Sandbox Affliction

[Pel]

Wow, this definately deserves more attention than it's getting... *bump*

Anyway, on to the map. As Fuzzywig said, this looks very much inspired by Utah Mambo. Both bases look very unique, and I love the obelisk structure inside each one. The whole layout looks very balanced, so I'm looking forward to some good games on this map.

I'll come back later with a gameplay review.

[madz333]

Originally Posted by Pel

Wow, this definately deserves more attention than it's getting... *bump*

Anyway, on to the map. As Fuzzywig said, this looks very much inspired by Utah Mambo. Both bases look very unique, and I love the obelisk structure inside each one. The whole layout looks very balanced, so I'm looking forward to some good games on this map.

I'll come back later with a gameplay review.

Many people say that this map was inspired by Utah Mambo, but the only correlation I see is the placement of the bases, one on one side in the middle and one offset in the corner merged into the sand. Deadlock and I were actually inspired by many maps, including Rats Nest beleive it or not, the middle structure is mainly where the people go, and the vehicles go around the outside, but we wanted gameplay to be less linear than Rats Nest, which is basically a figure 8, so we had the paths curve, going from Blue Garage around the middle to red Garage, freed up gameplay and made movement less linear, as it were.

And we also tried to break the mold. Many Large team or BTB maps on the mid-level sandbox have just two bases and random cover, and we wanted to be free of that, so we connect 4 bases with pathways and merged higher grounds into the sands etc.

[pyro6666]

This reminds me of valhalla, which I love, but i think a second mongoose on either side would make this play faster, and really help with objectives.

[CaptnSTFU]

You did this about a month ago, so is it safe to say your merges are done in the genuine way, not with the ghost merging technique. Regardless this is a BAMF map amazingly beautiful and a killer to play on. There havn't been a whole of main level maps that are just truly badass but this one qualify's in my book.

Ps. Whats with like 3 really amazing maps coming out at the same time lol and all on sandbox 0_o i guess some people don't like longshore haha.

[madz333]

Originally Posted by pyro6666

This reminds me of valhalla, which I love, but i think a second mongoose on either side would make this play faster, and really help with objectives.

After testing this multiple times, we found out (and Deadlock was very good at this) that the mongoose could very easily slip around Banshee and Red Brute Shot bases, go around the back and hide behind on of the pillars and wait there for a man to go on foot grab the flag and get in the mongoose. This was very easy to do and was nearly 100% effective (I believe that there was only one time where they actually stopped us if we had gotten the flag on the mongoose.)

Anyway, the mongoose is set to 90 sec respawn which is twice as fast as rockets (180 sec) and 150% as fast as Warthog (120 sec), which means that it is almost readily available but often doesn't work a second time on the same enemy (There was once a player who camped behind the pillar the whole game just to make sure no mongooses went there.)

About the other vehicles, since Laser and Banshee aren't in the same gametypes (Laser=Asymmetric & Banshee=Symmetric) we have two Missle Pods in each bases front bottom to counter the Banshee (there also the most effective thing against Mongooses because they respawn at 90 sec so you always have one when the other team gets a new mongoose.


Well that was our reasoning on the vehicles.

[CaptnSTFU]

The only thing i can recommend after playing this, is if you built another platform to the far right of the center and put laser there and then just got rid of the needler. Other than that i was epic win for ctf and slayer.

[madz333]

Originally Posted by CaptnSTFU

The only thing i can recommend after playing this, is if you built another platform to the far right of the center and put laser there and then just got rid of the needler. Other than that i was epic win for ctf and slayer.

By the time we had finished the map for the contest, we were at the item limit and far over the budget limit, so we had decided to just leave it as it was, we couldn't even spawn a sniper or a box for all we cared. The only thing we did after we put it up for the contest was a few spawn tweaks that didn't help at all, so we didn't repost the map on fileshare, so everyone of you guys have the older spawn system(which works really good IMO) and even if we wanted to create separate versions for the Contest and the public (we would've had to since the laser is part of the Template for the contest) we couldn't do it because of said reasons.

About the needler, oh here comes a story.

Deadlock had wanted to keep our weapon set similar to that of default sandbox, but we had a laser and Banshee which we had to incorporate in the flow of weapons, so we ditched one of the Rockets and centered it, made Symmetric games have 2 Needlers, and Assymetric have 1. The laser and one of the needlers are in the same spot, but in different gametypes, which causes there to be a lack of anti-vehicle weapon in Symmetric gameplay (read above post for more info) and there seemed to be a lack of support weapons in Asymmetric games (the power weapons almost always dominated until they ran out of ammo) so we lowered the respawn times of the brute shot (support weapon) and needler (the one in asymmetric only) to weaken the strength of the power weapons (Rockets & Laser).

I however had wanted to ditch the Needler altogether, however it was the only way we could counter the power weapons, so we ended up with a chaotic (in the good way) BUT balanced (how we did that, it was a miracle) map.

BTW I hope people actually read these, I spend lots of time organizing our rational behind weapon placements.

[Fatgezzer724]

Looks like a map where gameplay is unpredictable, bases are symetrical but the main part is asymetric.
The banshee is kind of out of the way, there might be issues getting it out of its cave of maybe thats just me. A strong condender, love the bases.
Fatgezzer

[madz333]

Originally Posted by Fatgezzer724

Looks like a map where gameplay is unpredictable, bases are symetrical but the main part is asymetric.
The banshee is kind of out of the way, there might be issues getting it out of its cave of maybe thats just me. A strong condender, love the bases.
Fatgezzer

The banshee was part of the template so we couldn't move it, and so was the base its in. Thanks for the compliment about the bases, I like them too.
The contest is actually over, and we didn't win :( but i thought we had a good entry. GRats to nuvnuv, who did win

[crispychicken49]

Very nice map I have to say. Very asthetically pleasing. Everything is interlocked extreamly nice and geomerging is absolutly superb. Ghost merging perhaps. Very nice, deserves a feature.