[Guide]Map Making

To start
First thing every prospective mapper should do is open up Staredit, the default map making program that comes with starcraft. You can find this program in your starcraft folder along with Starcraft.exe (for windows users atleast). Click the terrain brush, and begin experimenting with the different terrain types to see what they look like and how they interact with eachother. I reccomend looking at a pre-existing map (ideally a good one, like a pro-map) and notice how they use the terrain in that map. For my example I will be using the Jungle tileset.



Once you're comfortable with the terrain, and the name of each terrain type, close Staredit. You may actually never open this program again. Then, google "Scmdraft" and download Scmdraft 2.0 (Beta 0.8.0) (that's the version I'm using atleast). This is another map making program fully compatible with anything you make in Staredit, and sc should be able to read and use any map you make with this editor (with exceptions, but they are so few they're unimportant, especially if you're just making fairly normal melee maps).

Now, familiarize yourself with the layout and features of this program. It can do basically everything Staredit can, plus a lot more. The biggest advantages this program has over Staredit as far as a melee mapper is concerned, is the ability to edit tiles (rather than only isometric squares), the ability to copy/paste sections of tiles, the presence of a symmetry tool, the ability to stack units (such as minerals), and the ability to place sprites (used for neutral buildings and units mostly).

Scmdraft
In any good melee map you will be placing terrain, units, doodads, and possibly sprites. If you click "Windows" at the top, you can open the terrain and doodad palette. I prefer to use the menu on the left side of the program instead of these palettes for terrain, units, and sprites, but I use the palette for doodads. If you ever close these palettes, you can reopen them at any time.



When you're using the terrain brush (ctrl + t selects this brush, or you can just click on any kind of terrain via either the terrain palette or the text menu on the left), note the options at the top of the program. On the far right side are your symmetry tools. Selecting these BEFORE you place any terrain will have the program mirror your brush strokes (with isometrical terrain brush only). If you make a pool of water on the left upper side of the map, with Mirror-X activated, you will find a pool of water at the upper left part of the map, the same distance from the map edges as the pool you placed yourself. With Mirror-Y only activated, you'll find the pool of water on the lower left part of the map. With only Mirror-XY activated, you'll find the pool of water in the bottom right. With all three options activated, you'll have your pool of water in the four corners of the map. It's very convenient to use these options when applicable, as it can ensure positional balance and save you a lot of work; it's very time consuming to count and copy the terrain by hand (which is how it was done before the symmetry tool was available). Positional balance is very important for fairness.

If you click the drag-down box where "Isometrical" is in currently, you can select "tile-set index". If your terrain palette is not already open, selecting this option should open it for you. It is probably useful to enlarge the terrain palette so you can see more tiles. The tiles here make up all terrain in your tileset. The isometric brush automatically groups like-tiles together to form the varying isometric squares you see in dragging the isometric brush around. You use this palette to create original doodads for decoration, to create original enlarged and inverted ramps, to fill in space that might leave room for a tank to fit in and shoot stuff you don't want tanks to be able to shoot from a tiny island (this is called a tank-hole, and are significant because of how long tank's range is), and to correct the spacial issues conflicting terrain types can cause. For example, placing temple terrain automatically creates jungle terrain around the temple. If you want a temple wall right next to water, this is trouble-some because the jungle terrain will push/delete some of the water, creating a hole/path that you don't want. You can manually place proper tiles to enlarge the temple, enlarge the water, and/or shrink the jungle. This is often a very time-intense operation. Another way to fix this problem if you don't mind wasting the space involved, is to place null terrain (the black tiles in the index) and then place a neutral Khaydarin Crystal to cover the null tiles. This removes the gap and prevents pathing issues (more on this later), but wastes space. It however is much less time consuming.

