Thanks.
Right now, though, I have absolutely no idea what to do.
Here's the feedback from the last playtest.
The dark area was a tunnel that I had simply forgotten to add lighting to. Embarrassing, but fixed now. I'm absolutely stumped as to how I should adapt the map according to the rest of the feedback.
It's apparently still too tall, even though it uses approximately the same height proportions as nucleus. Lowering the roofs would make some of the stuff below them feel squashed, and removing some of them would kill the multileveledness which was the whole point of the map in the first place.
I consciously avoided adding health to the hill room, to encourage combat in the surrounding areas. I also removed all the health and ammo from the central roof to make players in that area more vulnerable, thereby making it less overpowered.
I got complaints about those two decisions ('not enough health and ammo around cp', 'No Medikits on the roof'), but I also got feedback ('point is too easy to hold especially with enclosed area and roof') hinting that those measures weren't enough.
The feedback 'A lot of wasted space and areas where people never will go' and 'hole in roof at mid is invisible to the player who doesn't look up' is also problematic. I enjoy maps that offer rewards to attentive players (the window on Dustbowl 1A, the roofs and windows overlooking the final outdoor area in Barnblitz, the Sniper bunker and underground tunnel around Dustbowl Final), and a seldom used flank route is better than none at all, in my opinion.
The problem with the 'underused' areas
may be that they're too spacious, though. If I shrink them down a bit they may feel more like routes than combat areas and therefore feel more intuitive.
Finally, I'm starting to wonder if I'm doing something wrong when building cubemaps. I was pretty sure I did the 'mat_specular 0, buildcubemaps' thing on the A2b version, and I'm absolutely positive I did it with the A3, but I got feedback about the water missing a cubemap when both those version were tested.
So, does anyone have any advice on any of this?