1st crack
Creator: melondhinio || First Published: 05/11/2012 || Players: 2 || Size: 10x10
Categories: None
Rating: 7.50 in 2 ratings
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Comments:
Nyvelion (05/11/2012 06:22pm | Edited: 05/11/2012 06:23pm):
Not the worst first try ever... who wants to tell the new guy all about "FTA"? And
chokepoints?
Shadow Star (05/11/2012 09:41pm):
I'll get it out of the way. Time to take you aside and tell you the facts of AWBW mapmaking.
People like seeing maps that do different things that they haven't seen before, while still
being balanced. What this leads to is a lot of maps that play quite similarly but do things in a
different way, like getting a hamburger with all the toppings, and then getting another
hamburger with different toppings. What you have is the first attempt in a hopefully series of
improving maps.

Now, FTA is the acronym for First Turn Advantage, as long as a country goes before
another country we have this. This happens in games besides Advance wars. However,
we have come up with a solution for this, by giving the second player a single infantry on
one of their two starting bases, the map's early game issues are mostly balanced. It's not
always the case, and often maps need slightly different counters, but if a map has 2 bases
and 1 hq per country to begin with, 1 infantry is perfect.

Chokepoints, are what we call narrow passages that players are forced to send their units
through, this means that ranged units become a lot more powerful than if the terrain allowed
for 2 or even 3 units to be right next to each other.

I'm also going to include stuff about terrain diversity, clumped property, and incentive as they
seem like good things to cover as well. Terrain diversity is what really separates maps from
each other. Ideally that means all of the terrain is equally balanced, instead of having a giant
mess of stuff right together. Property clumping is much the same, with a lot of property right
next to each other, that's property clumping, it's not exactly bad, but by spreading it out it
makes people move and spread out their forces to get to property, which increases that
units and players will be seeing the varied terrain. Lastly, I'm going to cover Incentive,
Incentive is the reason people leave their safe areas to attack the opponent. You have 2
airports, this is a decent incentive, but, everything else is right by the start, try to balance all
of the property out.

There are other things to cover, but, those seem like the ones that your map easily helps in
the teaching.
melondhinio (05/22/2012 04:31pm):
thanks guys i'll try and rework it on a slightly larger scale



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