ynysllwynogod a14a

-fixed one of the bridge-atrium doors not opening (I forgot to func_brush it)
-fixed collisions on the sign in the tunnel (I forgot prop_dynamic collisions don't go away if you disable the prop, so collisions are now handled by a blockbullets func_brush instead)
-removed a pointless sign that was needed to indicate a doorway behind stairs that don't exist anymore
-somehow no one ever noticed that the hospital point cap zone wasn't marked at all despite how many versions it's been through. yee

General assessment:
-bridge point is simultaneously too busy but also needs to be made more busy by having the top of the bridge accessible again according to player feedback. I think I'm gonna live with the fact that the map is going to be a bit chunky
-blu last got defended because only a single attacker realised there was a third entrance to the point. Oops.
-might be worth doing a heavy simplification pass; I had a look at the a1 after some comments by abp, and woah I can really feel the complexity creep compared to a13

Layout:
-bridge:
--made the bridge accessible again, adjusted surrounding geometry to match; the atrium side was reverted to its original geo, but the hospital side was changed to something that looks closer to how it was in a1 with the road connecting
--removed the lower spawn exit, no one used it lmao
--made the building that goes under the bridge only accessible during bridge-atrium rounds
--removed the little spot underneath the stairs in the corner
-hospital:
--made the stairs and doorway over the underground entrance only available during hospital-bridge rounds; for other rounds this area will only serve as an underground route
--closed off one of the doorways into the little perch building
-removed both of the drop down routes into the garage area, reverting it back to a simpler linear route
-moved the train in blu last's staging area so that the fan route is more obvious

Balance:
-removed/downgraded/moved health and ammo across the map; should make things a little harder for defenders holding near connectors, people dying easier hopefully means a little less stalemate

Other:
-added an arrow prop to the tunnels for hospital-stairs rounds to make it clearer the far end of the tunnels goes nowhere
-added arrows to both lasts to make it clearer where attackers come from
-removed a few dynamic arrows to routes that no longer exist
-added clipping of the lower fan area so you don't get caught on everything

General assessment:
-red last still too hard to defend; blue players can get onto the point, the problem is there's too much faff for red defenders to hide behind so that blue can't clear the area
-like last update, there's another connector that's been bothering me, between bridge and atrium; have some small edits in mind

Layout:
-red last:
--moved the vent exit up to the balcony
--removed the outer route to the left of the point
--removed the lower entrance to the side connector
--made the side entrance wider
--adjusted the side room to fit the two above changes
-bridge:
--made lower exits out of spawn more visually obvious when spawning by reducing platform width
--moved the doorway to atrium to the front of the building instead of the side
--removed the smaller door going to stairs point
--slight adjustments to the corner room to make its entrances a little wider

Balance:
-made cap zone on red last bigger
-several changes to pickup placement on last to slightly favour attackers more

General assessment:
-red last got played 3 times. All the little buffs I gave defenders over several versions so that the point wouldn't be instantly capped have compounded into a monstrosity once decent players had a whack at it
-because there was this back-and-forth of redoing last, basically nothing else got tested hahahahaha

Layout:
-added geo to the point, extended the walls around the spiral stairs; this blocking of the space will reduce angles somewhat, hopefully making it easier to get on and hold the point, as well as removing two of red's most used sentry positions, as well as making red have to walk further to see and attack anyone on the point
--I don't want to be too heavy handed and swing all the way to making the point easy to cap, so hopefully this change is enough to tip the balance into blue's favour
-widened the side flank further; less choky for attackers, plus it gives an even better angle on one of red's defensive positions
--despite the complaints about choky connectors I'm leaving the rest as-is, the side flank should be enough for people who want more room

Balance:
-reduced ammo pickups around the point so defenders can't maintain sentries quite so easily
-added a smol health kit to the side flank to give attackers a bit more of an advantage

Other:
-clipped the stairs behind the stairs point perch
-clipped the doorway next to the atrium ramp

