rindle

Remove the spires! or change them. the spire IS badlands. sticks out like a sore thumb.

I notice some nice height variation on the first two screenshots which is most of the time good for placing a cap point there.
Besides that I agree that those spirals dont belong there, but ok, you already said they are just placeholders.

To me it looks kinda open for snipers, maybe its just cause its pre alpha and you didnt work on the cover yet.

All in all it seems like a good start for a payload map. Keep it up!

Downloaded the map and ran through it for you, and then I put it up on the server and some of us had a few games on it.



Firstly, it needs func_respawnrooms in the spawns, this lets you change class without dying.


The spawn is quite ridiculously huge, it takes 7 seconds as a normal speed class to walk from one exit to the other. Red can also enter the spawn by going through the lower entrance.


Firstly, these spires as a big no no. Make your own with displacements or something, but this screams Badlands. Also, look at how much space a snipe up here has to work with. Consider adding cover nearer the spawns, and possibly even blocking this area off from snipers. Also, add another way across the chasm or make that track wider because I fell off a few times.


Just another shot of that sniper deck, if you look underneath it, snipers have clearly enough room to snipe from down
there, almost too much room. Note how engineers cannot set up at all in this first area except behind the spires, but even there they're very useless.


Sooo orange, in the next alpha change the floors+ceilings to grey! :3


While I want to say that this water thing is silly and unneeded, it had saved me on multiple occasions when I was spying my way out, or just to hide there as scout.


Blue shouldn't have such height advantage when they're attacking Red's last point! Red should be owning that area,
anyway. Also, consider making it at least 128 units lower, at the moment it provides ridiculous amounts of height
advantage!


Consider adding a sign, changing the wall textures or lighting slightly better so you can see that there is a staircase
behind here.


What is the use of this area? Maybe you could turn it into stairs and add a small ledge on there and going along the wall on the right?


Same as 005, Red should have easier access to this area than blue. It should also be dropped approx 128 units, it's very high up!


Consider putting stairs of a ramp through this wall going into the area in the picture before this one.


This area needs playerclipping, as do many other parts of the map.


There is quite a horrendously large sniper line here, maybe add some more cover along the track to reduce the effectiveness of this area?


Consider lowering this a bit and letting red access it more easily ie with stairs.



General observations about the map I made include it is very overscaled and open, but that's natural for early maps, the defensive higher positions could with lowering by 128 units, red need better access to the defense positions while blue should be working slightly harder to get to these spots.
Excluding the snipers on Red, it felt like a complete walkover for blue.

Be sure to update the map, it's got a nice winding layout to start with, I want to see this developed

I don't know how you expect to the get the bomb across that thin bridge, theres almost no side path alongside, meaning bomb pushers would have to ride in front, behind or on top of the bomb. Make a side path!

First off as soon as you join there is a flood of console errors. I'm guessing this is because you copy and paste'd from A Boojum Snark's Gametype Library, it's nothing fatal though.

info_player_teamspawn failed to find control point round named 'mspl_round_2'
info_player_teamspawn failed to find control point round named 'mspl_round_2'
(x 14)
filter_activator_tfteam failed to find control point named 'cp_twoB'
info_player_teamspawn failed to find control point round named 'mspl_round_2'
(x 14)
filter_activator_tfteam failed to find control point named 'cp_twoB

Click to expand...

The first area seemed very large, wide, and sniper friendly. I suggest doing what's inside the following two pictures:



First thing First: Chop off the entire side with the second spire. With the other side add a spiral ramp or something going down, with displacements/cliffs dotted about connected by planks of wood. Have some larger, with the ammo on them and maybe one big enough to warrant an engineers placement.

Make the Bridge wider as a whole, and add cover. (The green shapes)
I also suggest you have 3 spawn doors in the places marked with grey. I'm debating whether or not you should keep the tunnel at the bottom, I saw nobody use it, then again it was only a 3v3 or so playing today.

In the second image, it shows it from a different perspective.



The third image is what I think you should do to this area. Add a small building or something, put a small hp and small ammo in there, people said there was a lack of ammo and health, but what there was was too large. Just make this area less straight, give it some variation.



The fourth image (I stole from stick >.>) shows what you should do, again make it more interesting in the general shape. Everything seems to be squares and rectangles. I also propose you move those windows, and doorways down, and make your rooms smaller in height a little bit.

What others have said pretty much summed up the major flaws. Have you read "the political gamer"'s model tutorial? It should help you out. I suggest you replace the two spiral-rock formations that screams their native map.

Two things:
1) If those spires (yes I know you're going to take them out ) are an indication of a desert-y theme, then that opens up possibilities for a lot of displacement fun with height variation, and a unique opportunity to employ rock props to your every need (cover).

2)Stick stop stealing everything I try and do including my exact crosshair (I suggest more white tones, I tried to match the one from Mirrors Edge)

The whole map feels like it's 1.5x the size it really needs to be.

If you want help with the scaling I suggest you read: http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=12605

It really helped me, and I'm sure it helped a lot of other people as well.