Team Fortress (4pl)

[nariac]

My first ever multiplayer map. Be gentle!

 

The theme, obviously, is a team game of East versus West. Your start locations are strongly defensible, however fairly sparse in Tiberium. To power your war machine and build your fortress into a mighty citadel, you and your ally need to control the centre of the map, with its rich resources - most of the blossom trees are located here. There's a Comm. Centre in the very middle of the map ripe for the capture, as well as a pair of Hospitals to the north and south to aid in expansion. Take them to build a firebase, or raze them to deny such a position to your enemy.

 

Aside from the frontal assault option, there's also the opportunity to backdoor your enemy by sending a force along the coastline to the north or south. But beware! There are hostile gunboats patrolling the waters, which will make short work of a early exploratory force of infantry ... unless they were to hide in the canyons, of course, as the boats pass by.

 

There are many such canyons and rocky outcroppings on this map, and more than a few have commanding views of neighbouring Tiberium fields. Well placed defences at these points could stake a claim over those valuable resources which might be hard to overcome, without extreme force.

scm91ea.BIN

scm91ea.INI

[MattAttack]

Don't know how I missed this post but I saw it yesterday and decided to try it out.  Unfortunately there was only 1 other player readily available so I couldn't test it's full potential, but it was pretty cool!  I always like capturable structures and these days I'm starting to prefer maps with less tiberium on them.  You definitely need to pay attention to your harvesters (which I don't mind) and further testing is needed to see if the gunboats will attack all players fairly, as they act pretty retarted sometimes.  Aesthetically it's a bit blocky, but I've seen much worse looking maps in my time-- I mean, at least all the cliffs/shores/etc. all line up properly.  I'd suggest some 2v2 tests online (as skirmish sometimes doesn't reveal all flaws) and if the gunboats work well, I wouldn't change a thing.  Good job!

 

Oh, BTW of course I recorded the game:

 

http://youtu.be/cNbRyOImyik

[nariac]

Thanks for testing it, Matt!

 

And yeah, it's a very blocky, pseudo symmetrical map. I always try to make beautiful natural terrain in my single player missions, but as this was my first multiplayer map making attempt I was really worried about balance! So I erred on the side of caution and made the opposing "fortresses" ... fortress like I guess.

 

I've been trying really hard to do things with gunboats in single player missions, but it seems that reinforcement gunboats will follow waypoints but never fire, and starting gunboats will fire but never follow waypoints. So frustrating! I suspect that the gunboats here will attack any initial attempt to sneak along the coastline, but if that attempt is withdrawn and survives, the boat will just aim its rocket turret at that first target and never reacquire a new one, making it easy to destroy or sneak past with subsequent forces. Still, delaying an initial rush is useful. And if those initial targets are destroyed in any way, the gunboat will be free to attack anything new that comes into range. So they sort of work.

 

Shame there weren't more players around to try it out. I imagine a pro team in a 2v2 might be able to defend those starting positions pretty well, and really slug it out for the middle ground!

[MattAttack]

heh heh, yeah don't get me started on how stupid gunboats act.... I had to learn those exact same lessons myself.  I'm glad to hear you're trying that stuff out as well! I want to play it again, but I rarely have a free minute for multiplayer these days and any free minutes are mostly dedicated to my singleplayer campaign (which can be interrupted by a diaper change or a feeding)  I'm glad to see that for being fairly new around here, you're definitely ahead of the curve as far as understanding how a lot of this stuff works.  If you have any questions, feel free to PM me as I could write an encyclopedia about the stuff I've learned about c&c over the last 4 years.  I just haven't had the time to make more tutorials (I had planned on amending Nyer's ccmanual also.) Just today I discovered some new insights into the "smudge" section of the .ini!

[AchromicWhite]

Yes, I am aware of that gunboat logic. Personally, I think that extra units on the map should be left for single player missions and that mulitplayer should be about what each person builds, rather than random stuff on the field... and I say 'random' because when someone fires the map up, on the preview screen, it wont show up. Meaning, when the players FIND the boats, it's kinda like "What, WHAT??" and can cost them quite a bit... imagine trying to go for a flank attack with a lot of troops early, and then have them all die and lose because of it.

Personally, I find those types of elements in a multiplayer match not fun, BUT others may think it's neat, so each to their own.

I'm also in two minds about giving tech, at any point, so if I was personally designing this, I'd have all the capturables as hospitals. Just so that people have to pay their full price and wait full time to make their next level of units.

 

All in all, though, I like the look of the map, lots of defendible points around the map (chokes), open areas around the centre tiberium for skimishes over resources and side areas for flank attacks... just, defended by gun boats, haha.

 

  -Liam