Hey,
Downloaded this map out of curiosity, and I've been loving the look of it so far! There are some nicely designed arenas, and the design of the shortcut doors from C to A that close as the various points are captured is pretty clever.
However, I feel that there are a couple of ways that system could be improved:
- This doorway lets BLU divert to C and spawncamp instead of attacking A. However, it's kind of an important entry route for RED into A, and is later re-used as an entry route to C for BLU.
So, I reckon you ought to put it on high ground (so it's only useful for RED during the attack on A), and add a second door next to it that only opens after B is capped, and BLU uses
that as their route to attack C:
Of course, you would also need to raise the wood cover to keep RED safe as they exit this door and prevent them from using it as a sniper balcony.
Secondly, these two doors are sort of mystifying:
They're right next to each other (so they can easily be camped by any enterprising BLU player who makes it that far), and one of them closes - but it doesn't matter since the other one is right next to it, and the door
between the two doors never locks.
What I propose is separating these doors out more, so they're more clearly separated in purpose and also harder to camp:
Firstly, axe this door and cut a hole in the nearby wall:
This new hole would then exit out here, and THIS would be a door that closes after B is capped.
You could then close off this area, turning it into a partition between the two routes:
This would make the two routes separated pretty much from RED's spawn right up until they reach B.
This means that if BLU tries to push up one of the two routes and hold it, RED can just use the other route to get to B totally safely, and this massively increases the chance that RED will reach B and have a fair, back-and-forth defense.
By the way, RED's spawn is very campable in general - any position that can watch one spawn door can easily watch the other.
Solving this is as simple as adding a big wall to partition the higher and lower parts of this area, so if you want to watch the exit that puts RED on low ground, you have to jump down and lose your ability to watch the highground exit.
Now, onto other, miscellaneous problems:
BLU's respawn time is very, very long. It's possible that you've forgotten to send the "SetBlueTeamRespawnWaveTime" and "SetRedTeamRespawnWaveTime" inputs to your tf_gamerules entity.
This will mean that the game will use the default value of 10 for both teams - up to a 20 second respawn time for BLU, on an A/D map!
Typically, a good value for BLU is 0-4, and a good value for RED is 6-10.
I recommend a value of 7 or 8 for RED when and 3 or 4 for BLU on your map's A point, since it's quite close to BLU spawn.
B is VERY close to A. It takes me all of SIX seconds to walk from A to B as a BLU player.
When you consider that RED has to spend time not only respawning, but walking back to B before they can even get a chance to defend it, you start to get the idea that B might not consistently get a fair chance for RED to defend it on this map.
In my opinion, it's a no-brainer that you should add more distance between A and B - at least five seconds worth of walk time.
You can maybe save on building any more distance than five seconds worth by using the game_forcerespawn entity - if you send that entity a "ForceTeamRespawn" input with a parameter override of 2, it will cancel the RED team's current respawn time and immediately respawn them.
That means that the "RED respawns and runs back to B" time is now shortened to "RED runs back to B".
BLU's forward spawn is campable for many of the same reasons RED's spawn is:
It's also very dark, lacks a resupply locker and BLU can go in there before A is even captured, which is sure to infuriate the RED players trying to defend A.
Some last map-building complaints:
It appears as though you've sealed your map by building a big skybox cube around it:
This is a poor choice, because it means all these faces outside the map (which the player will never realistically see) are being rendered, and having lighting information calculated for them - harming both performance and the map's filesize.
You've also used sky_day01_01 (which is a Half-Life 2 sky texture) instead of a TF2 sky. This is not only a stylistic clash, it's very low-resolution.
It also looks like the sunlight is tinted slightly pink, which makes the map look subtly wrong and unearthly.
This webpage has a list of TF2 sky textures and environment settings:
developer.valvesoftware.com
For alpha versions, it's usually good to copy settings from this list just so your map will look good with minimal effort - until you enter beta and can refine the look.
For your map, I recommend copying Dustbowl's environment settings.
That's all for now. Bye!
