ns2_sol
Mephilles
Germany Join Date: 2013-08-07 Member: 186634Members, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
Germany Join Date: 2013-08-07 Member: 186634Members, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
in Mapping
I'm making a new map.
Eat it @The_Welsh_Wizard !
The map is in greybox layout testing atm so feedback on the map layout itself is needed the most for now.
Minimap:
Marine Spawn: Earth
Alien Spawn: Jupiter or Saturn
Workshop link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1434225549
Mod ID: 557C8B8D
Eat it @The_Welsh_Wizard !
The map is in greybox layout testing atm so feedback on the map layout itself is needed the most for now.
Minimap:
Marine Spawn: Earth
Alien Spawn: Jupiter or Saturn
Workshop link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1434225549
Mod ID: 557C8B8D
Comments
Lacks crashed trains.
Glad you started working on a map again!
Someone raised a good point yesterday, though, which is roomnames. They are obviously very temporary, but e.g. "Eris" and "Ceres" sound pretty similar, if someone has a heavy accent it might be hard to tell which one they mean.
I would have never thought this could be your map. Glad you are mapping again. One thing I don't understand though... why is every room named after planets / moons but only one room named after the dog of Mickey Mouse?
Layout looks solid, room layouts felt surprisingly solid aswell for a greybox. The map's center felt a bit empty / too overcomplicated for a large area without RT / TP. But that is just a feeling. Judging from the map it looks fine. The center has also really some similarities with Mesh lol.
Also I agree with pSyk, it is missing crashed trains. Unplayable.
Also I believe one room should be called "Home" :thinking:
Ceres already appears to have been renamed to Titan... so that issue is already resolved XD
Btw thx to @Kasharic for providing his greyboxing tutorial https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/154824/tutorial-greyboxing-for-gameplay
solar system
Grey... the theme is grey.
In Urectum
You could've just called it by it's original name, George...
Herschell knew the game, naming the planet after his king
Try to think from the Khaara POV...
Lunar
Like an elephant in the alley.
Khaara POV
Way too exposed even if it seems doable. GL/FT will ultimately lock it.
Jupiter
Can shoot the hive from a great distance. A GL bird nest spotted. Lane... straight...
Khaara POV
One trick or two but easily defused.
Saturn
"Whey mah railgun?!"
Khaara POV
It almost look better but it's a trap.
Solar
Can shoot the hive from a position that also allow to cover the ARC. It's like you took a bullet in the toe.
Khaara POV
Naked in the middle of the room.
Earth
Don't even think about it.
Weird or bug:
Holding 2 location gives quick access to 4 TechPoints.
TF setup can be quite a thing to help fortify those positions. If a cleaning occurs on one of those point the marine team can still use Titan/Eris as a proxy to get back to Mars/Neptune. Killing Pluto on the way will be easy...
Also use a chronometer for measuring the time needed to go from one point of interest to another. You'll see things eventually...
Use the replace tool to remove the grey box texture. 1 minute job. It gives a little help to the Khaaras especially with cloak (even if it's a dump right now).
Good luck...
(yeah i like ... ... )
The power nodes are intended to be angled.
If I were you I would stop and :
- try to use a grid of 256 to see were i should break a 'line of sight' or add obstacles to help the Khaaras.
- get the travel time right
- use robots to see where both team meet for the first engagements
The you will have a list of thing to do popping in your head.moved titan and eris more towards marine spawn. This leads to bigger rotation times from the ris junction to pluto. Also rotation times to the alien side naturals (neptune and mars) are a bit faster through the center now
Minimap:
Looking at the minimap again, I have a suggestion how to fix it:
Right now, if marines want to cover all lanes they have to play super aggressively and essentially hold aliens back at the red line, having players in Eris, Mars and Neptune. If they can hold that, they have already won, anyway. I feel like it takes pretty long to get to these places from marine start.
The only alternative is playing super passively and always having marines at Venus and Mercury. But if you're playing that passively you're probably going to lose.
The issue is that you can't just have players sit at Titan (defend the blue line) because of those two central vents. I didn't see them used much yesterday, but that's because marines sucked and there was no need to. But even if we had covered the center properly aliens would have run around us.
I suggest removing those two vents and instead adding vents in the three marked locations (Mars, Neptune, Titan (hard to see)). This allows marines to play defensively without being extremely passive at the blue line. If they push up past the red line aliens still have a chance of getting around them, though.
Two more things:
- Venus is pretty hard to defend for a natural because you have to walk right up to it
- I felt like it took me forever to get anywhere as marine and by the time I arrived aliens had already set up an ambush. This is however just a gut feeling, I don't know what the actual rotation times are.
edit: Another idea if you want to keep the vents would be to have the Neptune vent go to where I drew the titan vent and have the Eris vent be a lot shorter. Basically, don't do vents from alien naturals to marine naturals. Bad.
Myself, Meph and Ghoul were all spectating the round, the issue was not with the map, it is with the marines.
The round took 35 minutes and I saw marines use the middle lane all of about 7 times in the whole round.
Marines just don't use the area, so aliens have free reign to go through. The vents were almost never used, largely because they didn't NEED to be used, aliens also got a tunnel in Titan that went unscouted WITHOUT a shade for 8 minutes. When it was finally killed, it was replaced about 30 seconds later and had a shade put on it, which took marines another 5 minutes to discover.
Ghoul suggested moving the Pluto RT close to (or into) Eris, which I think is a good idea, but I also suggested to Meph to rotate the map 90 degrees to make marines spawn south and aliens spawn north, because this would feel more familiar to people when they play, as a majority of the maps have this spawn setup. The reason for these suggestions is to make the middle lane more intuitively important, so for people that don't think strategically, it is still obvious that this lane needs to be used.
I don't think the layout is at fault for the marine loss, I think marines clumping up and rarely using the middle lane really ruined your chances.
It would not leave aliens with only 1 natural... the term "natural" is to describe the "nearest RT" on a specific side... the RT would still be there, it would just be harder to take and hold with the change... Look at Mineral to see that Pump Control is still an alien Natural, but one that is hard to hold.
This was also suggested, but Meph doesn't like the idea of having 11 RTs.
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Another suggestion I made was to remove mars and neptune RTs and move Pluto RT closer to Eris, but make the Eris RT a double node.
- moved Pluto RT to Eris to give the central lane more importance.
- rotated the entire map by 90° (so marines spawn south now), with this players hopefully have an easier time reading the map and how it flows
Assumes service announcement voice -
@Mephilles is currently absent helping others instead of helping himself, work will come, but likely not until the new year. Thank you for your co-operation and apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.