I've been playing 1v1 ranked for a little while now, and all the maps seem to work fairly well (but poseidon, i hate poseidon.), but i'd like to know, what makes a map fair and balanced? what are the benefits and drawbacks of having, say, an open area v.s. an enclosed area? what's a good balance of metal near spawn and metal outside of spawn? how do you control player interaction with the map, as to avoid making only one viable strategy work? I took a peek at the system designer and was having issues with some of the generation stuff, but i feel like i'll get the hang of it after a little while. I just want to know some of the balancing things that go into a pa map, for i'd like to dabble in creation.
That depends entirely on your definition of balanced. A symmetrical map is inherently balanced as both sides have the exact same spawn location. However, you could define balanced as encouraging usage of different unit types equally. In this case, a flat map is more balanced than a map with lots of choke points as ground movements will be harder to counter on the flat map and thus air dominance will have a lesser emphasis.
Then i suppose my overall goal should be to create an environment that allows for numerous strategies to be viable, and avoid making one strategy either too powerful or too weak? Maybe i'm just thinking of this the wrong way, the idea of level creation for an rts is new to me, and coming up with a design on a sphere instead of a flat plane is even more foreign to me.
honestly, just try varying your terrain and see how it plays out, large choke points can benefit tanks, but lots of cover or dense forest can benefit dox. Wide open spaces can be used in many ways, consider placing pools of water in them if you can to give dox more mobility over tanks in certain areas and such. Essentially, if you can provide multiple different terrain types, you can make an interesting map. If you're not making it symmetrical, and are looking for a balanced map, my suggestion would be to try and make metal groups evenly spaced away from different spawns, with similar quantities in most clusters, so that players all get a similar starting point.
