Ronald wrote: ↑Tue Jan 07, 2020 9:50 pm
Sadly very few good naval maps exist, mostly because naval in Red Alert is garbage.
Can you give (us) a few map-design guidelines (for others) about:
- What map design elements do make up a good OpenRA naval map?
- The DO and the DON'T when designing naval maps?
From my experience, there's a few things I've found that allowed for more naval play alongside other units for some good fun.
1) 2v2 or beyond. 1v1 doesn't seem to work as well. Naval requires a lot of resources, and if you put too much resources on the map, everyone floats. Naval caters better to 2v2 where you can have mixed allies and soviets.
2) Water should be close to spawns to allow for immediate naval placement. This can cater for options like cheese play, or quick transport to areas of the map that can be strategic or quicker than going by land.
3) Map design needs to adhere to regular map design principles. There's a whole topic on this regarding number of lanes, and minimum lane widths for avoiding chokes.
4) Water cannot be more than 30-50%. I never figured how much is good enough, but 25% of all land tiles is a good estimate to start with.
5) Water should connect spawns between enemies if you want to see some kind of naval action. You need to then consider how the water divides the map, whether it's direct or on the edge of a map going around, whether spawns are close or far, etc.
6) Make ore mines a distance away from the water so that destroyers can't camp them all. At least 75% of ore mines should not be within reach of destroyers to allow for some balance.
7) Provide a safe way to place subpens/naval yards that can be protected by land defences or units so that naval doesn't snowball for 1 player for dominance.
Allow for long ranged naval units to be able to reach at least 75% of key target areas of the map. If they can't, dominating the seas won't be worth it.
9) Remember, naval should be secondary, and design the maps in mind as if naval is like air units, tanks, or infantry. They should be an option, not the main goal. So you will have games where naval is never used, and that's fine. Just like we have games where air is never used.