Handmade Maps Please

Procedural map
For the moment maps are procedural generated. I reciognize that :

• Maps are beautifull, and consitent
• Procedural generation bring randomness

Critique of procedural generation
Randomness is not diversity !
Even every planet is different, it is actually very rare that the topology will affect gameplay choice, except the following obvious case :

• water planet will force people to play naval
• the size of the planet will change the aggressivity of the player

Apart from the 2 previous case, any player will setup the same strategy again and again. The land battle can be summarized to the quantity of units (=metal income). And there is no opportunity to take advantage from the land, there is no choke point, no altitude adavantages... everything is wide and opened.
Finally every planet is similar.

Legendary maps !
As the maps are procedural there is no "legendary" maps, i mean a map that everybody known and like (or hate). like this one:

It is important for the players, for the community, to have common references. Procedural generation remove the "soul" of the maps. Players just don't care, they are million of planets, all of them are faceless. Players cannot speak about an epic battle that took place over "insert your maps name".

If you have played starcraft, how many good (and bad) memories you have on "the hunter" ?


Mappers !
Mappers like to map, give them the tool to do it on PA Mappers are part of any RTS community, if you deny their existence it is sad, very sad :'(


Perspective for procedural generation
The procedural generation provide something that it is not exploited at the moment, the Unknown.
As players don't know the procedural generated maps, it could be fun to begin the game with a complete black fog of war. That will force the players to discover the land and the ressource locations, and it should not dis/advantage players because nobody knows the maps.


Conclusion
Procedural generation is well done, and has advantages. I'm not saying that we should remove them, certainly not. Even if handmade planet is possible, i think that procedural generated planet will continue to be used, and both system could be mixed.

So Please Uber, consider to implement a map editor.

A lot of work in perspective, I think uber can for the moment only create couples maps with relief for 1v1 2v2 ( relief map for an 8p ffa is not such important ) and after create a real map editor.

I fully agree that user generated maps in other RTS often yielded much, much better games than the default stock maps. Just take a look at the masterpieces of StarCraft: Broodwar's later years. Chances are it's a bit more complex in PA, given that the game's "maps" are spherical, often include multiple planets and the unit palette makes avoiding map features easy (air, orbital). Still, I think there are a lot of (potential) mapmakers who'd love to take on that challenge.

This, however:

I can't agree with. I've had multiple games that were heavily influenced or even decided by maps. E.g.: Land bases near water that are shelled by naval units or choke points on mountainous planets that funnel armies.

lol ^=^ this is the how many-th time you ask for this Satan? Anyways, I stand by your cause as always and hope for the best.

Never give up the fight ! I am a lobbyist

There are already 10 posts like this one.

It is subjective, of course.
But :

1. I play since alpha, so my opinion relies on a significant experience. Not saying your opinion don't, just to explain that I m not throwing this opinion after 10 games only (not saying you did neither).
2. If you look at the stats you will find that the player with best income will win in 95% of the cases. metal income = unit quantity, then you can conclude that the topology has a minor role.

What I think is needed are some terrain 'sculpting' tools aka what was available in SimCity 4.

They way I see it working is:
1: Use procedural system to generate a template planet to work on
2: Use set of tools to adjust the procedural planet- the tools allow you to raise / lower terrain relative to the surface, add in cliff edges, add in rivers and lakes (which are also auto added as a function of terrain height- i.e. water will fill anything below the water level anyway).
3: Profit

I've actually tried creating similar map in PA, lots of time spent changing seeds, and in the end I got two continents that are joined together by narrow bridges from both sides.
Tho random spawns can't guarantee teams will start on different continents, and metal distribution is not perfect either.

The question is, what do we need to be able to make a mod that can be a planet editor? Can we get Uber to add the hooks or functionality to make it possible?

Well there has been at least some success modding maps so far (the lava + cliff biome mod). Given the way the planet generation works I think it should be easy enough to get a system that would allow is to manually place additive and subtractive brushes on the planet, as all the building blocks are already there. I'm not so sure on the feasibility of 'push / pull' type editing of the base planet mesh though.

+1 for this! Id love a Spherical Seton's Clutch ;p

Add Leap support. So they can be literally handmade (kind of).

My thought about what a planet editor should contains:

• a set of level brush; a big brush to raise/lower smoothly a wide area, and a small brush to create abrupt relief
• a brush to place and orientate existing "props"
• a ruler to set level of water/lava
• a brush to place metal spot

i have no idea how works the planet generator, but if at least uber could provide hooks/functionalities required to manually handle the previous points, i m sure that a community made planet editor will be quickly made up.

I agree something should be done. My favourite gametype is close quarters large number of players FFA. This is because I think this game and games like it are most enjoyable at the start of play and most enjoyable when you have many enemies to contend with all with their own motives and goals.

The problem that I see is that the way to make this gametype most fair is to having boring planets with no features such as water which can often make the game very unfair. Even still, the mass distribution is such that some players have a terrible starting position and other players strike gold and cannot easily be toppled.

It would be nice if we could have it a bit more like supcom where the starting positions all have a similar level of mass points and then there are strategic locations within the map that you end up fighting over. SupCom2 got boring because there was only really ever 1 or 2 ways to play a map correctly, and the experienced players got annoyed when newbies didn't know the correct way and eventually as far as I can tell they all quit. I think we need a balance wherby yes the the maps are randomly generated (to a point at least) but also yes there are particular ways to play certain types of starting position and each starting position is balanced enough to the point where player skill rather than luck determine the winner.

I also used to like those maps where everyone started out with a base in the corners and then had to expand into the middle to win. I think this kind of gameplay would be a lot of fun in PA because the mechanics of the game are much closer to TA which lends its self to having a lot of small scale land grab battles.

That can kiiinda be done with the whole 'start on moons with one big central planet'.

We'd also require hooks that allow us to set rigid spawns, some game modes require each player to spawn on their own designated planet, and currently, there's no in-game way to create that scenario, you just have to organise which planet everyone's spawning on before selection.

I brought this up quite recently in this thread:
Manual Controls in System Editor?

Where Neutrino expressed an interest in eventually adding manual landscaping tools:

I posted something very similar to this last week. I guess i needed to add peekchars... So if this is in the works, FANtastic. Definitely need a point of reference for memorable battles.

"Remember that time when we beat those 5 other people in the epic battle on that.. spherical map with lack of any identifying features?"

"YES TOTALLY! It was the one with the metal spots.. shaped sort of like a rocking chair.. eaten by a swarm of locusts. Good times..."

+1 i want this so i can make a campaing for players to download