General assessment:
-these changes don't have much to do with the singular playtest a10 got - more addressing issues that had been bothering me for a while without knowing/wanting to fix them
-the one thing it did show is that the changes to blu last were fine, at least
-the lingering problems were mostly around the connectors between hospital and stairs; it slowly ended up being a confusing mess of interconnected areas, which were not just chaotic to play around, but encouraged stalemates since all the areas meld together into one gruesome pseudo-choke
-this was because there weren't just routes going between the points, there were also lateral routes going between the routes; instead of well defined lanes it was a lattice of pain. These lateral routes had been created with good intentions many versions ago, but all the effects compounded into a bad result
-easy solution: these lateral routes have been blocked off

Layout:
-hospital-stairs connector changes:
--added a fence to block off one connector
--blocked off the stairs-side alleyway, adjusted surrounding buildings to match
--added a simple connector so that we're not stuck with two tight chokes, except this connector is a proper connector and not some lateral garbage; because of its placement it also isn't a "full" connector (meaning it's more like 2.5 connectors now than 3, from the original 2), so the added complexity is minimised
--adjusted arrows on stairs point to be more obvious
--opened stairs spawn a little so that the left spawn exit is more obvious
-changed a high clipped building on hospital so it's now an open platform you can get up to
-removed adjacent wall to this building, and added a dirty sightline blocking prop into the bridge to compensate, since people can see into it from the hospital roof now
-added a new lower spawn exit for bridge spawn
-adjusted the windows outside bridge spawn, with an open window overlooking the point
-removed the lower tracks entrance to blue last - I somehow missed that I'd given 4 separate entrances into blue last (red has 3), with 6 doors between them, making it feel overwhelming for defenders, probably due to this situation being a little overwhelming for defenders

Other:
-removed a wall in the atrium spawn which blocks off the second spawn exit that appears during red last rounds; this was a leftover from how things were laid out in a1 and should've been removed in a2 when the second spawn exit was made available. Whoops.

General assessment:
-main problem now is the stalemating; lightning rounds thankfully don't happen enough to worry about, especially when teams learn they need to defend after the first few rounds, but rounds should be going into sudden death as little as possible
-the map geo is in need of a little trimming to simplify things, especially the bridge point

Layout:
-made the bridge on the bridge point inaccessible, and adjusted geometry to match
-removed the raised area below the point, made the area a single flat ground that ramps directly the point instead of having some finnicky geo to move through
-remove the drop down at bridge spawn since I couldn't stop players from being lemmings
-changed the perch at stairs point into a building interior with windows
-moved the stairs alleyway cover and car to form a single length of cover together
-removed the little bridge route in the connector between stairs point and hospital
-removed the lower barrier next to the hospital point, added clipping, both should make it a little less awkward to navigate
-lowered the windows and added ramped clipping on the windows in the atrium stairwell so that players don't need to jump through the windows anymore
-made both main entrances to blue last thinner/chokier so that they're comparable to entrances to red last
-removed the side door of the ramp entrance to blue last
-lowered the window ledge at blue last so that lower level sentries can shoot over it

Balance:
-lowered cap times of the 4 central point by one second; from 5s to 4s, except for the atrium, which went from 4s to 3s

Other:
-adjusted geometry around the fan to make it harder to block

General assessment:
-the general flow of games is settling into the first one or two rounds ending quickly, then people learn to defend and rounds taking a decent amount of time
--usually there's roughly one stalemated round which is okay, but this time one round fully stalemated
--as far as I can tell, this was because red got passive and turtled their point
-nothing really stands out at this point as really needing improvements, though blue last doesn't feel quite there for me

