbuildable cells, islands, lots of tiberium. I find the inability to expand offensively or towards tiberium to be more of a balance changer in a Nod vs. GDI game than the actual openness of a map. F.ex. Green Acres is pretty much all wide open, but by base creeping GDI can deny Nod control over a big chunk of the map. I guess it can fit in as a subset of an open/closed type of scoring applied to the entire map. The other type of score should probably be for abundant/scarce resources.

Well, defence against apaches will also be decreased to a significant extent. It's important to have the spare power plants, barracks and cash to build rocket men on demand when the helis come. If the defender is GDI, scouting the rush and slapping down a quick helipad and an orca can also help a lot. So the less cash you have, the less defence options you get. At 5000 credits heli rushes become practically impossible and turn to harassment, so that might turn out to be a bit too limiting as far as play choices go. There are also quick tech rushes which get stricken off the record at 5K, so 7K I would consider a safer minimum. You keep the 4 apache death-blow as a risky all in option, while you still get enough starting cash for a wide variety of builds including economic 3 ref. starts. I reiterate the safe minimum part, I personally believe it's better to play at 10K. Gives more options, is possibly easier to get used to and do the math for for less experienced players.

New 1v1 experiment. ruby ridge.bin ruby ridge.ini

I remember TD actually briefly had a (slightly flawed) post-game report at a certain point, so it's most probably not impossible. As for map features: no tiberium seas, no capturable multi-tech CYs, even though I'm fine with comm. centres or power plants, or something, for expansion. Obviously no ion cannon-firing civilian structures and the like. Resources. IMO, maps should have enough to sustain at least 3-4 ref. builds for both players. Not too little, as to limit the game to rushes, but also not too much or too dense, so that they inhibit troop movement and base expansion. Base-creep potential is also a point that needs to be reasonably addressed, probably as one of the 4 'sliding' features White suggested. Settings. 5-10K starting cash seems reasonable, I'd say the № of starting units is a greater point of contention, with people getting APCs at 5, IIRC. Crates are a no-no and visceroids can be eliminated/minimized as a threat if need be, by changing their stats: no weapon, little health, etc. I kind of like the separate helipad option, because it widens the use of chinooks, at least theoretically, and it doesn't really slow heli rushes down that much. Optional for me. I believe slowing down the speed a notch to 5 will defuse the threat of APCs somewhat, giving more micro time to the defender... but then again, I myself prefer the excitement of the faster setting and I don't think it's really a balance breaker in competitive play. Scouting the rush and taking early measures is much more important than the 3-4 additional frantic clicks you'll get to make when it comes on lower speed. I say: optional between 5 and 6, agreed upon beforehand by the players and/or observer/referee/tournament rules and locked for the duration of the game. Pausing also seems possible/plausible if official matches ever take place. Lowering the speed down to 1 slows the game to a crawl, and if theoretically we can tinker with these settings, it can be made to go even slower or almost not at all. (Basically the same suggestion as the previous one, of hacking in a speed between 5 and 6.)

Temples cannot be captured. Fortunately, with no power, they also cannot launch nukes at players.

Seeing more of the battlefield has been the main goal of commanders since war began. High res is a huge advantage in almost all respects and it vastly outweighs the very small disadvantages you get like infantry micro and precise targeting of small/fast units. RA is a different game with a different imperative: build and shift tanks fast, keep all your tanks together. Many sneak attack options that TD has are eliminated - engis suck, air comes later in the tech tree, no real rush units exist besides tanks, small infantry squad assaults are basically rendered obsolete because of tanks... tanks. But also I'm pretty sure that on 'regular' RA maps, as opposed to the mirrored money maps that are played, high res might very well be better than low res. So yeah, I believe in competitive play resolution should be either universally locked or forced to be the same for both players in individual games. Definitely locked in case of a tournament but there are more elegant solutions for ladder play, like coefficients. F.ex if we both play at the same res and I win, I get 10 points. If I'm at one res level higher than you I only get 9, etc. I like the idea of playing at speed 5 as it unlocks a lot of micro potential, but then again, it also gets very tedious very fast. If there was something in the middle between that and 6... (7 is actually not necessarily faster than 6 and it causes more lag.)

Actually, that is used on quite a few maps. Most notably, ones that have expansions only accessible by air or augmented builds with extra 'special' construction yards.

ROF = cool down time, and yes, it is time between shots, hence 'rate of fire'. I also advise not to rely on the wiki... whatever wiki it is you are speaking of.

No idea about frames or if rate of fire is measured in frames. ROF line in weapons.ini it is, though. Lower numbers mean higher rate of fire.