Alpha 10: Landfall

Description
"Alpha 10: Landfall," by lesovikk1, is a first-timer map, and in a lot of ways it shows. It's hard to be too critical on any newbies, since everyone who's done any mapping before knows what his first map was like. However, there are some points that this aspiring mapper would do well to consider:

The map is given a background of a random battle in the Clone Wars, which is fine - until you play GCW. Because a lot of the props in the level are CW-centered, it seems silly in GCW (-when you see a Banking Clan ship above you). It's often better in these cases to leave one era out altogether rather than make a goofy setup like that. (Of course you could always load separate ZE layers for each era, too.)

This map is also big - far too large to really be a lot of fun. Most first maps tend to be this way, and it is important to get a sense of scale in comparing Zeroeditor setup to ingame setup. I don't think it helped this author that he populated his map with the actual capital ship assets from space maps, which are really far too large to work well on ground maps (and their lower-rez textures don't look very good). On that same note, you need to adjust view distance because I don't believe that the Corellian Corvette has any lowrez model.

Other minor mistakes abound - while the author fortunately had the foresight to change the ground texture, the sky texture is unchanged (and consequently that ugly Yavin modtools sky). The terrain editing is also not extremely well-done, with a number of rough-edged "hills" that don't feel a lot like hills. The map could also use some boundaries, since there's nothing blocking the player from getting outside the map bounds.

It's also worth mentioning that conquest is set up improperly - you don't need to capture all the CPs to win. While sometimes this is intentional (and forgive me please if it is), I doubt this is the case here - it seems like the author incorrectly set up the addition of new CPs to the conquest setup in the lua.

Good aspects of this map include some of the town layout - it worked well, but everything (on the whole map) needs to be a lot closer together, otherwise it is just plain inaccessible.

If the screenshots look interesting, give it a download, but you may want to pass until the author makes a few tweaks or comes out with a newer version.

-Mav