Another option in that drag-down box is the Copy/Paste Tool. This is very useful. I made the distinction above of enlarged ramps by saying "Original enlarged ramp", as opposed to one you create yourself. Thanks to this tool, there is absolutely no reason to create your own ramps from scratch (a very time consuming task). Now, take this time to go to Broodwarmaps.net, click on "Map DB (database)" on the left side of the site, look in the section of maps which begin with (0) (should be the first page), and find "(0)Jungle ramps". Download this map and put it somewhere you can find it easily. (http://www.panschk.de/mappage/(0)Jungle ramps(n).scm). Open this map up in scmdraft. You can switch between it and your map file through the "Windows" menu at the top. Either select the copy/paste tool or right click while having any other terrain brush selected to get to the copy/paste tool. Go into the ramp map, find any ramp you want (normally you'll find a functional one, but we're not making a real map at the moment so it doesn't matter which you choose), and select it by dragging a square over it. Note: it's unlikely you'll find a perfectly square ramp that works (the default ramps are squares, but are doodads not terrain, though you can create default doodads out of tiles if you want/need), and as such you will need to select the ramp in bits and pieces, by dragging a square over as much of the ramp as you can without including extra tiles, and then making another square over another portion of the ramp while holding the "shift" key. Overlapping additional selection squares won't hurt. The key here is to select only the tiles you need. The program will not help you selecting only useful tiles, you must use your eyes to determine that. Once the ramp is fully selected, either select "Copy" from the "Edit" menu, or press "ctrl + c". Now, go back to your map file (you can use the "Cascade", "Tile Vertically/Horizontally" options in the "Windows" menu to view both maps at once if necessary, and click in the map anywhere, to fully be in this map window. Not clicking will make you unable to paste your selected ramp the first time (attempting to will function as the click, in which case you won't paste the map until your second attempt/click). Select "Paste" from the "Edit" menu, or press "Ctrl + v", and click anywhere in your map to paste your ramp. You cannot move this pasted ramp around at all, so in a real map it's important to have placed the ramp exactly where you want it to be before clicking to paste it in.


I usually don't tile my windows like this for just copy/pasting.

Now, be careful with tile editing and copy/pasting. Both are almost necessary in creating any functional map, but the isometric brush will act weird around it, altering and distorting the tiles it effects. It may often be necessary to copy/paste the same thing over and over if you are editing stuff around it. You can either paste the stuff you need pasted last, or just paste everything you copy into another map file so you can reaccess it at any time if necessary.

Another thing you can do is place sprites. Sprites are a lot of different things. The part of the tree doodad which has the leaves is a sprite, while the trunk of it is terrain. A neutral building which appears in a melee game and belongs to no player but is solid is a unit-sprite. In (3)Medusa, the stacked temples on the backdoor are unit-sprites, and the statues on the bridge corners of the bridge chokes leading to the 3rd gas expansions are sprites. Permament disruption webs and dark swarms are unit-sprites. Don't place a dark-swarm or disruption web halfway on a cliff edge and normal terrain, as it will crash the game at start (you cannot normally place a dweb or swarm in-game like that either). Don't place a building unit-sprite partially outside of the map or it will crash the game. Scmdraft will not warn you that it will crash the game. Be careful to only click once and not drag the mouse while clicking, else you'll create many stacked sprites (unless that's your intention). To the right of the drag-down box which should say "Sprites" (which previously said "terrain") is another dragdown box which should say "Player 01". When placing sprites or unit-sprites, make sure "Player 12" is selected. Player 12 is the neutral player.



Minerals, neutral critters, and starting locations are all "units". Minerals can be stacked if "allow stack" is enabled under Options->Units, and can be placed for example partially on cliff edges or in the middle of ramps (as a mineral block) if "Place Buildings Anywhere" is enabled under Options-Units. Make sure critters and minerals (and geysers) are "owned" by Player 12, or they will not appear in a melee game. The starting location (abbreviated "sl" by me) should be owned by the player who will start there. For example, if your map has 4 players, you will want 4 starting locations by minerals and a geyser owned by any unique player 1-8. That is, you could have Player 1, 2, 3, and 4 used, or 1, 2, 5, 8 used. By unique, I mean you can't place two starting locations owned by Player 7. Unless you are making a fastest map, you should make sure "Require Mineral Distance" is enabled under Options->units.

Ok, you're familiar with scmdraft, the editor you'll be using now, time to start making a map. This section will flood into some other sections I'll get into later, but the concepts here are still invididually important. When you first start making maps, you're basically blindly throwing down blotches of terrain. Ideally you're using some good map made by either a top broodwarmaps.net mapper (probably a MOTM), or a korean pro-map. Using a map you play on a lot as a reference is good. Using models while you map is important, though not necessary throughout your mapping career.


Good example of a bad shape

One big mistake newer mappers make is they have awful sizes, poor proportions, and odd shapes. Part of this is poorly using the available space (addressed in detail later), part of it is just not having any feel for it. This stuff is hard for even veteran mappers, which is why using model maps AND testing your map throughout its creation is crucial, though not perhaps necessary. One thing you can do is unprotect a pro-map instead of just looking at a picture, and open it up in scmdraft to directly compare it to your map. Testing is pretty important assuming you have some experience at playing sc. If you don't, then perhaps testing won't help you, but by that point you probably shouldn't be making maps at all.

