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the Dagon Knight4005 Posts
This is something that's been nagging at me ever since I started playing closer attention to the GSL. When I'm playing, I have far too much to keep track of (between my dreadful cheese and my maximum of twelve probes) to pay attention to the maps at all, but when I watch other people play I have to wonder what kind of town planning results in some of the maps we just accept in SC2.
When you think about it, we were kind of used to seeing roads in BW, for whatever reason they were just a fairly common map artifact. By comparison, roads seem fairly rare in SC2, but Metalopolis has roads all over the place.
For now, we'll forget the fact that Metalopolis appears to take place on top of buildings, because I don't even want to think about why they'd build roads like this across the top of buildings…
![[image loading]](http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/2310/metalopolis.png)
Where do these even lead!?
Where do these roads actually GO? I mean, if you're going to ram mineral clumps into the top of your buildings, the least you can do is provide some access, but once you take into account the scale of a marine or a siege tank, these seem like highways connecting the different bases. What's the point? Nobody spends that much time driving on top of roofs.
By comparison, Scrap Station looks like the kind of place where they'd mine bundles of stuff, a totally reasonable place to make sure was paved all over with roads, light rail tracks, maybe some kind of awesome space dock? Nope, just some flat metal paving. I bet you get the shittiest traction on that flat metal stuff.
Moreover, Scrap Station has some serious paving imbalance; check it out:
![[image loading]](http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/3125/scrapstationpaved.jpg)
I don't even want to think of how poorly the map is balanced. How much faster can you get out to defend your third if you don't have tanks and hellions skittering around on that metal stuff?
THANKS A LOT BLIZZARD
Hopefully this is just the first foray into the field of interrogating the decisions behind transport infrastructure in StarCraft. Next time, I'm going to have to devote some serious time to thinking about the reasons we never see any trains outside the campaign…
 
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This is truly outrageous!
But seriously, what's up with the roads on Metalopolis?
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I think its pretty obvious that Metalopolis is a secret futuristic NASCAR track built on top of a giant building that is thousands of times larger than battlecruisers and command centres.
As for scrap station. The design flaw is likely why it has been abandoned. The automatons forgot to pave the rest of the station and thus were banished to an eternity of loneliness and wallowing in their mistake.
Hehe thanks for the post gave me some genuine lols
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5 stars, will read again! This is a true injustice! Rally for infrastructure!
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Metalopolis, as the name suggests, is a large city formed around the gathering and application of various metals. This provides a huge disparity between the poor menial workers who make up the majority of the population, and the rich elite that owns metal processing plants and are there to oversee production. Also the mineral extraction process produces lots of unpleasant dust (notice how it's impossible to see the streets).
To escape the masses and unpleasant air the rich people have established areas on top of large buildings (you see that fan in the middle? That is for making sure that dust goes away). Obviously given how large the rooftop is you do not want to walk from one end to another, so it's customary for such rooftops to have roads and transport vehicles (like airports with train tracks and busses).
The rooftop we're looking at in metalopolis is an unfinished rooftop construction. They have planted grass, formed roads, placed decorations (minerals as decorations are a true sign of wealth and the gold bases are meant as VIP areas), and constructed fans to keep dust away. Normally they would then build shops, places to stay, parks (naturals), etc. up there, but before that happened it was attacked.
Scrap station is a quite erratic space station. They just created two bases from where to run their operations, and roads were established when they needed them (as they may need to abandon in a hurry and don't want to construct roads for nothing). As can be seen the work was just improperly split between the two bases with the right one getting more (maybe they were competing companies and the right company was cheaper/better).
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You guys are making my day rofl!!
//tx
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Unbelievable waste of taxpayer dollars building all those roads! Raynor for president in 2012!
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Metalopolis makes my brain melt... i just can't get my head around it. 
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thank you for this. this is a wonderful post that made my morning
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Thank you for good laughs, awesome stuff there. 
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the Dagon Knight4005 Posts
On March 23 2011 21:19 Reason.SC2 wrote:
I think its pretty obvious that Metalopolis is a secret futuristic NASCAR track built on top of a giant building that is thousands of times larger than battlecruisers and command centres.
I'm pretty much totally onside with metalopolis being a futuristic nascar track. Can some custom map designer make us a future-nascar on the roof of metalopolis using hellions? First person to complete 200 laps or whatever wins. Maybe it'd be boring? I'm not sure, Nascar confuses the shit out of me.
P.S. I just realised this blog was my 250th post. I need to step up my game and start spamming like a crazy person or nobody's going to want to elevate my totally sweet (and 100% legit) blue star from my signature to beside my name.
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I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Because I scouted the 4/6 pool incoming and wall quickly....
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Haha.
I remember that back in Red Alert 1 and the original Command and Conquer, vehicles would get a speed bonus on roads. Good thing SC2 doesn't have the same mechanic, except with Creep, of course.
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the Dagon Knight4005 Posts
On March 25 2011 05:26 Atom Cannister wrote:
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Atom, I know we're bros, but I can't tell if this is a reference to your very efficient scouting pattern or your very efficient sexual orientation...
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On March 23 2011 23:01 rasnj wrote:
Metalopolis, as the name suggests, is a large city formed around the gathering and application of various metals. This provides a huge disparity between the poor menial workers who make up the majority of the population, and the rich elite that owns metal processing plants and are there to oversee production. Also the mineral extraction process produces lots of unpleasant dust (notice how it's impossible to see the streets).
To escape the masses and unpleasant air the rich people have established areas on top of large buildings (you see that fan in the middle? That is for making sure that dust goes away). Obviously given how large the rooftop is you do not want to walk from one end to another, so it's customary for such rooftops to have roads and transport vehicles (like airports with train tracks and busses).
The rooftop we're looking at in metalopolis is an unfinished rooftop construction. They have planted grass, formed roads, placed decorations (minerals as decorations are a true sign of wealth and the gold bases are meant as VIP areas), and constructed fans to keep dust away. Normally they would then build shops, places to stay, parks (naturals), etc. up there, but before that happened it was attacked.
Scrap station is a quite erratic space station. They just created two bases from where to run their operations, and roads were established when they needed them (as they may need to abandon in a hurry and don't want to construct roads for nothing). As can be seen the work was just improperly split between the two bases with the right one getting more (maybe they were competing companies and the right company was cheaper/better).
This guy covers it pretty well, but I think we should be more concerned with Testbug being an example of global warming.
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I'm not sure if this is related to the thread, but have you guys seen Shattered Temple?
![[image loading]](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/images2/thumb/e/e4/The_Shattered_Temple.jpg/591px-The_Shattered_Temple.jpg)
Looking at the distance of the mineral line to the natural on some of the mains, do they not differ? Or is it just me?
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EPT![[image loading]](http://img688.imageshack.us/i/metalopolis.png/)
![[image loading]](http://img688.imageshack.us/i/scrapstationpaved.jpg/)
