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(3)Demian made by LatiAs
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/tRHrwXY.jpg)
(4)Avalon made by Str18-02
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kypWSvU.jpg)
Download the maps from here:
http://www.kongdoo.com/bbs/board.php?bo_table=news&wr_id=22&page=0&sca&sfl&stx&sst&sod&spt=0
Freaklings comment:
+ Show Spoiler +"Wow. Finally some new Korean maps that I actually really really like.
Demian is great, even if very standard:
- seems very well done, in all respects
- nice layout, that makes sense
- 3 player map, always need more of these!
what's there not to like? Unless some surprise major imbalance jumps out from behind a tree, this is probably the best three spawn map that came out of Korea for years and definitely the best map ever to be introduced since the end of the Kespa leagues."
There is an interview in Korean with LatiAs, the map maker of Demian http://www.etnews.com/20141229000301
Translation Courtesy of Stratos (thankyou):
"In the interview the guy says he joined a mapmaking group called Again, but since it's no official entity or whatever you can call him a freelancer. Otherwise its just stuff like 'I didn't expect the map to be picked, but then the call came." Nothing about the map or the guy or anything really."
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Japan11813 Posts
I didn't even know they are using new versions.
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United States2948 Posts
The Kongdoo page lists Avalon v0.93 (updated as of January 15) and Demian v1.01 (as of January 5)
The regularly updated official HungryApp KSL page and its corresponding message board list Avalon v0.92 and Demian v1.01
Did a few Google searches for the Korean names (아발론, 데미안), but didn't come up with anything.
With the players actively competing on these maps the past two months, I can't imagine the maps changing significantly, thus forcing the players to re-learn them 
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In the interview the guy says he joined a mapmaking group called Again, but since it's no official entity or whatever you can call him a freelancer. Otherwise its just stuff like 'I didn't expect the map to be picked, but then the call came." Nothing about the map or the guy or anything really.
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United States2948 Posts
^^Thanks for translating, comrade
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Thanks prech and Stratos.
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On February 20 2015 08:41 prech wrote:The Kongdoo page lists Avalon v0.93 (updated as of January 15) and Demian v1.01 (as of January 5) The regularly updated official HungryApp KSL page and its corresponding message board list Avalon v0.92 and Demian v1.01 Did a few Google searches for the Korean names (아발론, 데미안), but didn't come up with anything. With the players actively competing on these maps the past two months, I can't imagine the maps changing significantly, thus forcing the players to re-learn them
These are indeed the versions so far used in the KSL we were looking for.
I'll post a detailed analysis of changes and remaining problems soon.
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/RCXxe6x.gif)
Direct comparison between Demian 1.00 and 1.01.
The main mineral formations have been changed to account for some worker pathing bugs resulting in mining rate differences. I did extensive testing and still found some worker pathing issues, particularly for terran in the right main. However, main single saturation mineral mining rates are only diverging by about 1.3% (tested for Zerg), as it seems, so it's actually quite alright overall, although personally I would try and optimize some things.
There are also some minor terrain changes (notably, adjusting bottom main building space, fising drop holes below, below left high ground 3rd ; the others are purely aesthtical/random).
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/hmv5SQo.gif)
Direct comparison between Avalon 0.92 and 0.93.
As you can see, the only changes are in the mineral formations of the top and bottom left mains. There's still a pathing bug with the topmost mineral patch in the bottom left main (maybe more, I have only tested with Protoss so far). There are also a couple of other serious issues, which have not been addressed at all:
- The bottom right natural has absolutle horrible worker pathing (on 4 of the 7 patches !). Fixing this one would be tricky though and would require relocating the natural a bit, due to the extent of the problem.
- some more mining problems at left 3rd (2 patches), top left and right mineral onlies (1 patch each, but these are minor problems)
- There are random cover providing tiles on top of all the high ground ramps, which should be replaced by normal unbuildable ramp tiles.
- there is a significant chance of a gas mining worker at the top third respawning behind the mineral lines, forcing it to go all the way around the mineral to return its cargo. This is also true for the bottom 3rd, but much less prevalent.
