Played through some games on this map with a few friends. General thoughts:
Fourth base is always very very far to the side, rather than along an attack path, for better or for worse.
In the 1:30/7:30 spawn setup, it seems like PvP could be fear-inspiring, with the lack of ramp into the natural-- you'll have Tal'Darim-like qualities here, with most PvP being 4gate vs 4gate. Not so much a problem as a "this is how it is with unramped mains"
There's a lot of airspace which is sweet for dropping :D
If you spawn in 4:30/10:30, the third seems generally hard to take, whether you're going for the watchtower third or the "through the minerals" third.
TvP Trinity (Diamond) vs Uniden (Diamond) http://drop.sc/45158 Nothing too strategically interesting here.
TvP Blazinghand (Master) vs Uniden (Diamond) http://drop.sc/45159 Is the airspace too abusable? Are fourth bases too hard to take?
Player Comments: Uniden: I liked this map. No balance comments Trinity: I wouldn't mind if this was a ladder map. Thirds look hard to take if we spawn the other way.
About that snow glaze, i have my brightness turned up a bit, and it was pretty jarring to see everything be so white at the start of the game. You should consider readjusting the brightness of that snow if you can.
Great map, very easy to abuse against insane AI since they don't know how to open mineral patch backdoors XD
In all seriousness, looks great, just played a match and the aesthetics are awesome. That said, I feel there is not enough openness of the natural, making it too easy for Protoss and Terran to early expand without risking punishment.
On December 10 2011 08:11 TehTemplar wrote: top right/bottom left mains are too big
How are they too big? 27 CCs is small, and the Top Left/Bottom Right are much larger.
If you are referring to the TL/BR set, then I'd say its not so bad in this situation because the tips provide some very useful vision anyway.
Either way, love this map to bits, glad you're still working on it.
EDIT: Actually yeah, as much as I love snow glaze, considering people play on high gamma to help see cloaked units, it's probably more trouble than it's worth.
Perhaps just ash-mixed snow, you know, edit the texture by dimming the white down to grey a bit and adding some more ashy spots of dark, and then put some smoke stacks on the machinery of the map to account for the ash? Or make it look more like the result of a battle?
I know at least PvP will be happy for the updates. I like where it's going as well. I think the aesthetics are fantastic, and I don't want you to change them much unless some great inspiration smacks you -- except the whiteness of the snow.