It's hard to seperate these three facets in mapping, as they're heavily linked. Messing up one usually messes up the others. "Size" of course refers to the size of something. Specifically, how much space you allocate to an area. This "area" could be an expansion, a main base, a battlefield, a pathway, etc. It's important to not make things too large or too small. Making a main base too small has obvious consequences, the players will feel cramped and/or won't be able to place all their necessary buildings. I often see mappers experimenting with forcing players to build their base partially in their main, partially elsewhere. I strongly reccomend against this. It's hard to pull off, and usually just makes things awkward for the player. The best example of this I know of is (4)Neo Forte. I can't say I enjoyed playing on the map though. Making a main base usually just wastes precious map space you need for other parts of the map. This is closely linked to starting location position, which I'll address later.

Proportion refers to the relative size of some object compared to the size of some other object in the map. Proportions are important to using space appropriately. Proportions ARE sizes, but refer more specifically to how the size of one thing effects the size of another. More of the implication of poor sizes rather than the existance of a poorly sized object. Making one expansion too large will make something else smaller, probably a pathway or battlefield. Making a main too large will reduce the space you can allocate to an expansion right by the main, or one which must be an exact distance from the main's edge and from some landmark in a battlefield, thus limiting either the space of the expansion or of the battlefield, to negative and perhaps catastrophic consequences either way.

Shape is just what it sounds like, the shape of some terrain object in the map. The biggest aspect of maintaining good shapes is avoiding straight lines in your terrain. This both looks bad visually, and can result in some area feeling "awkward". Shape also refers to how you blend different areas together. Refers to how you work the terrain between say a main base edge, and the edge of an expansion lying against the main. Sometimes, you'll have decent proportions and sizes, and managed to fit everything you wanted into your map, but you'll have bad shapes, awkward terrain edges which result in the space there being useless and thus wasted. Often, jagged edges or sharply accute angles will cause this. Aiming for "round" edges is still a good gameplan here.

Another big facet of mapping is distances. This is just what it sounds like the distance between one object and another. One commonly discussed distance is "main2main" which is the distance from one main base (usually calculated from the starting location or the ramp) to another along the shortest available path. Another common distance is "main2nat" which is the distance from the starting location of one main to the center of that main's natural expansion. "nat2nat" is also common, being the distance from one player's nat to another player's net. These distances all have large impacts on gameplay and comfort. Main2nat is mostly governed by the size of the main and the location of the starting location within the main. A map like Lost Temple has a much longer main2nat distance than what most gamers are comfortable with nowadays, such as in Python. Lost Temple both has larger mains and its starting location is placed in the "back" of the main, whereas in Python's smaller, more compact mains, the starting location is more in the "center" of the main. Adjusting starting location placement is usually best complemented with some form of testing to see what's most comfortable. It's possible to place it somewhere in particular in the mains per some concept. The effects of a too-large main can be offset by placing the starting location in a different place relative to the center of the main base. Usually this means moving it closer to the main ramp or choke.

The easiest way to mess up distances is to have an awkwardly uncomfortably long or short distance. Variation in distances effects gameplay and racial balance, but as long as you have your distance in some comfortable range, you should be ok. I can't say exactly what that range is, as it is somewhat relative to the rest of the map.


That's a long distance. The starting location is the size of a command center.

Another important concept connected to distance is the expansion layout of the map. That is, the distance between expansions and other expansions, as well as between the main base and an expansion, or between the natural expansion and some other expansion. These distances are important because it helps determine the timing of when players will take a certain expansion. I'll talk more about expo layout later, but the big thing to take away here is that you don't want expansions too close or too far from eachother, or too close or far from the natural. It's awkward to have expansions too close to eachother, and awkward for them to be too far from the rest of things.

