Rhen Var: Colony

Description
Jerbot77 today makes his SWBFFiles debut with the map Rhen Var: Colony. It can be best described as a cross between Rhen Var: Harbor and Bespin: Cloud City.

Being that this is a first map, one can expect some flaws in the design. This map\'s design is well executed, but it is not a very good design for gameplay. One faction starts out with two command posts way away from the city, and must cross a completely open field to get into the city. The other faction has a whole lot of command posts and has a much better defensive position to hold off the invaders. The city is very large, too, and somewhat confusing to navigate. There are lots of circular routes and places that don\'t really seem to go anywhere, and it\'s not immediately clear how to get from one command post to another. The field, on the other hand, is very straightforward and clear- it\'s possible to get around the main fighting and slip into the city, but it\'s hard to do so due to the lack of cover. There are a huge amount of units on the field at once and there are a lot of reinforcements to burn through, so the largeness of the map is not really that much of an issue.

The map is constructed fairly well, however- objects are placed well and I didn\'t notice very many floating ones. There were some terrain cutting issues, though they were only in specific areas and not really in a main gameplay area. Although you may not think that a Bespin/Rhen Var cross would go over very well, it actually is a pretty decent matchup. The white and gray color schemes of both planets sort of mesh well, as compared to a Geonosis/Hoth crossover. There are also a lot of vehicles around the map- mainly flyers, but there are some tanks as well. The ceiling is set pretty high, so you have a lot of room to zip over the buildings and kill people from above.

Onto the bugs list... most of these are mentioned in the readme, but these are the ones that I feel need to be fixed before any other version. A good percentage of the vehicles have no sounds at all, which really detracts from the gameplay a lot. There are no map boundaries and the map is pretty spread out across the terrain, so there definitely needs to be something stopping the player from going off the terrain. There needs to be a bit more out on the field for units to take cover behind, or at least give some semblance of a forward base.

Overall, this is a fairly average map- for a first map, it\'s pretty good because it avoids all the major pitfalls, but without that taken into consideration, it has some design flaws and bugs that need fixing before it can really be considered as a \'good\' map.

-Jedikiller