A thread to point out grts maps that could have altered metalmaps to work with ZK. I'll describe the effect of Overdrive here because it will come up in many of these maps.

There is an equation that multiplies the income of an extractor based on how much energy is spent on it. The equation is sqrt(1 + energy/4) so an extractor's income doubles if you give it 12 energy and triples if given 32. A team's excess energy is distributed to the extractors for the purpose of income multiplication. The distribution is not uniform, if an extractor has higher income there is more value in multiplying it's income so a larger proportion of energy is sent to it. The OD equation has been solved to ensure the optimal distribution of energy.

OD has been balanced for mex incomes in a range of about 1 to 5 with the larger incomes promoting more investment in energy.

Grts_RiverMouth_002
As already stated in the other thread. Mexes should cover an entire spot and each spot could have about 2.3 income due to their high density.

Grts_Cookedwell_008
Not enough metal. Each spot could be upgraded to 5. The middle spot should be covered by a single extractor and if a king of the hill mechanic is wanted it could produce about 8.

Grts_Messa_008
The middle mex is +30 which could be toned down to +12 and still be worth fighting over. It is quite a hard spot to take but +30 can be easily knocked up to a ridiculous +100.

Grts_Rocky_Glacier_010
Surprisingly not bad. Even pedobear has reasonable metal values.

What about:

_gantelope

_gunmetal

_desertvalley
http://www.smoth.net/files/Grts_desertValley_016.sdz
also what about this guy(not out yet but not the map it used to be)?

grts_gantelope_004
Metal spots could go down to +3. The spot at 2430 2780 looks like a mistake which creates a resource imbalance. The spots are slightly too big for extractor radius and they are too close together which screws up area mex. This could be fixed by reducing spot size by 1/2.

grts_gunmetal_harbor_009
There is about 360k metal in reclaim on this map. Other than that the mexes are fine, they are quite high but there are few. An unrelated issue is that the gaia units have radar blips when zoomed out. They should not have blips or they could have a very large icon distance.

grts_desertvalley_0012
The mexes here work fine.

SEVERELY reduced the overall metal...
will be TOTAL 60.7k for the entire map. Largely it was that I had goofed one of agorms palmtrees to 1k.. I went ahead and reduced the metal of the structures on it all the same
Energy is still 170k..

Better?

60k still sounds like too much although it is a massive reduction from 360k so I can't really judge. I will have to try it ingame. The effectiveness of conspam as economy will be reduced by smaller features due to larger walk time.

If we assume half the metal per side each side can make 400 puppies which may be manageable given the map size as long as everyone is aware of the threat.

I can post my WIP version if you would like, I am working on the texture to change the look and contrast of the map but I would happily post a test version for you if you wanted to try it with a few friends.

I'm curious, what's the actual metal-per-second output of, say, a rector doing reclamation? 6m/s? Is there any way to make a feature burn workertime so reclaiming it yields at a slower rate?

as far as I know, the only way is to set their energy or metal values to something high.

reclaimTime

so there you go

reclaimTime is a bit of a pain due to it's inconsistency. I'd also have to make Puppies pay attention to it if you decide it is a solution.

Google, I uploaded it to springfiles
http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-ma ... l-harbor-0

Some feedback after testing in single player with ZK:

The map and all its features look great, good job!

Extractor radius fits well the size of spots, area mex doesn't break anywhere. Personally I would prefer metal patches that are not so huge but it is just my opinion.

The amount of metal in features seems reasonable. It is about 30k metal per side, so in 4v4 would be 7,5k per player. Considering that he would have to invest in cons and the reclaiming will take some time it seems good to me.

The Gaia buildings kind of pollute the minimap with icons, but I have no idea if it is easily fixable or not.

Some features need their collision volumes adjusted:

These pipes clearly have bugged colvols, looks like you messed X with Z scales.



These could have the colvols better fitting the model so they dont unnecessarily block the pathing, but it is probably me being OCD, and wont be a noticable issue ingame, especially that the trees seem to be easily tramplable even by weasels.

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=27430

interesting about the colvols, I'll have to investigate, I suspect I have them correct in grts but didn't do that in the map file .. We will see. Not a big deal to make a v12 just need to get some more feedback on that.