I don't really think you can teach the kind of coordination and teamwork required for maps like king, atomic and chain, so no amount of tutorial map work will help that. The tutorial map does what a tutorial should, what a tutorial normally does, it teaches you all the retarded stuff you will probably learn anyway just by playing, but if you want coordination, you're going to just have to get people to play a lot. King works fine as a map for just having tanks drive around and shoot shit, coordination or no. Atomic also works fine for that, chain maybe less so due to being more restrictive in terms of resources, but there's nothing wrong with it as a map. I think, trickster, that all of those maps can potentially be very good if you have a good team, but they will usually just be normal, no better or worse than the average unskilled empires game. I certainly don't find them less fun than regular maps on a regular server. They aren't bad, just not always as good as they can be, but a lot of regular maps are always so so, regardless of whether you have a good team. Frankly I'd say include some new maps just for variety, I'm getting real sick of cyclopean and mvalley. I'd also put another vote in for eastborough, forest (works fine and doesn't look any worse than a lot of the other maps) arid (I like arid, works fine when I play it) and whichever ice map it is that has the nuke bunkers and the bases with the tank elevators in them, also has the breakable ice lake in the middle. I forget which one it is but it's my favourite snow map. Also chain as I said, good map, looks nice, seems to work fine, prefer it to bush.
Trickster. Look at other source mods with really complex maps. People learned them because they were official. If king becomes official, players will learn to play it, because it's there. That's the main factor holding it back, people don't want to download a map, enter the game halfway through the match and not understand the map. If everyone has kind, everyone starts the map together, and everyone gets a pretty clear idea of how the map plays (after a while at least) Believe me, there's nothing to be lost from making king official. Only things to be gained. It'll become a staple map of empires, I fucking guarantee it.
dune, or whatever its called, coast, bush, chain, snowstorm, shadows, eastbro, assuming it replaces district. Midbridge could be official if the pool party was removed and the res flow halfed. Palmbay is ok, I guess. Empirescup, in all serious, should be official. Moors needs some some stuff to make it less of a big empty square. A mountain, a lake, a forest, buildings, cliffs, it doesn't matter. Really just two huge squares dropped on either side of middle would be a big improvement.\ Tropicvendetta was ok, although the gameplay was never great and it sortof encourages fooling around.
Oh yeah tropicvendetta, I totally forgot about it. It's a great map, makes a lovely change from regular CV maps, that it encourages a degree of dicking about is probably a strength honestly, it mixes up the game without detracting from its core elements. +1 tropicvendetta
chain isn't a complicated map at all, and it's shaped like any modern RTS map, so players that have played any rts will feel fine playing it. The only complicated thing is trying to get around the map on your first try. In all seriousness it's just another Canyon clone except it looks really good and it has 2 or 3 levels.
I'm staying away from maps which don't work at the present time (Silo, Insurrection, Snowbound, Tropicvendetta, Provinggrounds, etc) because it's difficult to work out how they'll play out. And I disagree. With a map like slaughtered, any idiot can command an idiot team, and still make something of it. Even mvally and cyclopean are manageable, just. But trying to guide a newbie team through King would be impossible. In fact, it is impossible, I've tried. Atomic might be possible to learn, so I can maybe reduce my position to borderline on that. Chain too. But King is so far out there that it just wouldn't click. And I want to make it clear, I fucking love King. I totally disagree on the opinion regarding the tutorial map too. There's no vehicle creation section except in the sandbox at the end, nor is there an explanation to any of the classes, yet we waste 2 rooms on turrets, and dimly light and lock off the building room so you can't see shit. Not to mention allowing people to skip the "basic FPS" bit, which results in "HOW I PRONE" spam ingame.