When mapping, particularly when making two player maps, you must consider pathing. Pathing is actually very important, more important than you might think. "Pathing" refers to a great many things, but mostly has to do with the paths units take. The first thing that comes to people's minds when they hear the term "pathing" is involving blocking pathing with some kind of non-terrain block. For example, the infamous "glitch" in the original Lost Temple, at the mineral only expansion of top right main, where units going from 3 to 12 would get stuck between the mineral formation and the cliff edge. Mineral walls in general, such as the ones in Monty Hall will also block pathing. Neutrals over walkonable terrain will block pathing, like the neutrals in arkanoid, or the temples in Medusa. Another feature that can disrupt pathing like this are tight chokes, like in Bluestorm, Peaks of Baekdu, Loki, etc. These chokes are too tight for large units to pass through, but that's news to those units who will attempt to go through them anyway and get stuck. As such it's important to be careful when using any of these features, but I'll get more on that later.

A larger aspect of pathing is related to distances and your expo layout. The biggest part of pathing is how it relates to the layout of your map. It's related to sizes and space allocation to a certain extent. Does your pathing make sense in your map? The paths your units will take to get from one place to another, does it lead through an expansion? Is the path a dead-end to an expansion? Does the path go straight from your nat to your opponent's nat? Do you have a very wide, very large path that leads from and to somewhere important, but there's too much space allocated to it? It's hard to describe just in words what I mean, but it's important that your every path is useful and important. Otherwise, it's a poor use of space.

Linearity is a big pathing-related issue. You generally want to avoid linearity, though it is important and sometimes necessary to have. Two player maps are almost inherently linear. Tight chokes serve to reduce linearity. Adding paths, having your main paths break off to other important paths can serve to reduce linearity. Perhaps you'll have a viable main path leading from your base to your opponent's, but it's too linear. A way to reduce linearity here is to create a new path, and/or branch a new path off of your main path. You then make it important/viable by making strategically or economically important. The former involves some sort of tactical advantage you gain from using the path, the latter involves some sort of expansion. Medusa is an incredibly linear map. Its backdoor paths help alleviate the linearity by giving players another viable path to use. This path leads through and protects your mineral only expansion, and creates an alternate route to the middle of the map.

Linearity is generally a bad thing because it can reduce movement. It tends to be bad for gameplay and balance. It's better to have a nonlinear map, but there's more to it than just creating other paths. The paths have to make sense and be viable. Linearity is often synonymous with "tightness". Maps which are tighter tend to have issues because they're linear. It's also possible to have a linear map which isn't tight. For example, Python is incredibly linear, but it alleviates the problems linearity would normally create by having a very spaced out expo layout. To go from your base to your enemy uses a single direct path, the definition of linearity. However, you can't only use that path if you plan on expoing. As you expand, your scope of influence increases, and so does the scope of things you must worry about. The fact that the middle is incredibly large and open only matters largely after you start expanding outside of your nat.

Tightness makes it hard to maneuver your army, and makes flanks difficult. This can make for boring gameplay. It's useful for all three races at some point or another to be able to both retreat and attack in a non-head-on fashion. In a linear map, you are often forced to retreat to an expansion, whereas sometimes in nonlinear maps you can retreat by simply dissipating into a more open area where the enemy cannot follow because he would have a positional disadvantage, or for whatever reason. This tends to be more advantageous, because retreating to an expansion tends to make it easier for your opponent to continue moving at you to attack. Linearity tends to increase turtling and "boring" play. Sometimes linearity can increase "excitement" by increasing "back and forth" gameplay, but more often than not that ends up in split-map 20 minute games.
There are two sides to linearity problems. Where players can't attack because they can't gain an advantage, or where players can't attack for fear of a counter attack, though this occurs more often in bilinear maps (a focus on two main paths, like Loki).


If your map is too tight, it's hard to get to Bob's Guns.

There's another less known feature in maps which can create pathing issues. Even paths. That is, a number of paths of an even number (2,4,6 etc), as opposed to an odd number of paths. This can create pathing issues if the even paths are the same length, which can confuse units sometimes as to which path to take. This emphasizes pathing issues which can come about from path length. This sort of ties to neutral unit/building pathing blocks, which can be avoided largely by making them the inferior path to a non-blocked path. That is, a path longer or farther from where the unit potentially choosing the path's ideal location.


Now you're just fucking with me.

There are other ways to trick pathing into working. The map (4)Voices IV by Testbug (an iCCup map) features a "backdoor" path leading from the main through the min only. It's easy to get a pathing issue using this kind of feature with rotational symmetry, as the path will inevitably be "faster" going through the min block from one base to another at some point. So Testbug "tricked" the pathing by making the two ramps right next to eachother, and placed in such a way that a unit who would try to go through the min block will "find" the appropriate choke and use it instead of getting stuck, automatically. This also partially uses the notion that units will try to avoid ramps if it can, preferring to use a path of like-altitude. A unit then trying to use the blocked path is predisposed to "dislike" it because it's a ramp, despite the proper choke being a ramp too, anyway. Only terrain and doodad blocks will be completely understood as being impassable by units.

