Bloomilk has kind of become my best way of staying ion the loop about the game, because My firewall won’t let me go to gamers at work anymore. So I am posting this here. If someone wants to go to gamers and post this in the mystery map thread there as well, that would be great, and I’ll check it tonight!

AG7 and I started a dialogue about this and I am paraphrasing some of our thoughts.We’d like you thoughts as well.

The goal for me is to discourage the same squads we see all the time. We plan on designing a map that will NOT cater to the regular squads.

My thoughts:
I want a map where

A. Greater Mobile is nuetralized
B. Yobuck and Ig lancers are irrelavant
C. An average melee beatsick has a good chance, when put in the right
players hand.

It just can't be balance and protected gambit, that's good for standard
play

I'm sure there are other standards.

AG7 thoughts
The only thing you can do about swapping armies (the other source of power for Republic/Imperial power armies) is add doors basically.

Oh, one other thing: I think really competitive maps need fewer places in the starting areas to hide commanders. All of the abusive power combos in the game rely on hiding a few key commanders away...

Pretty hard to outright nerf greater mobile on shooters; it's a pretty big advantage. I think there just needs to be a way for melee to advance 6 squares at a time and be safe from flanking shooters. If the map does have shooting lanes, they need to be short: 12-14 squares long at most, not running all the way along the map so that melee can base to catch up.

Yobuck and Lancer are confused by doors mostly; Yobuck can be slowed down considerably by hindering terrain - he hates Theed for that reason.


Josh and I are pretty much in agreement, although he is a bit more concise than I am.

We're still working on locations. one of them is just about set in stone, and I haven't desided yet on mine, but I may go back to my roots with a KOTOR Location.

There's some added responses along this line over at Gamers, but the short and long of it is that it's pretty much impossible to build a map that's going to do ALL of the things you listed, Matt.

If you build it to cater to Melee attackers, so they can advance 6 squares at a time and still be safe, well then you're creating a new haven for Yobuck or Lancers to run around, and still find cover in places. In addition, that typically creates great places for Mobile Attackers (of any sort, whether GMA or just regular) to move behind these same walls that provide cover for the Melee guys.

Keeping shooting lanes short, done to 12-14 squares is a good idea overall. Having some longer ones isn't a game-breaker though (see Throne Room map). The key is, when you do allow those longer lanes, just make sure they are narrow.

Having places to hide commanders really doesn't make any sense to me. Pretty much, no matter how you build the map, you're going to need some areas to hide pieces, otherwise they get picked off right away. So, if there's a space to hide something...well, then that's where the commander goes. Squads like Yobuck and Lancer are ALREADY powerful. Maps aren't going to stop that, especially since those squads already do well on pretty much all of the Restricted maps. So only new pieces will stop that. Creating maps where the commanders have to be closer to the front line in order to find their hiding spots just makes it that much easier for pieces like Yobuck to do a strike and swap, as they don't have to go as deep as they did before.

The key is to determine the meta squads first. And then test the meta squads on the maps. You can't design the maps just based off of an individual piece, or an individual ability. Because some squad will always find the best way to utilize a map, and it may only become evident based on the entire squad, and not just because of one piece in the build.

I said this over on Gamers, and I'll toss it out again. Honestly, I think the best way you'll come up with maps for the Mystery Map tournament that might end up being Restricted-level maps, is to review them with some of the community ahead of time. Obviously, pick people who know their stuff in this regard and who aren't planning to play in the tournament, so there's no unfair advantage though.

Something as simple as a hall way with lots of "Duck and cover space". I'm thinking along the lines of:



Ok... so its a network topology, but its the closest thing I could find with the shape I was referring to. Basically, a long corridor with enough space to move 6 squares down it, and then 6 squares into a side hallway that would provide no line of sight except from anyone willing to leave themselves out in the middle of the hallway. It makes mobile attack negligible, as the mobile attacker would be able to get LOS, but not take cover afterward. Like wise, if a piece was swapped for a mobile attack, all the mobile attacker could do is make its attacks (hopefully defeating whoever is in a side corridor with it), and then hope to duck and stay out of the way until the next round, when it could be swapped out for more fodder. With enough doors, you may be able to make the swap threat even harder to pull off then it is worth too.

Just my 2 creds

My only problem with this, is I like to play huge pieces. It seems unfair to screw the already screwed huges even more.

What are these "Cut corners" you refer to, and why can you move through, but not shoot through them?

That is correct, but generally this is a terrible idea. While it can help Melee advance, most of the time you'll see it played by GMA. Move through the opening, shoot, move back in where you cant be shot. Depends on how they're done, how many there are and where they are at. Chris has a map with a ton of these and I never bothered to play on it for Restricted testing, basically took one glance at it and said "nope!".

Lancer is allowed to squeeze, so you are going to have to have a very, very long corridor to prevent the strafe from getting to a safe landing zone. One or two such corridors are okay, but I would hate to see Larges and Huges punished.

If you can't attack through them, what prevents a player from parking a fig on one side and preventing any movement through it?

Keep in mind that a pawned lancer has a total of 48 spaces it can move in 2 activations.

True, but it has to land after the first one. You'd need a corridor of length 12. If it bends, that could look like:



The Lancer would start at one end. At the other end, there could be a room... as long as your people are spaced such that he has no landing space, he can't fly in because he wouldn't have enough movement to get back out the corridor. In fact, if you had a bunch of corridors like that punctuated by 3x3 rooms then a single character positioned in the middle of the 3x3 room would be safe from the Lancer.