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Level Design TE-Bridges (Gonna find a better name...)

This map actually was started on yesterday, through a conversation with one of my 2nd rangers friends, anyways it's an AA map, one of the few that exist unfortunately. It centers around a massive bridge that's 360m long crossing a mostly dried river bed, it will have 7 caps, two islands, two caps in the middle island, one for the center of each bridge section, and one on each side of the riverbank.
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I think that a key lesson to take away from the less popular AA map Barashka is not to have your caps too far away from each other. This may seem like a good way to make for interesting long range fighting, but in my experience this essentially just makes for really boring uncontested flanking moves using spawn on SL, where one team manages to take all caps but one unopposed, and then usually the only fighting is for the last (and sometimes the other team then vainly attempts to spread out to retake all others leaving the last cap totally undefended too). My recommendation would be lots of caps closer together, which can be quickly captured in like 5 secs, with locks on the ones further away. This doesn't mean it has to be linear, you could still have two or more directions the caps head in, just keep pairs open at one time, so you don't end up with players scattered all over.

I agree that AA maps should get some more love, just don't fall into the pitfall of low intensity trudging maps that so many before seem to have fallen into. A good AA map has got to be a balance of allowing players enough avenues of attack, and making sure that players still end up close enough to each other to allow action.
 
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It's a tough balance and one that also highly depends on if it's an infantry map like No Man's Hill or a CA map like Barashka or Arad2. As well as if you have teams that know how to play both the roles and strategy.

I've played Barashka and Arad2 a zillion times in the quest for tank kills and sometimes it can feel like whack a mole, but with full servers with players who know what they are doing, it can be epic. That's part of the problem, the vast majority of players have little experience tanking, as AT or engineer, so when you're on a map where those roles are numerous and important, they can often be played poorly, leading to the map being a simple rush of transports and infantry into the caps.

Barashka could benefit from a cap on the island between B & C. Currently, it plays almost entirely as two separate skirmishes at the bridges. Infantry have a hard time influencing one from the other. More caps farther back would extend the fighting, it's a nice map that we never really leave the center of.

Arad2 plays great if tanks and AT focus on A & D with support to B/C, and engineers and infantry focus on taking the villages. I think B & C should be farther apart personally, or have longer cap times, they can fall too quickly. I like the way the caps lock/unlock.

I haven't played No Man's Hill more than 20 times and I find that 80% of the fighting is for the hill itself with only small groups of 1 to 5 soldiers flanking to one cap or the other. I've wondered if the hill itself was lower if the fighting would spread out more. It's a very nicely made map, but I don't think it's that interesting to play.
 
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its 1Km^2 however not all of the map is actually used, I might add halftracks, not sure. there are 4 caps on the bridges alone, upon looking closer at the mesh, I realized it might not be ideal for the job I had in mind(mainly it doesn't provide decent cover, people can be killed unless they're prone from the sides., so at the moment I'm using barashka's bridges twice as long as the one on barashka, with a massive crater, and two toppled section in the middle, the russian will be attempting to break a siege via the bridge. The river in the map is mostly dried up, so it looks kinda funny to see a really wide river with only a few feet of water....
I'll post a detailed description of how the game plays out (cap by cap) later today. Also have a few dozen screenshots. :D
 
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