[M] AVEX - Stream Pack I (5 Maps)

Many thanks to the Masters Terran streamer UpATreeZelda for this map, who simply gave me the idea to create a "pocket third." While slightly distancing the natural and fourth. This should pose very interesting games revolving around two and three base pushes, and creating tension amongst the fourth base despite the passive positioning, ideally. The aesthetic was a popular candidate when I polled reddit and multiple streams, often second or third, generally behind Neo Venice and Derailed.

This map has quite a bit of history, it started sometime in early May, where Snute wanted to mess around with map design. Originally entitled Snakeland, Snute wished to create a variation to the Frozen Temple base layout, and most importantly, make it lush and green. After weeks of tweaking and 'balancing', testing distances and build interaction, Huangshan would be released to the public and be played on a $250 matcherino tournament casted by BaseTradeTV. The map proved to be relatively standard and appropriately and expectantly balanced, and popular with the players.

Since the 2nd Nova DLC pack was released, as many of us mappers know the Elsecaro sand texture is the only sand texture we realistically have that can fit beach tilesets aside from Xil. Replacing Xil, the Elsecaro sand and some other aesthetic updates were updated to the map for this release. A rock was added by one of the thirds, and the rock tower pulled closer on the other to account for concerns from Protoss and Terran players.

A re-skin of my original Detox map from earlier this year, Danger Close is an attempt for me to address some of the issues posed by the original map. Some of these solutions involve the rocks behind the gold, the complete re-design of the middle, the removal of the bridge between the natural and the third, a reaper path from the third to the main, and a few others. Unfortunately I wasn't able to shrink the bounds of the map as I wanted to, without some more layout changing around the outside (which I was already content with). But, I'm happy with this version enough to lead me into considering it for another TLMC involvement.

This map was done on stream in 7h and 47min, with very little breaks every 2 hours. Originally I was having issues with the middle design, before settling on the one here. The bases at the corners were a concern, since I wanted to avoid circular syndrome as much as possible. But I had to put a base there, nudged closer to one player to make the base below the natural seem even worth it at any point. Definitely bases I expect to be taken later on, but better than it was before. I've also wanted to make a map based off the map with the same aesthetic for almost half a year now, so this scratched a pretty bad itch. I'm happy to see it getting positive reception.

Another stream map. This was another take on the pocket third that UpATreeZelda gave me an idea for, making this too a heavy macro map. I'm satisfied with it, but only partially. Similar to Talandar's Rise, I have concerns about one the flow of one of the base directions. I might address this in a future update to the map, but I think the obvious base route might just prove to be fine, and the other two bases just taken as lategame tension and map presence. I'm not too sure.