OpenRA

After Poseidon and Ares, two 2-4 player maps for naval engagements and combined warfare, I thought to finish my little excursion into mapmaking with a big bang experiment:

Zeus, a huge combined warfare map made of 256x320 tiles can be played by 4-10+ players. The map will hopefully show how well the gameplay of OpenRa can be scaled to multiple battle theatres. Like with my previous maps, the idea of this scenario is to avoid chokepoints, expose the player to attacks from multiple sides, make safe base building difficult to achieve and promote the usage of all game assets. This results in aggressive, but more strategic gameplay: It simply takes more time to deploy troops and begin a tactical engagement.

Please give feedback.

General map information:
-- The map is supposed to be played 5v5 or 4v4 in two teams: north vs south. However, additional starting positions have been added for no specific reasons but fun.
-- Oil derricks have 1500 hit points and heavy armor.
-- Mine layers carry less mines (1 mine for allied, 2 mines for soviet)
-- Special Tech Building has no specific function except cash generation.

Recommendations for good team play:
-- Since this is not done automatically by the program, each team should choose a certain group of colors e.g. north chooses colors connected to fire, while south chooses colors connected to water or forest. This will help You identifying Your closest ally quickly.
-- Buddy up with one player and set some early objectives. Support Your buddy financially and stay in contact via team chat or mumble.

Cheers!

It seems that the OpenRa engine has some troubles when it comes to such huge maps as Zeus. A 3v3 game became too slow to play after a while. I hope that the bottlenecks in the Openra engine will be removed in future version of the game, so that the Zeus map will be playable.

As such, Apollo, a version of Zeus containing the eastern half of the map will be playtested. The landmass has been reduced to about 50% of the original amount, while map map is about 60% of the size of the original.

The map features a large scale naval battle between two groups of three players, with an optional seventh player in the middle of the map.

Note that the same changes regarding mine layers and oil derricks apply in Apollo.

Cosmetic changes with the Apollo map for new playtest.