- To break the backdoor block at the top and bottom edges, both the temple has to be destoryed and one of the mineral stacks mined out, whereas on the left and right positions it suffices to destory the temple.
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Wow, I never knew that balanced mineral placement needed so many requirements! I thought that merely being symmetrical was the only sufficient factor needed.
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On February 23 2015 09:00 Hesmyrr wrote:
Wow, I never knew that balanced mineral placement needed so many requirements! I thought that merely being symmetrical was the only sufficient factor needed.
To my knowledge, most mineral lines are taken from older pro maps where the lines are already confirmed to be relatively balanced.
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United States2948 Posts
Very cool, thanks for the analysis, Freakling 
I wonder if the map-maker or players are aware of these problems, and the advantages/disadvantages based on the starting positions
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On February 23 2015 11:48 neobowman wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2015 09:00 Hesmyrr wrote:
Wow, I never knew that balanced mineral placement needed so many requirements! I thought that merely being symmetrical was the only sufficient factor needed. To my knowledge, most mineral lines are taken from older pro maps where the lines are already confirmed to be relatively balanced. These are both equaly naive assumptions. The sad truth is that you have to manually test every single one of them to make sure.
On February 23 2015 12:55 prech wrote:Very cool, thanks for the analysis, Freakling I wonder if the map-maker or players are aware of these problems, and the advantages/disadvantages based on the starting positions Well, most of this is wild, though somewhat educated, speculation, but:
I think neither most map makers nor most players are actually very aware of the problems.
Beyond the very early game, players generally have better things to do than to monitor their workers and income rates, which is why you will usually see updates to main mineral lines but nothing else (and even that does often not happen [see [Neo] Jade, to name a particularly bad recent example]).
But think about it: If you are a player and lose, would you rather blame it on some map imbalance that you did not even notice (or naively assumed could not possibly even be there, because sure those map makers know what they are doing  [or likewise: those blizzard guys surely knew what they were up to with their pathfinding algorithms O_o]) or look for bad decisions or build order shortcomming on your side? The latter ones are always much more obvious.
Most map makers are equally unaware, because they make the same naive assumptions, and most never bother to test them, usually leave the testing of their maps to the players (which is bad, because players often lack the deeper understanding of mechanics and mapmaking to do effective testing of basic stuff, they care more about general build orders, tactic and micro) and plyaers simply do not complain enough (for all the stated reasons).
This has been a problem forever, even in the old Kespa days, and having no established map testing procedure (just publihing the map a few days prior to the tourney, to players can have a try really does not suffice if no basic mechanic testing has been done before, which clearly was never the case in the Kespa or Sospa scene).
Finally, sponsors/organizers do not really bother either, because of naive assumptions, yada yada yada..., and because maps are a responsibility they have delegated to the people who know about that kind of stuff, i.e. mappers and players (and they surely have a ton of more urgent other responsibilities to care for)...
Just to give you some numbers:
I have tested countless modern maps, and what I generall find is deviations of single saturation mining rates (single sturation meaning : 1 worker per mineral patch and 3 workers per geyser) at correseponding expansions on the same map of:
up to 10% for minerals
up to 20% for gas (that is 50 gas/minute less from a geyser !)
And if you go farther back to "pre-modern" maps like, say, Paradoxxx, things get only uglier...
With basic testing I usually achieve:
sub 2% deviations (sub 1% for mains) for minerals (sometimes better than 5% can be hard without relocating the expansions, when dealing with multiple bugged mineral patches at the same location)
sub 10% deviation (sub 1% for mains) for gas (mostly by limiting myself to only using certain gas positions, which is quite feasible in most cases)
So it can be done.
That being said, I know of some high level foreign players who actually test at least their main and nat resources very meticulously to find the best minerals to split their workers to and to figure out the advantages and disadvantages in each postitional setup of a map they have (to cope with). And I've heard a lot of complaints. I do not know about korean players, but I would assume that at least some of them are very systematic and figure it out. But if they complain, they probably do so to the organizers, not the mappers themselves, and most of it probably gets lost between more urgent issues.
