Between the
What 5 maps would you miss the least? thread and a recent crappy COOP round of driving up and shooting all the axis bots in the
barrel mainbase, I was thinking this map could use some loving. It's almost universally hated it seems. But perhaps with a little help from the community we could give this map a facelift and make it
awesome playable.
This is the minimap. Yellow is the playing area. There are 10-15+ tanks on each side. The gameplay tends to just be drive your tank forward and shoot. Not much for flanking. Not much for infantry to do other than find a hole and hide in it. Trucks/APC are death traps because of the amount of armor and lack of cover. And a pipercub spawns at the bottom city if the brits have the central village flag. I havn't played it enough in earlier versions to know if the bottom was a flag, but I imagine it was.
So after getting in that pipercub, I realized this is what we have to play with for the map. The current playable area is probably only a quarter or less of the space on the map. Lots of rolling hills and valleys that could make for some fun team tanking warfare.
If you move the current OOB (white) to the blue, look how much more space there is to work with. The entire mountain comes into play along with the pipercub village. There is a plateau on the left side of the map and the allies could flank around the riverbed near their mainbase.
In a 5 minute MSpaint layout that sucks, I put this together. The map wouldn't/couldn't be great for infantry, due to the lack of cover. But this map could then be great for a pure tanking map. 32v32 tanks+arty. Tanking flags with 200m flagzones with team spawnpoints that have reserve tanks to get back into battle. Maybe start all flags as Axis?
The item that takes away from fun of tanking on the large maps is that you spawn, drive for 3 minutes, get one or two shots off, then start driving again. To do tanks 32v32 I think you need to make tanks spawn forward near the flags so that players can spawn and get into a tank near a flag they control. Then the team that owns the flag, gets forward tank reenforcments. Maybe you keep the heavies in the mainbase. And make each tank objectspawner produce up to 10+ objects.
My machine can't map, otherwise I'd do it. I am pretty sure if someone puts the effort into updating the map, we could get Sam(F|H) to host it for a "FH Community Loves up Aberdeen" event. Find a mapper to work on changing the objects, then plan a date to get 64 peeps on it. I don't know if either of the tournaments have tried to expand the playing area in Aberdeen. I'm pretty sure F|H hasn't.
I think Lobo was the mapper behind this map, and alot of time has been invested in it. Instead of relegating maps to "This sucks. Let's never play it again"-status, why don't we as the community get together, brainstorm and give this map some love to make it really fun.
What 5 maps would you miss the least?
62 (10.8%) - Operation Aberdeen
38 (6.6%) Tunis
34 (5.9%) - Anctoville
34 (5.9%) - Bardia
34 (5.9%) - Mersa Matruh
Why not work on improving what is considered the worst map in the mod? Can't get worse right