Why Mass Appeal = Noob Appeal, A Short Dissertation

[Pxtl]

Look at Starcraft - every popular Starcraft map has only one or two means of entrance into the home bases. Compare vs. TA maps where you have to be ready for attacks from every angle, and it's no wonder that players gravitate to maps that are porcy.

[smoth]

Northern mountain is U shaped with porcy start points. No one liked it even though it was non linear and porcy.

Messa and desert valley are straight with clear paths, people love them

Just sayin

[KaiserJ]

with frozen fortress i tried to go a similar route as talus... put the resources in areas that are counterbalanced with a highpoint for guarding so you must take both areas to secure the metal

people are mind-blowing blind, ignoring lateral paths / possible raids through LOS blocked areas and just forcing themselves constantly into enemy porc.

its just weird how many players can be proficient at micro but awful at examining the map and exploiting it

talus (maybe intentionally, knowing hunter) seems designed if anything to punish linear expansion in the way of dsd

knorke, i'll take beheriths new map over DSD any day, at least it has a balanced heightmap (unlike DSD thats imbalanced heightmap makes a massive impact, particularly in the first few minutes of the game)

[PicassoCT]

How about nubzones? Safe, protected startpositions nubs get autoassigned, wherever they join? Would also keep them out of the way.. problem is the math.. even one player doing nothing usefull with his ressources- is bringing down the team in a game with exponential ressources=> exponential units.. so the reason why noobs get screamod is basically the good old annhilation mechanic itself.
Cut the top of ressources, lower the unit count and the screaming ends. Its double ironically, that people who would get along with ressource systems like in gundam, or micronwars, have to learn the BA first, and the survivors refuse then to go back to CC&Style ressources.

Crowd Magnets how do they work?

Endless Ressources (speedmetall) or narrows (rewarding defense - with only 300 Units that is madness) fix the ressources. But it is what made TA, TA, if you dont are l33t, you are wrong here. So wrong. You come here, if you realize, that starcraft, and other games drag you down, with a hamsterwheel of clicks for nothing. Just look how free progamers of spring roam out there. And those who quit spring, usually quit gaming altogether- after us there is no challenge left.

[knorke]

every popular Starcraft map has only one or two means of entrance into the home bases.

Only one land entrance into your start base.
But starcraft has air units and flying some dropships full of marines or a shuttle with reavers into the enemies eco is a normal tactic.
So there are more angles of attack then just the small ramp/choke.
While in BA air transports are those things you build to nap coms.

And after a while your resources run out. So you have to build a new base that might well be on the other side of the map, not connected to your main base.

people are mind-blowing blind, ignoring lateral paths / possible raids through LOS blocked areas and just forcing themselves constantly into enemy porc.
its just weird how many players can be proficient at micro but awful at examining the map and exploiting it

Games like "3v3 Talus" etc. are already mostly played by players who are fed up with DSD. I like to believe those players play better then the average DSD noob. So if those players can not do it...who else? Maybe using those lateral paths is just not as beneficial as it seems.

unlike DSD thats imbalanced heightmap

you mean the river/ditch in north?

[Pxtl]

@knorke - and BA/ZK/whatever has all-terrain bots, bombers, jump-bots, hovers/amphibs (if the barrier is water), and various alternative modes of egress into a walled-off home-base.

Look at how popular porcy The Hunters is for FFA. How popular Beherith's FFA maps were that shunt players down easily-fortifiable roads. Before the switchover to DSD, the most popular maps were Castles, Altored Divide, and SpeedMetal. All three of those maps share the common feature of tight chokepoints entering into the home-base area.

Of course TA-style games require wider access paths because of larger forces rushing through the choke, but still, the principle stands - newbs want an easily-defendable home base, but are willing to play with less-fortifiable expansion-areas. Either through choke-points or through a large slope (like in DSD) you need to protect the home or players won't touch it.

[Beherith]

Yes, throne is surprisingly noob friendly, but the other popular ffa maps (dworld, blindside, mearth) are wide open for kbots, and quite open for vecs as well.

[Pxtl]

While they *look* wide open, the roadways on maps like Mearth and Dworld actually push units along a handful of easily porcable paths.

[Johannes]

Too open FFA maps make it too easy to gang up on someone in the start I think. It's no fun if half of the players are eliminated in the first minutes .

And important thing about roads, but often overlooked, is that it also makes it faster to move your army to defend an attack.

[PicassoCT]

Lets make fill up bots then, that fill the empty spaces in a badsd host, and adjust there difficult depending on the skillz somebody shows. I summon- a AF.

Could you make chickens, that attack the team that is stronger?

[Pxtl]

... that's actually a really clever idea, Picasso.

ZK had a playable chicken-faction where chickens would play kind of like a normal player - every mex worked as a small chicken factory, putting out chicken units proportional to the metal-extraction-rate of teh mex.

Adding a Gaia chicken-factory on the mexes surrounding the unoccupied start-points would be cool. Combine it with some aggro-logic for determining when they roll out to attack nearby players - for ZK, perhaps they sense the energy-web and go after the nearest web with the highest overdrive?

[PicassoCT]

A new tactic appears: Its colled Trolltutoring, help nubs build a base, so they can act as meatshield against the bots :D

[hunterw]

So, lets check this theory- if i write a gadget, which draws a unpenetratable shieldwall through the map, leaving only a small central region as battlefield, this would make a nubs wet dream out of every map.
Now if the shield retreats time dependant, this should make things interesting.

This is potentially a really great idea for Spring. There were plenty of these maps for Natural Selection - they were called siege maps.