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On February 23 2015 20:43 Freakling wrote:
Just to give you some numbers:
I have tested countless modern maps, and what I generall find is deviations of single saturation mining rates (single sturation meaning : 1 worker per mineral patch and 3 workers per geyser) at correseponding expansions on the same map of:
up to 10% for minerals
up to 20% for gas (that is 50 gas/minute less from a geyser !)
In modern maps the gas is almost always on top of the starting location so I assume the deviation of the gas income is only apparent due to the natural and third gas locations?
What would interest me is, when you test the map, do you only use one race to determine the income rate? If so, is the difference in mining efficiency between the races relative to each other, or are there mineral locations which would favor a specific race more?
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The short answer is : It's a long(ish) story.
The actual answer is : I'll try to answer that as good as I can this evening when I have more time...
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Actually, you should just read this. It's not quite up to date, but it's definitely more elaborate than anything I could type up now. And it has animations (although some of them are broken...)
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I think I did not include anything about building palcement and complications with terran comsats, which both can matter a lot, too...
I generally implement the following solution on all of my latest maps:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/7D4yM8M.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2v2Op5w.jpg)
Note that these almost completely prevent mining rate drops from building a comsat, but do not work on maps/expos that do not adhere to this strict mineral placement (i.e. the vast majority of them). Building the dopt/turret one tile further to the left works on almost all maps, though.
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Some tldr to address Cryoc's question:
On February 23 2015 23:48 Cryoc wrote:What would interest me is, when you test the map, do you only use one race to determine the income rate? If so, is the difference in mining efficiency between the races relative to each other, or are there mineral locations which would favor a specific race more?
Mining rates between races are genrally different, because their buildings have different collision sizes, so workers have to slightly different paths and distances to travel:
![[image loading]](http://s23.postimage.org/yv80zlyij/collision_boxes.jpg)
Pathfinding bugs may also only occur for specific races, because of the same reason. So testing for only one race cannot guarantee bug-free and abalanced mining. I always test my maps in the order protoss->terran->zerg (for the simple reason of increasing difficulty of spamming buildings and workers with "Operation Cwal" on...)
On a (somewhat) related note (somewhat relevant, and really pushing oddities to their extreme in the discussion:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/391439-altering-worker-spawning-position?page=2)
On February 23 2015 23:48 Cryoc wrote:In modern maps the gas is almost always on top of the starting location so I assume the deviation of the gas income is only apparent due to the natural and third gas locations?
Yes, but unfortunately sometimes things do not work as they are supposed to.
Gas positions on top of the CC/Nex/Hatch generally provide full mining rates (about 300 gas/minute). It'##s supposed to look somewhat like this (look at the worker paths):
![[image loading]](http://s18.postimage.org/vdns68th5/top_gas_mining_sequence.gif)
But sometmes this happens:
![[image loading]](http://s13.postimage.org/4st497013/top_gas_far_return.gif)
Which leads to a significant drop in the gas mining rate and can only be fully fixed by moving the whole expansion (geyser, minerals, everything) around until a non-bugged spot is found (this usually easy to do for mains, because there's a lot of space to work with, but rather unwieldy for other expos). Alternatively, there is a workaround, which consists of just moving the geyser to the left by about two tiles, which reduces the problem, but does not quite fix it:
![[image loading]](http://s4.postimage.org/p5w80xexp/top_left_gas_mining_sequence.gif)
An example for this would be the top right main of Circuit Breakers.
In general (leaving out any specifics, explanations or exact numbers), you can refer to the following chart to determine your gas mining rate;
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/hgiMGA7.jpg)
On locations like top right nat of Circuit Breakers, it is definitely advised to use four workers for gas mining, as it will give you about 50 extra gas per minute.
Here are some values (tested for Zerg) for the naturals of some maps:
![[image loading]](http://s1.postimage.org/8jqvosxbz/natural_gas_mining_rates.jpg)
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Freakling, Sonic and Yellow need to hire you o.o
So much information I don't even know what I want to start reading first :D
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United States13143 Posts
Freakling, thanks for all this. I knew that mining rates changed based on race, but I didn't realize it was that drastic.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/My5zmrk.gif)
