Tropicanae

Description
"Tropicanae" is, as you might guess from the title, a tropical map. It's the first map of the author, Thunderstorm025, and while there are a number of first-map hurdles it [i]does[/i] clear, it runs smack-dab into the hurdle of authorial ambition being bigger than the knowledge of the tools.

The basic setup of the map is four islands surrounded by water - two "main" islands, with three CPs apiece, and two secondary islands with one CP each. Several vehicles are available to move between each of the islands, but the water is too deep to get there on foot. It's a nice idea, but that last part (the "vehicle-transit-only" part) is where the map sees its biggest problem.

A lot of first-time authors (myself included) make the mistake of conceptualizing a map that really only works well if every AI unit were to be controlled by an actual human. This is not and will never be the case, and because of that, if you don't plan your map around what your AI can do, then you're really shooting yourself in the foot, design-wise. In this case, not only are you limiting island transit to the handful of vehicles you have available (which means that you're going to have a lot of units waiting around), but you're expecting the AI that use those vehicles to succeed in moving in and taking over command posts.

Here's why this doesn't happen. First of all, AI don't always evacuate their vehicles, even [i]if[/i] they're sitting right on top of a command post. That's a huge problem right there. Secondly, even in a perfect world where the AI do exactly what you want them to do and drop in to specific command posts, the AI will always be essentially balanced against each other one-to-one, which is a really big problem for the single AI now surrounded by five or six enemy AI at a command post. Attrition will, nine times out of ten, work out for the defending AI. You could script specialized AI goals that move AI in teams to specific places at specific times, but that's beyond the ability of most, and certainly beyond the scope of what you could expect a first-time modder to know.

You really need to have an open battlefield that allows the AI to interact with each other fully. This means that all the AI need to be able to transit from one island to another, regardless of availability of vehicles. It's also helpful for the human player who can't get his hands on a vehicle - think how fun that could be, playing single player and having to stand around waiting for a vehicle because you can't do anything else!

There are also a number of bugs, many of which are listed below in the readme. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, just because you recognize them does not excuse the fact that the bugs are fixable! In fact, some times it makes me wonder [i]more[/i], because it baffles me that you could [i]know[/i] what your problems are and ignore them. The big issues I noticed were the missing sounds (with a lot of vehicles, this is very noticeable), the hard-edged ground textures (too many overlapped textures in one area), missing textures (Kashyyyk building roofs, to name one), un-smoothed terrain (especially when it's seaside - these will always be very eroded in real life!). I didn't see it myself (because I didn't bother looking for it), but I notice that there's also no "leaving battlefield" message according to the readme. Why leave this out at all? You know it's not there, fix it, because it's an easy fix.

In any case, it's a decent design, but it falls kind've flat in the playability area. All the work of capturing CPs is on the player's shoulders, and because you get little-to-no AI support, you can spend the entire game just running around the enemy's main island capturing CPs after they've been taken back from you. It's not a bad first map, though, and if it looks fun, give it a try. It's always nice to see a new map.

-Mav