Map Design Concern

I've been playing a lot of Forged Alliance with my new PC, and I'm running into a map design issue that's driven me nuts since the day I first encountered it.

There are plenty of 'pure land' maps, of various design -- though I will admit most of them tend to be fairly small. (I still miss greenhaven, where territory control was important, and hills made it a pain)

There are plenty of 'map with rivers' type designs.

There are a reasonable number of 'central continent' or 'big lake' map designs.

There are even a couple of island hopping map types.

There's even a single 'sea plus land' type map, the one with the isthmus connecting the two land masses.

What there isn't is anything like Shore to Shore from TA, something where the initial conflict starts on the sea, but you have to press into land to end it. (Shore to shore didn't have enough depth to really enforce that, you could always do shore bombardment and then an airstrike, but... at least it came close). There was another map that did something similar by putting metal walls up around the central base areas, letting a player shelter behind them, too.

I want *big* islands, continents really, where a player can fort up in the center if he looses control of the oceans and you have to dig him out -- either by air (which could be expensive if he has sufficient AA) or by landing on the beach.

So... does anyone else feel that way? And do you think we'll get lucky with PA?

Planetary Annihilation is not Forged Alliance 2.

You're fighting on spherical planets, not "maps".

Yes! It's tragic there are only 1 or 2 maps that have players completely separated by sea to force early naval warfare.

Perhaps if we could change generation types or make our own we could generate planets bisected by a sea that could enable/force naval warfare between two polar continents. I like naval warfare

I am pretty sure the planet generator will be able to do that.

You're able to set the amount of water and the height diversity. So this will be very much possible.

And for the purpose of this conversation, the difference between those two words is nil. The maps consist of your precious 'spherical planets'. So I can type two long words which do not precisely address my concern, or one short word that does.

Would you prefer the word 'level'? "Gameplay environment"? "Simulation environment"?

If you have a point to your objection that I'm missing, please point it out to me. Otherwise, I'll continue to use the very functional word 'map' to make my points.

The basic point I wanted to bring up and discuss was map diversity. One thing I've wanted that SupCom 1 and 2 did not provide was a theater of war that 'moved' from sea to land. An oceanic battle followed by a coastal invasion.

In fact, given the scale that PA allows, I could see a real 'island hopping' campaign being possible, where you have to conquer island after island by controlling the sea around it, then landing troops to take the interior and it's precious resources. This would be opposed to the 'island hopping' campaign possible in SupCom, where you just bombard the heck out of it from the shore then send in the engineers to clean up the rubble.

While I'm aware that you can 'tweak' planetary map parameters, I don't know if it's going to be possible to make this type of map via them. The parameters I saw controlled things like water height, mountains, greenery... they didn't give you a way to force the landmass to be broken up into continents or islands. (Or better yet, large continents with small islands between). Of course, I could have missed the relevant control quite readily, in which case by making this post someone is going to point it out and make me feel like an idiot.

Sigh... You can either use the random generator or handcraft a "map" from scratch. If you want a map you can model it in a 3D modeling program and import it. . Your concerns are unfounded and due entirely to a lack of relevant research.

If you want a "map" you can make it.

This type of conflict wasn't well balanced in FA. Generally whoever lost naval quickly precipitated a loss, which doesn't make for a very dynamic map. This could be addressed by providing cheaper coastal fortification, e.g. coastal artillery.

In real warfare there was a rule of thumb that every battery on the coast was worth 3 on the sea. This kept coastal bombardment from always being a significant factor and was especially true in the world wars. A similar heuristic could be used to balance naval in PA without negating its power of mobility. Naval should be most effective on long coast lines that are difficult to fully fortify and island hopping maps e.g. WW2 Pacific.

I too would like to see this kind of play, properly balanced, happen in PA.

Actually no I can't.

Not everyone can do 3D models. Heck, I couldn't even handle map 'editing' in SupCom, much less one based on 3D models!

What do you want? A medal? You can't be arsed to learn how to model in 3D using easily available, if not free to download, software? Am I supposed to feel sorry for you? Is Uber supposed to provide you with everything you expect rather than you doing a little research into what the game is first?

"Hey Uber? That Planet Generator thing sure is swanky new tech, but I can't be bothered to listen to your livestreams or read forum posts made by the Dev Team. Are you gonna map maps I like and completely render all the time you spent working on a Random Planet Generation system completely pointless?
Please Respond!"

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Find one of the hundreds that will be uploaded within the first week. Or use the friggin' Random Planetary Generator like the rest of us.

What the hell are you even asking for? Uber to waste time during Alpha or Beta making custom maps while they should be adding features and bug fixing?
'Coz I gotta tell ya... Making sure you get to play on a Total Annihilation Clone of Shore-to-Shore...
not high on their priority list.

Primarily? I was wondering if anyone else was interested in that type of map, and what the odds were that such a map would be included. I also was hoping to start a discussion about map types, rather than a diatribe about a specific map type that was lacking in SupCom.

Oh. And BTW, contrary to your assumptions I have watched the livestreams; I just don't remember every last detail from them. Watching videos is hard enough for me, I don't need to waste time watching them several times over. (Now, if there was a transcript I'd probably reread it a dozen times, but... that's because I read fast enough that I could read it ten times over while the actual live stream is playing)

Too lazy to even write down your own transcript. :roll:

I could go into a long discussion on why it's not possible for me to do that, but it comes out as either a self-pitying monologue or a public service announcement on the autistic spectrum. So the short version is: I can't.

I wish I was more autistic. I was just never good at drawing.

subtle artistic/autistic joke

I'm almost completely dyslexic and I need either the automatic help of spell-checkers for every 5th word I write, or a dictionary if I'm writing with a pen and paper. If you pressured me I probably wouldn't be able to tell you which hand was left and which one was right for several seconds without putting my hands up in front of my face to see which one of my thumb and forefingers made an "L".

We've all got problems.

That's okay, everybody relies on spell check now anyway.

Yeah, without my spell chequer I'd be helpless too

Shall we get back on topic now?

Your original post expressed some concern about map design. I'm going to take a wild stab and say that Uber has not yet refined their Planetary Generator landmass to water algorithms yet. Moreover, we're likely to know just as much as Uber does at this point thanks to their amazingly in depth Livestream on Planet Generation and Flowfield Pathfinding, when it comes to the the "end result" of their hard work coding the Planet Generator. I'd say all the information we're going to get is within those livestreams for the time being. When Uber has something more substantial to tell us, they will.

Which is why I referred you to review the livestreams at your leisure. The information is there and many questions that have been asked on these boards within the last few weeks could easily be answered by revisiting the livestream and absorbing the information as it is presented.

If that's a problem, then maybe asking for a transcript first or searching these forums for information presented by the Devs is a better first step than soliciting advice and the ... "occasionally" uninformed opinions from the average forum goer.

This isn't just about map design. It is about gameplay balance as well.
Getting a tight balance where the player who is behind on the fleet on an island hopping map can actually get back in the game is hard to get.
Its' about how long range ships got, how easy it is to defend coasts, the resource distribution, the size of land versus the coverage of sea, how strong air domination is and how powerful superweapons are.
Sure you can easily get that gameplay in a mission but getting it against a player in an online game might be a lot less common as players might just give up after they lose sea.

Anyway Uber might be able to make planets or modify the planetary generation to find planets that promote the gameplay you wish for but it has to be done with the game balance as context.
Modders will probably be able to do that as well but then players also needs to start playing on those maps as well.

I actually did try to find threads relating to this topic. I even browsed the index of threads and didn't see anything regarding map design... maybe I missed it. Posting at 4AM in the morning isn't my usual style (insomnia SUCKS).