TLnet Map Contest #14 - Voting

1. Blackburn
2. Submarine
3. Impostor
4. Hard Rain
5. Ice and Chrome

Reasoning for picks:

Blackburn:

Blackburn isn't a flawless map by any means. The bottom centre base feels overdesigned and almost never comes into play. Several of the slow zones don't do much (including some of the ones that didn't get removed). It's categorization as a 'rush' map is somewhat doubtful. But these flaws seldom matter, and Blackburn is a breath of fresh air in a TLMC filled with generic played out map layouts. Its layout does favour split-maps, but it's also much smaller than say Newkirk Precinct or Year Zero which gives aggression a chance. The gold base seems well placed with both significant advantages to taking it and significant drawbacks (only time will tell if it will play well in the long run). The high ground plateaus across from the nats seem to produce meaningful army movement and positioning. And of course in the map contest tournament it produced a bunch of great games.

Submarine:

Submarine doesn't have the most enterprising of layouts (though a 12 base map is somewhat of a rarity. We haven't had that since Fracture back in 2018), but it is very well thought out. It's a playable rush map (which has in the past been a rarity in the TLMC). The way the middle twists and has the smaller chokes near the center and larger chokes on the outskirts is neat. The map does seem extremely connected which could make surrounds too strong, but maybe that's acceptable for a map this size. During the tournament the games were quite solid. The unintentional tank spot on the reaper ledge was nice and I'm disappointed the map didn't keep it. Maybe it helps the balance to remove it, but it's a lot less interesting without.

Impostor:

AZGs were a bit of a disappointment overall with none of the maps using AZGs in a remotely impactful way (as expected), but Impostor probably did the best job of it with the narrow passage with high ground overlooking them. The map does have some inviduality to it apart from the AZGs with the long rocks being useful for swarmhosts as seen in the tournament, the narrow passage to the linear fourth serving sometimes as an advantage for the defender and sometimes a liability, and the general flow of the map around the narrow central choke being quite nice. The changes also seem to be for the better (moving the long rocks back so that they aren't quite as strong, and making the outside passage longer to encourage more use of the middle ramps).

Hard Rain:

Hard Rain's a bit too macro heavy for my taste, with quite a narrow middle, but the layout is interesting. The third base is of course of particular interest with it being pocketed away which makes it easy to defend in some match-ups, but with the unbuildable/droppable watery area and the cliff overlooking the third as a tradeoff. Hard Rain is quite a bit Backwater-like which fills me with misgivings, but hey credit given where credit is due for the layout novelty. The name Hard Rain combined with the very similar deco means that I keep on accidentally calling it Heavy Rain. Dammit ATTx.

Ice and Chrome:

Ice and Chrome's layout is utterly generic and boring, and it's exactly the type of map that's over-represented in TLMC, but that doesn't in of itself make it a bad map. To me the fifth best map was a bit of a toss up between this, Romanticide and Bamboozle, but I ended up picking Ice and Chrome because it is very well executed. It's a large macro map, but judging from the tournament it seems decently strong for Terran partially due to some good siege positions next to the thirds similarly to Triton. I don't know what else there is to say about macro Blueshift. If it ends up on ladder it'll probably be well received.

Beckett Industries
Ice and Chrome
Lightshade
Oxide
Jagannatha