First Official Map Makers' Contest

[garvisus]

I am submitting the 1 v 1 map Narcissus.

Mirror map with limited unit production.

[Negern]

How's it going with the evaluations? It's too exciting to bare!

[LPhillips]

How's it going with the evaluations? It's too exciting to bare!

Hi, I'm sorry; I got a bit distracted by the old "real life" and Warbarons hasn't gotten enough attention lately.

So, this is a community-judged contest. We've all seen the maps, and some of us have gotten to test them pretty well. What are your impressions?

For the large FFA submissions, we have:

Pitfall, by Smursh.
http://www.warbarons.com/ver08/mapedito ... istid=1023
"This is a 100x100 map with 82 cities and 78 income buildings. The map is set up with large regions of each terrain. Most cities start with poor production and little gold making the taking and holding of resource buildings important to upgrading production. This combined with the distance between cities means that much of the fighting is outside of cities making this more of a game of maneuver where using native bonuses effectively will win battles.

The map has a total of 30 ruins, located in pits off the main paths. Two special high level ruins with powerful artifacts and defenders are located in the center behind a ring of mountains and lava. Because you must both fly and firewalk to get here only a powerful hero can enter- great risk for a great reward."

Hexagon, by garvisus.
http://www.warbarons.com/ver08/mapedito ... listid=980
"Six capitals situated near the six corners of the hexagon. Between each capital is an item city with powerful units available for production. Limited production in all cities, but the capitals.

1 v 1, 2 v 2, 3 v 3; team 1 (white, red or teal) team 2 (green, blue or black)
2 v 2 v 2 team 1 (white, blue) team 2 (red, teal) team 3 (black, green)

60 cities, 25 income sites, 23 ruins, 6 temples (3 undead, 1 attack, 2 movement)"

For the small map contest, we have:

Archipelago, by Negern.
http://www.warbarons.com/ver08/mapedito ... listid=966
"With the exception of two cities, which can only produce crows, fliers and water units are banned. Instead one has to get the troops around by boat. All in all, there are 28 cities and about 25 docks scattered on 15 islands of varying size. Some of the islands are easy to defend - some not so easy."

Stripes, by ptgamer.
http://www.warbarons.com/ver08/mapedito ... listid=981
"Features:

1) Tough terrains of mainly swamps and hills, and at the same time none of the cities allow for dwarf, orc, wolf rider, and giant. There are small percentage of dessert but sandworm production is also prohibited.

2) Each player starts with a tight cluster of four cities with powerful productions that are slow. This city group is easy to defend given the surrounding lava; as long as you secure the capitol the game won't be over too soon (elemental productions are available in the non-starting city clusters so it is possible to break the natural defense).

3) The only flier production allowed in the starting cities is crow.

4) Rich cities and income buildings make it easy for you to get hero offers and buy different productions.

5) There are plenty of ruins, most of which gives you allies. So exploring ruins may quickly give you a game-changing stack.

6) Numerous neutral units are placed throughout the map so your late-coming heroes have a chance to level up quickly.

7) Powerful items are placed on lava so if you want them, you have to invest in the ashwalk ability.

8) 1v1 starts with one player in the left most city cluster and another in the right most cluster. Against a non-aggressive AI it still took me 21 turns to finish the game.

9) 2v2 starts with one player in each team on each left-right side of the map, and teammates are always separated by an enemy in between.

10) The aesthetics resembles a soccer field, composed of mostly solid blocks of homogeneous terrains with clear delineation of sectors."

Narcissus, by garvisus.
http://www.warbarons.com/ver08/mapedito ... istid=1009
"Mirror map with limited unit production."

[LPhillips]

As you can see, we have some beautiful maps to choose from here. Some of them have received extensive attention to balance and testing already.

We will have a discussion period of 7 days, and then we will have a 7-day voting period. Please give your impressions now.

Notes on voting, which is not open until October 14th:
The voting will be simple. Voters will rank the maps in the 4 categories, one below the next. Rather than scoring them on a scale, we will do comparative scoring. So, you will rank maps 1-n from first to last in each category.

1) Originality and Creativity
2) Balance
3) Polish
4) Beauty

Decisions and scoring should be pretty easy, as we have so few maps. These are the categories in which you should advocate for or against a map. Their meaning and importance is described in the first post. Just to be clear: Voting is not open until October 14th, server time! For now, give opinions and discuss the maps. Mapmakers are encouraged to advocate their maps.

[LPhillips]

If there is no interest in participating, I will arbitrarily award a winner based on impressions from the map editor and very limited experience with the maps. The maps themselves are quite good, and prizes will still be given in appreciation of the excellent work put in on them. I can say personally that I am grateful for the added variety in our map pool, and excited about getting some games in on them!

We'll give it a little time, given the excitement about v0.9 and the timing of it all. If there aren't replies in a day or two we will award the winner!

[LPhillips]

Bump:
By writing in this first then commenting on the more intricate v0.9 thread, I keep making people miss this.

[smursh]

How will voting be done. I know it is supposed to start today, but was not sure if we are just posting our votes here or some other location?

[LPhillips]

We would be posting here. A simple vote count, since there's no poll utility. However, no one has made any comments whatsoever. They haven't even commented on the maps and how they play out. Makes it a bit hard to move forward...

I wanted to give mapmakers an opportunity to say something about their maps, and also give players some opportunity to interact. However, there's not enough interest. We might as well start voting. If no one is interested in that either, I will just pick two maps and award them based on what can be seen without playing them.

[smursh]

Lets start voting then.

I won't vote on large maps since my map is involed, only for small maps.

1: Originality/creativity: Narcisus, 1st, Stripes 2nd, Archipelico 3rd. Difficult choice. all were very good.

2: Balance: I rate a tie between archipelico and Narcisuss. Stripes gve too much advantage to whoever went first and could get to the ruins with allies.

3: Polish: Archipelico 1st, Stripes 2nd, Narcisuss 3rd. Here in the original version of Narcisuss production was too limited given the heavy city defenses, I like this map much better in the current version.

4: Beauty: Stripes 1st(love the look of the rows of soldiers), Narcisuss 2nd(love the terrain changes), Archipelico 3rd(cool look, just not quite as impressive as the other two.)

Please note: I think all these maps are excellent. Further improvements made since the submission date has made each of them even better.

[KGB]

I commented on the maps in the map submission section when they were first posted while I was playing them to help with balancing them out. I didn't realize I would have to come back and post more comments later on them for the submission contest. I honestly thought you and Snotling/Piranha were the ones voting since it was your contest.

I really don't feel comfortable voting on the Balance and Polish categories because most of the time I played the original submission and for the most part the authors went back and fixed issues and resubmitted. So unless I played them again (which I haven't in some cases) it kind of unfair to vote based on what may no longer hold true. So that would leave voting only on 1 and 4.

KGB