--Final Control Points--
Final points are outside, main route leads uphill to control point. Minor route enters the general area nearer the control point but can "carry" less people; it is also off the main route and so takes longer to get to. There is one one-way route to allow attackers an opportunity to use it to their advantage; this is further away from the control point than the minor route and is considerably off the main route. Area directly surrounding the control point is abundant in small sentry nest areas, similar to Dustbowl 3-2. Defenders spawn a 4- to 5-second Demo run from being able to intervene on the control point, making death more significant. Note that the control point can be visible before this, such Dustbowl point 2-2 where the fence prevents the defenders from getting to the point too quickly while still allowing them to see what's going on.
It is extremely important that the final control points and their arenas should be balanced to a pinnacle. Players are going to spend a lot of time in the final control point arena; it should be a fairly large environment with equal opportunities for the attacking team and the defending team to use this environment to their advantage. If the area is too easy to defend and too difficult to attack, the map will technically never end. If the area is too easy to attack (although this would be the lesser of two evils), the defending team will have little chance of successfully defending. Control points 2-2 and 3-2 of Dustbowl are good examples of fun playing areas, although in 3-2 the spawn would be a little too close to the point in this case for the defending team.
A useful factor for this final area would be, while the defenders take a couple of seconds to get to the point, the attackers should have a larger distance between their spawns and the main point arena. This would mean it would take longer to get pack to the point area, so again making death more significant. The distance would, however, need to be calculated carefully as, although it would encourage tactics and teleporters, if we were to err on the side of caution it would be to keep the point capture-able as opposed to completely defend-able in order for the map to end. A decent length to get to the final point might be just less than from the Blu spawn to Dustbowl 2-2, with a setup gate to allow the point defenders to set up a bit of a base instead of immediately getting rolled.
Obviously, the defenders would have a longer respawn time (~5 seconds avg) compared with the attackers (~2 seconds). Like in Hydro, these times can vary as the game goes on.
--Middle Control Points--
Since both teams will start off owning two middle control points each, the routes between these points for both Red and Blu will have to be similar to cut down on unintentional advantages to either team. Once one team has captured a point the routes between the next points can be a little different, overall being a little more difficult to capture for the attacking team.
Each point will need AT LEAST one main route and one minor route between it and the two points either side of it (in a square arrangement), as the stalemate on the choke points was the main detremental feature of Hydro. There will need to be a little of "no-man's land" (think CP Gorge, just as the attackers enter the facility around the second point) between each point in which players can fight without being particularly on each other's ground; this land should become a little harder for the attacking team to take control of after the first capture of the game, when playing moves on.
Overall, the layout of the points and the routes between them should be EASILY NAVIGABLE, fairly open (not so many tight turns and sharp inclines like Hydro) and EASY TO LEARN. Ideally, a player should know their way around the middle area after having played a round concerning each of the possible pairs of control points. TC maps can be difficult to find your way around at the best of times, so the layout should be as intuitive as possible (but not boring, obviously) to compensate for this. To better show which ways are blocked, possible routes to control points not being used in the current round should limit the player from going remotely near them instead of just blocking off the entrance to the route itself. For example, if there is an open area with the entrance to a blocked route at the far end, players should not have to go up to that end to see that the route is blocked; other props or brushes, such as wall, fences, barriers, etc., should be used to limit players going in that direction in general, and channel them towards the correct passage. In Hydro a player is more likely to see the blocked-off passages rather than the arrow signs to tell them where to go, so this should be made obvious for them.
