In some areas I feel, its too slow, in others too fast.
The first thing that often makes maps like Anctoville and others annoyingly fast, is the presence of very tight out of bounds, and way too many flags. I was just playing a round on Mareth Line 16 or 32, and like many other FH2 maps it has an annoying bottleneck that is no wider than a road. Take a map like anctoville for instance:
There is an awful lot of territory on Antcoville that goes unused, and far too many flags which distract from the overall focus. If you think of Anctoville as it is now:
We have a five flag push map, Push was of course added to this map to make it more enjoyable, because people were back-capping and flanking around the first bottleneck to other flags. However I felt that Anctoville would play very well without a push, if it had some minor changes done to it.
First and foremost was the elimination of the bottleneck at the very start, which often leads to 10 to 15 minutes of absolute slaughter if the defending Axis team is good enough:
Even with push mode, giving squads the choice to flank the objective, instead of charging head long into a machine gun or firing line, it gives the game that much more dimension. Now squads can focus on working together to take the objective, rather than sacrificing themselves to the meat grinder.
Without push I still say Anctoville would work great, however, its flag design, and the number of flags would have to be adjusted or rearranged. For instance:
In this version of the map, which you could relate to a map like Yamalia from Project Reality, except on a smaller scale, you have limited the number of flags to three, and removed push. This means that instead of an average of 6 men fighting over any of the five flags (32 Players per Team / 5 Flags), you can now allocate an average of 10. Now you can have two squads of 5 going against 2 enemy squads of 5, a much larger engagement of 20 men, than 12 like you would've seen in a version of Anctoville without push, with that number of flags, and flag layout.
The final thing to do to make this version of the map work well, and keep the gameplay at a good pace, would be to flush out some of the out of bounded areas highlighted in the picture. Get in the editor and fill them up with statics, and turn them into the crucial flanking routes and added areas of play to make this version of that map work. However this is not a suggested change to Anctoville, I am simply using Anctoville to explain my thoughts on gameplay modification and theory.
Finally, a definite must for all FH maps, not just Anctoville alone is the redesign of the flags. I understand that to the lone soldier it is an awfully wonderful feeling to have worked hard to flank around the enemy lines, and capture a flag by yourself. However this sort of individualism is only encouraged by the practice of single man caps. Every FH2 map, large or small, should have as a standard, multiple man caps on the flags, as well as increased radii on those flags, (Don't shove my words down my throat here, I am not talking anywhere near the scale of PR), and longer Neutral and Capture times. It has been proven, on PR and FH2 maps alike that this formula works, that using these features makes for the most dynamic team based gameplay when it comes to the quality of maps. Using a system such as this can near eliminate the need for push, especially with Out of bounds removed, or pulled back to allow for much more freedom of choice when attacking those objectives.
Finally, as you saw from my anctoville example, many of the FH2 maps suffer from I like to call (in my office anyway) Flag Pocks. There are simply TOO many flags for the maps to have any sort of focused combat over any objective. I reference PR as a perfect example of this only because they realized that their 4km Maps spread the players out so thin, that there was need to make less flags, in order to keep a higher majority of players focused. Again, Yamalia is a perfect example. Battlefield as a gameplay concept, is really suited to a few configurations of flags, that work the best with the number of players:
The Straight line, whether it is 3 flags or 4. The straight line is and always has been a great Battlefield map design. Whether you want to put the straight line in a L shape around a corner, or diagonally across the map, it doesn't matter, this map type has always been proven to work and produce intense, very powerful battles. In all of my time mapping for BF42, we made tons of maps for our private clans using this layout, all of which were fun.
The Three Flag Triangle. Three Flag Triangles in BF2 work, because both teams have a flag that is close to them, and a 3rd flag to capture. So at the beginning of the round, you can expect the majority of both teams to attack the two flags closest to them, and then focus their attention on the remaining neutral flag, producing a flow that eventually leads to a very powerful battle to start, and then a battle of dynamic defense and offense afterwards.
The 4 Flag Diamond. The 4 Flag Diamond is perhaps my favorite Battlefield design. It works amazingly well with Battlefields Sandbox gameplay. It allows teams to attack each other on flanks, or in a straight charge up the middle, that can then either be dismantled by the flanks, or aided by the flanks.
Last but not least, the Five Flag Diamond, typically dominated by a central dominating land feature or landmark, the Five Flag Diamond like the four flag diamond allows for Front and Flank assaults, which are supported by eachother, except it throws a fifth flag in the center to create a center point for the battle to rotate around. Often times in maps using the Five Flag Diamond the central flag is worth more on the strategic value list, which gives it special importance to the players, because they know that capturing it will give them the bleed. In some more innovative uses of the Five Flag Diamond, the center flag is the only Flag with strategic importance, and the other 4 flags are support flags that supply teams with special weapons and vehicles to use.
Now these flag templates, being the basic battlefield set ups are not limited to just these configurations. Like the straight line, they can be moved around into a number of different configs, as long as they maintain the same basic shape. For instance, say you create a map with the four flag diamond, if for every flag on the mockup you have two flags, maybe dividing two halfs of four different towns from eachother, the basic map layout still works, except this time players have to work harder to secure the different areas in the diamond, by capturing 2 flags per area instead of 1.
Strike of Karkand is an example of a straight line map that has been modified into an L shape, and has had a flanking support flag placed at Suburbs, while personally I dont like this flag, and thing it distracts from the overall feeling of Karkand, the basic play associated with a Straight Line map is maintained.
Zatar 64 is an example of a Five Flag Diamond map which has two extra support flags for the US team, to provide forward spawns next to the Five Flag Diamond. The base is still the same, the gameplay is unchanged, except this time the US can utilize the support flags for forward spawns and vehicle spawning, and the Chinese can choose to cut off the US from those support flags.
I could go on for hours, but I wont bore you, this post is long enough.
As for the rest of FH2, I like it, the last patch really fixed all of the major gameplay issues associated with the infantry combat. Despite (as my own personal pet peeves) the fact that there are things I would still like to see implemented into infantry play, the last patch has nearly mastered the idea of limited, yet very user friendly weapon controls. With such great limits as the Misc Deviation applied on jump, to the Speed Deviation and overall accuracy of most weapons, it gives the Infantry combat an intense, well rounded feel. The only thing left to do is to get rid of the individualistic stigma that surrounds FH2 Public play right now, and to do this new ideas have to come into play to force players to work together.
Again dont read this post and think of my thoughts as negative, they are far from it.
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