Layout:
-lots of various changes to blue last, mostly to make it less weirdly linear
--split the fan into two, and gave red a one-way entrance into the top half
--lowered the platform next to the point, and simplified its cover/layout
--connected said platform to the main area with a walkway
--split the red's main fan-side entrance into two smaller doorways
--removed the elevated cover next to the fan to give more room to the space, added a bit of prop cover in the middle to compensate
--added a sniper next at the end of the catwalk, seems funny
--moved the pipe over to give more room to stand on
-hospital/bridge rounds felt a little stale with only having two proper routes to each point
--opened the stairwell on the bridge point for these rounds
--added a doorway in the building above the train station entrance for an alternates side route to the hospital
-removed the alleyway wall on the stairs point; felt like it made the area unnecessarily cramped
--replaced it with a small wire fence
-widened the upper doorway out of the atrium into two doorways, should be less choky now
-filled in columns for the atrium stairwell

Balance:
-rotated atrium spawns so that the second spawn exit is more obvious
-added a few push triggers and clipping to the fan at blue last so that it's a lot harder to block, and easier to ride up to the new upper half

Other:
-added and moved arrows for the atrium spawn to make entrances to connectors more obvious
-clipped the rear doorway on the hospital garage
-made the spiral displacement on red last flush with the top floor so you don't get stuck on it
-reduced the size of the fan on blue last so it doesn't clip through the walls while spinning

-fixed a bug that caused the last rounds to not have setup time, meaning the setup doors would never open

General assessment:
-first time played with a lower playercount
--rounds were quick initially, but after a while both teams got an engineer and the rounds lengthened
-interestingly, without the stream of enemies coming from doorways that told you where you needed to push, players got lost somewhat easier
-in this test at least, the spawn move on the Stairs point did orient players how I wanted
-red last got played; notably, red almost entirely ignored the rightmost route, which hampered their attack
-blue last got played; blu didn't put up a great defense, so they kinda just lost
-I think next version will be the last before beta, not seeing much I can change (or want to change) regarding layout. It's very imperfect, but wrangling tc es no bueno

Layout:
-remade the staging area outside of blue last; it was too boxy beforehand, now it's needlessly complicated like the rest of the map
-added 3 whole cars to the hospital point, breaks up the large flat area
-added more space to the square room on red last so that attackers have a bit more space to hide behind the doorway
-added a railing to the platform next to blue last so that players can directly jump up to it instead of going around

Balance:
-added a small ammo pickup to red last staging area to make it really really obvious that the balcony is playable area and leads to more routes

Other:
-potentially fixed a weird compile error I had; sometimes points could not be capped, and I seem to have narrowed it down to the setup time on the two last timers; instead, they're now set to zero, and get set to 44 by a logic_auto one second after the first round starts. Makes sense!
-the fan on blue last has been changed from a func_rotating into a func_door_rotating, which seems to have a higher threshold for being blocked by players
-removed the ladder I had to emphasise the drop downs on mid, a lot of people thought it was a usable ladder lmao
-added a few more dynamic signs
-fixed a dynamic sign that only started appearing after a specific round was played
-added lighting to the area between hospital and bridge
-added lighting to stairs spawn
-made the train's light larger

General assessment:
-in the first playtest, teams were unbalanced, although it was still fun - the losing team put up a solid defence, and was still able to get captime on the enemy's point
-blue last got actual playtime! It was a liiittle choky, but everything works
-red last got actual playtime! very choky, needs opening up
-the underground area was missed by a lot of people though, so it didn't affect gameplay as much as it could have
-in general, the layout works pretty well; there's some problems but I feel those are constrained by the requirements of TC

Layout:
-added a side room on red last to open up the space somewhat
-changed one of the connectors on red last; it's simpler and more open now, should feel less cramped
-very slightly widened a few routes across the map

Balance:
-moved Stair spawns to be in the corner; this mostly moves them further away from the Hospital point
-made a few changes to the Stair spawn room to adjust, including a window so that one of the spawn exits is obvious from the spawn angle

Other:
-fan on blue last now speens
-added resupply signs to both lasts
-added a sign and lighting to the upper route on blue last to make it more obvious
-fixed some fence collisions
-adjusted signs into the underground train station route
-adjusted the area outside Bridge spawn so that players are even more incentivised to take the main route