Randomness in early game

I think allowing users to create maps themselves would be a very desirable feature for the longevity of this game, but would be happy with procedural maps to start with.

Uhh, any of them, the earth planets have mountain biomes to produce natural choke points, with open forests and plains to fight over.

Huh, are you missing the point on purpose?
I think you should re-read my posts, or I will call you "troll"

I am not sure you understand how the map you presented is any diffrent to what we have now, or how that tittle sand box even applies to playing on a sphere.

Or should I call you "troll"? If you are going to be so rude.

Well, please do the same kind of tactical analysis of any PA map... I did it in another forum already, but it's in french :

http://forum.canardpc.com/threads/7...-Gump-du-STR?p=7363255&viewfull=1#post7363255

If you don't understand the difference between both these exemple, I think I can't do anything for your sake.

And comparing both is relevant : We are talking of handcrafting VS computer generated content, and they are both the same type of game.

But yes, to be honest, I prefer to play on a "little sandbox" that offer the deepest gameplay I've ever seen on a RTS than a big rolling ball that bore me after 5 min in

But maybe Uber will do offer us a way to handcraft maps in PA, it's the only thing that can salvage it for me at this point.

You are comparing a randomly generated map, to one that is specifically designed for a specifically game mode, by hand.

And your attitude is toxic just because I disagree with you, or don't understand.

Yes, you are describing what I've said in the last post.
I'm comparing handcrafting vs computer generated, and why the latest sucks and why hancrafting is needed in PA.

Now you can go back re-read my posts, I'm sure you will understand the other things I've said too now.

Actually, given your last comment, you are actually agreeing with me, as you feel like the comparaison is not fair (that was my point : one is far better than the other).

What is toxic is reading half the text, jumping to conclusions, and trolling.

Easy fellas. I think it is fair to say that the procedurally generated maps in PA at present do have some degree of feature creation, such as choke points and mountain ranges, but perhaps not enough to please people such as Pilot who prefer carefully hand crafted maps. IMO I think PA does a fair job given it's random nature, and if opened up to user created maps could solve this problem.

If it can be done in age of empires, and frankly many other RTS games, it can be done here.

I agree that it probably is possible to do a good random map generator. It will just take quite long to do it. Having hand crafted maps in the meantime would be cool indeed.

Well that's mean. I don't know about everyone else, but it don't find the big rolling balls of PA boring compared to EVERY OTHER RTS that uses 2d maps. I find it refreshing and unique, and think the novelty adds a lot to the enjoyment. But again, my opinion, and it's fine if you disagree. However, I suspect you are in the minority, which is what Uber has to take into account.

Having a 3d Sphere is a nice thing and quite interesting indeed. However the currently generated planets are usually rather boring. Like the one positive point it that the planet is a sphere. But apart from that? Nothing.

Then why not just work on making the planet generator good enough to produce the density of terrain that a StarCtaft map has, but over a planetary scale?

The devs already said that they were going to be leaving hooks in for people to create map makers.

Heh, well I disagree, but no point in arguing about it

My comment wasn't address to the spherical nature of the maps, but what's on it, like Cola-colin said.
I don't actually really care about the fact it's a round planet, as the maps are not interesting enough to take advantage of their spherical nature.

As they are more people that don't play PA that people than play it (even if you take the ones who bought it only), I'm not quite sure that I'm part of the minority.
But I'm probably the only one that bother posting here.

People are seriously implying that randomly generated maps are just as good as handcrafted ones? I don't mind procedural stuff myself, as I find it interesting like a lot of other proponents of them in this thread, but it's just absurd to say that. A computer does not and likely cannot know what makes a "good RTS map." I think it's safe to say humans don't know what makes a good spherical RTS map yet either, due to lack of experience. If we can't teach the computer it it's certainly not just going to appear out of the ether of a procedural generation system.

To make sure people know what I'm getting at, I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with procedural maps. They are perfectly playable, as we can see right now. I am saying that computers are not very good at the kind of abstract game and art design that make for a map that the competitive scene will love.

That is the problem, user created maps feel like they are designed for conflict. That doesn't make them interesting for me.. it feels like they are over-designed. It is kind of like the map designer plays the game for you by creating the map. "Here's your base, there is the enemy. Here's a choke point.. now go fight." Like in your example.. to me it seems like you just list a bunch of predefined points of interest in the map.

Large part of real life tactical warfare skill is using the environment to your advantage on the fly. An environment you don't know beforehand and surely is not created for combat.. as far as we know. Btw the most interesting architecture projects also are often ones where a space is reused for something else than the original purpose..but that's off-topic.

If you are talking of Age of Mythology, there were not entirely procedural. Big chunks of them were handcrafted.

Interesting point of view.

I would agree with you if the chaotic nature of the maps was better for gameplay. It's currently not.

But yes, a handcrafted map that looks chaotic would be the best. That's why I've talked about the half-handcrafted half-generated kind of generator.

Heh I meant in a minority of people who play PA. But fair point, that is a groundless assumption. Has there been a poll to gauge people's opinions on the whole procedural map debate? Maybe there should be..