Ehh it misses out a few basic things but like I said, it's all crap you learn by playing the game anyway. The complicated bits of empires aren't the things you teach in a tutorial, it's because the best way to win is to work together using established strategies and paths, which you won't know unless you play to the point where all the idiosycracies are evident. For example a new player won't know the peculiar ins and outs of what to destroy in which situations. Sometimes you want to destroy the rax, sometimes the vehicle factory is the better choice, sometimes you want to cruise around blowing up refs, sometimes you want to focus on enemy tanks, sometimes you want to bleed tickets, sometimes you want to target the APC which to an experienced player is obviously a party bus. The reason the game excludes new players is because it's been played to death and everyone who has played it to death knows everything about it. it's true of any game, I haven't the foggiest idea what the best gun in counterstrike is, or how to start playing starcraft. It's just something you have to deal with.
I still maintain that a basic ability to build vehicles and know what class does what would remove so many useless players, and stop so many vehicles (including the CV) from being stolen all the time. As such, players would be less hostile to the new players, and they would listen more.
Then add some hints or something for those specific things, nobody's going to sit through a tutorial to learn that shit. Also I don't think I've ever had a problem with that, actually. I doubt it's that serious of an issue. Oh and no, it won't make players less hostile, vets hate noobs, it's the way the universe works.
I think you're wrong trickster and your actions are only harming any chances of ever having king be played even semi-regularly, which is a disgusting waste of an excellent map. O_o I thought I made it clear. Gimmick maps will never ever under any circumstances become official. They are the cancer that is killing empires. Empirescup can go die in a fire.
I kind of have to agree on that. Trickster your tastes are not everyone's. I enjoy any map that goes on long enough to get a few tanks out and has enough players for a decent scrap. Honestly what makes a map fun is how it looks, and how it plays with infantry and vehicles. Obviously I like the look of my maps a lot because I made them to my tastes, but maps like chain and tropicvendetta and that snow map I mentioned both look good and play well with vehicles and infantry, and would make valuable additions to the roster.
Hey, I'm not in any way saying that I don't like King, because it is by far, one of the best maps, and when you get good games on it, it brings out the best in Empires in every way shape and form. I just don't feel that the current playerbase would go well with it. That's easily fixed, and I don't see why we can't, before we start shoving more complex maps on. The problem is, most of you have been playing so long you've forgotten what it was like to be new.
I play so little and have played so many versions that every time I do I have to relearn things. I really don't think that mastery of the game is the main fun in empires. I still prefer just driving tanks around and shooting shit to any sort of organised play. King does that well, atomic lets you run round and shoot shit without worrying about the commander or anything, which is why I made it, tropicvendetta does the same thing, chain is a fun map to drive around on with its bridges and building-heavy area. I just don't think excluding maps because they might not have a briliant strategic comm to run them is a good idea. Nobody's going to learn to be really good at commanding unless they play a lot and nobody's going to play a lot without new stuff in the game and fun maps.
If you bastardise it, you ruin the point of it. I love the map as it is at the moment, I just think we should provide better infrastructure for newer players before we start supporting more complex maps, or rather, more coordination-dependant maps.
Actually I'd probably enjoy it more if I took the city out and make it a regular old tank map, that would give me more limit space to fix up some of the crappy open spaces as well, they need more infantry cover around the edges, I could probably get rid of the tunnels and replace them with a proper building complex inside the cliffs. I wouldn't cut the actual surface area down very much, just remove that third route and flesh out the other two a bit, there's a lot of unused geometry around the bridge which never sees any action, and moving all the polygons from the city to the northwest route would probably make that area a lot more fun as well. Maybe add some flags along the way. Sadly I dunno where the vmf is at the moment, and editing it would be a bit of a pain as I haven't touched it in so long. Still, I might dig it out and fix it up sometime. Could always reuse the city as a server startup map as well. I'm not against including it as is, it does work at least as well as most empires maps, and looks a lot nicer, but it could use some attention.
im thinking of just adding walls that make the map smaller, and when enough players are in the server the walls remove themselves maybe even if the player amount drops the walls get added again
This is something I'd love to see in more maps actually. A bit more of an elegant solution could be found but, maps with areas that open up as the playercount increases would be fantastic.
