[MAP] (2)Midnight Crossing

On August 07 2020 10:39 Jealous wrote:
Are the neutral buildings stacked?

Reminds me of Camelot, I like the multiple paths. Gut instinct would say that PvT/could/ be a campfest but maps like Camelot have shown that it is not necessarily true.

Good work!

On August 10 2020 03:38 Freakling wrote:
Looks like there are 4 gas to turtle on on the hill and then 4 expos to fight over with no player clearly owning them. In principal a good setup for long, drawn-our games with no trivial map split.
I'd rather have another full gas in the centre though and the open expo outside the nat be a mineral only (or keep it a heavily reduced gas expo, just so it gains some more value as a stepping stone expo towards the rather far away 3rd).
However, speaking of distances: Why didn't you go with a standard corner main? That little bit of low ground clutter in the corners does not really anything of value, only makes building placement more awkward, makes main mineral lines more vulnerable (could be intentional/desirebale, but you'd not need to cut a piece out of the mains for that), makes mains take more space than they would need, and as a result increases distance to the safer 3rd at around 4/10.
When it comes to late game, the lack of perpendicular movement paths, the tight passages around the top right/bot left corners and the distribution of high and low ground means that all the neutral expansions should be very easy pushable for Terran with little flanking opportunities. On the other hand the same features also make the map good for Carriers and allow Zerg to abuse their mobility for multi-fronted raid warfare. Still it seems like Terran should be able to relatively comfortably split the map in half.
Stacked buildings or not, the backdoor still looks vulnerable. The natural is also right in the way of the main-to-backdoor pathing.
I would move the nat minerals right to the edge (maybe leaving the main formations more exposed to allow for a weak point for Muta harass), move the backdoor choke closer to the nat choke (so a Cannon can cover both) and probably make the backdoor path low ground (with a blocked backdoor ramp to the nat), but the bot left/top right expos high ground with an additional access point towards the outer middle paths.
It should also be noted that the main movement path for units is also the shortest path, and it's the main access route to what are most likely to be your first four bases too. So overall in most game for most of the time the map will be a very straight forward, linear (allegedly ring) "arena map" where players just build armies and bud heads in the centre. So I would go the cookie cutter way and reduce the centre path to a tight rush path, instead giving more room to the side paths and their respective expos.

EDIT: And this. I'll keep linking that article till people finally start to implement the technique and thus avoid all those finer positional imbalances of space distribution…