EP3 Felucia

Description
"EP3 Felucia," submitted by TheGoose is - as you might infer from its title - Felucia, circa 19 BBY.

It also is an excellent example of why we have such adages as "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

This map wants to do two things. First, it wants to add new sides to make it more "movie-accurate." While a laudable goal, it is certainly not the first time something like this [url=http://starwarsbattlefront.filefront.com/files/search/?search_category=all&fields_name=1&fields_filename=1&game=84&keyword=felucia#results]has been attempted[/url] (not to mention all the sides mods that also do this). On the other hand, it hasn't been done as often as Geonosis - so I suppose that's a plus.

The sides themselves are decent, if not terribly original. They offer the standard "basic three" plus the obligatory command units (various clones with names for the REP, droideka and OOM droid for CIS). There is another class for each side, but it is basically useless - for the CIS, the "support" class is just the soldier class minus some weapons, and vice-versa for the REP (the soldier class is the support class minus a few weapons). One other thing I wasn't too fond of was the fact that the weapons both overheated and had ammo limits - if you're going to limit me, please choose one way or the other. Having both is just annoying. Bugs - the sides had a few. Several units and weapons were missing localizations. At least one weapon was missing a hud tag (a duplicate thermal detonator, also missing localization), and at least one other had a mis-sized tag (rep rifle).

Also on the subject of the HUD, however the author chose to "fix" his HUD issues, he didn't fix them. There is an extra half-bar at the top of the screen that shouldn't be there. The best way to fix any floating icons is obviously not however the author did it, since it caused this extra error to show up.

And before I get off the topic of the sides, I would be neglectful if I didn't mention a couple bugs with the heroes. First of all; the CIS hero - there wasn't one. That'd normally be fine, but it feels like a pretty big overlooked point if you include a hero for one side and not the other. Second - the author changed the Republic hero (Aayla Secura) to have one lightsaber, but whatever changes were made to her combo/animations caused a bug with her normal saber attacks - they shouldn't be used while moving (they are all upper-body-only animations), and so she unnaturally twists when attacking.

The second thing this map wants to do is expand stock Felucia. I'm not a huge fan of simply taking stock maps and working with them as a base - every time I see it, it just makes me think "lazy." Very rarely are the maps improved upon, and even when they are, they feel cheap (in comparison to original maps), because the author frames whatever little mapping they did do with the professionally-done work by Pandemic. In the case of this map, it actually manages to take away from the original map.

Several working or correct parts of the original map have actually been broken - as much as I would rather not see anyone use stock maps as a base for "their own" map, if you simply must use a stock map as a base, [b]don't mess up what's already there![/b] Just looking around briefly, a few things popped out at me - one of the tree root ramps at the back of the map has been repositioned and made inaccessible, the terrain has been changed without adjusting objects (causing floating objects), and damage regions from the steam vents have gone missing.

What the author did add to the map was basically opening up the terrain to the edges of the map - that's pretty par for the course for map extensions like this. One of the things that confused me, though, was the addition of several Mygeeto buildings over the battlefield. If this is supposed to be movie-like, why add something that is clearly [b]not[/b] from movie Felucia? Additionally, much of the added terrain needs smoothing - it's occasionally rough and looks sloppy compared to the normal terrain on the unaltered parts of the map. There are also some floating objects and/or objects placed inside each other (like a mushroom clipping through a tree).

The biggest problems with the new parts added were two: First, there was one CP added with no capture region (making a conquest victory impossible if you start out on the wrong team). Second, there was very poor AI planning added in some of the new areas. The first time I played the map, by the end of the map there was little-to-no resistance, because a clump of 20-30 AI were milling around a single enemy CP, not going anywhere.

One more quick note would be the minimap. It was either incomplete or positioned incorrectly (I couldn't tell - it's hard to tell on maps without very recognizable buildings). In any case, it doesn't look very well-done and it's unusable as far as positioning goes.

All in all, this map needs some work. Just looking through the WIP thread at Gametoast, it's easy to spot where testers for the map mentioned several of the problems I mentioned above. I would recommend that the author not ignore his testers' results, and be a little more conscientious with his bug-fixing and a little less hasty to release a map.

-Mav