The big thing to get about pathing is to avoid when possible linearity, and make sure you allocate just enough space to your paths. A path is useless if it's too small or if it lacks some purpose. If it lacks some strategical or economic aspect it's useless no matter how much space you give it. Note: bilinearity is not a big step up from linearity, and I generally make no distinction between the two. It's useful to avoid pathing issues, but sometimes it can be necessary for the concept to work to include a "minor" pathing issue. One easily work-around-able and/or non-lasting. eg. the tight choke of bluestorm, or the temples of medusa.

Probably one of the first few things you'll place in your map is the main base. This is the base where the starting location is, where players will most likely build their first buildings and setup their "base". There are a lot of shapes and sizes mains can come in, and many are viable if you place the starting location correctly relative to the size of the main. While you do have some flexibility in where to place the starting location, it's often most comfortable for the players for it to be relatively close to the natural expansion. I can't give an exact distance from the nat for the starting location to be, but you can look at the location of it in promaps.

Your main base should have enough room for terran players to make enough depots to max (give or take a few for ccs), 9 rax, 2fact with addons, 2port with addons, 2ebay, a mineral formation, correctly placed geyser (more on this later), and a correctly placed command center, and enough room for units to go to and leave all the mentioned features, with there being enough room for movement to and from any part of the main to another. If your main fulfills this, and anyone can go in and make their base without being an architect (without using some perfect base layout, by just throwing buildings down in a reasonably intelligent and efficient manner) and feel comfortable, your main is probably good enough. You usually want to leave flat space against the edge of the map, it helps to have a flat edge to start placing supply depots or something against.

Mineral formations are very important, they're the arrangement of mineral blocks in some base or expansion. They are important because changing the formation often changes the rate at which units will mine them (specifically by altering the path units take to go to the mineral, back from the mineral to the resource building (cc, nexus, etc). Not all formations are equal. In fact, the same formation mirrored some other way (flipped vertically or horizontally) may mine differently. Mineral formations can be better or worse depending on race. Sometimes moving the whole formation over by one tile will cause it to mine differently. As such, simply copying a promap mineral formation will not necessarily suffice. It is a good start though. (4)Python and (2)Destination have pretty good mineral formations. (4)Othello, (2)Bluestorm, (3)Outsider, and (3)Longinus have pretty bad mineral formations. The best thing you can do here is open up your map and test ALL your mineral formations. The testing process isn't the long part. Just open single player, find your map and play a computer. Put in the cheats "show me the money" "operation cwal" to be able to quickly produce all the buildings and units you need. If you need to test just one main base formation, go to the menu, click end game, and click restart (f10 e r r, I think) until you get the right formation (instead of starting over). Drones appear to be the pickiest about mining, so if you want to be lazy just test all formations with zerg and you should be ok. To be truly thorough though you must test all formations with all three races.


Destination's gosu mineral formation.

A mineral patch is placed "well" when it is relatively close to the resource building and when a miner takes a reasonably direct path from the mineral to the resource building. Note: these are all painfully relative terms. Take (4)Python 1.3 or (2)Destination 1.1 out for a spin and "test" its mineral formations, and compare that to how your mineral formations test out. If they appear to mine about the same, great, move on. An easier way of doing this, is to test the mineral formation on a normal game. Play vs a computer, and pick a build you're comfortable with. Comfortable enough that you know approximately how many minerals you have at a certain time/relative time. For example, on Python 1.3 if you go 9pool 9gas 8ovy drone, mine gas til 80, and then take a drone off gas after every next return (take the drone who brings back the 88th gas off, the drone who brings the 96th, and the drone who brings the 104th gas, and put them all back on minerals), you should have approximately 100 minerals when you reach 100 gas. If you have significantly fewer (20-30+) minerals than that, and you made no mistakes in executing the build, you probably have a problem. Or, make ovy at 9. When ovy finishes you should have approximately 200-220 minerals.

A less known or worried about aspect of mining is "wandering". When a miner gets to a mineral already being mined, he "wanders" away to find a different mineral to mine, instead of waiting. This is good with slightly over 1 miner per mineral block, but actually greatly reduces the effect of adding more workers over time. The implication is that the "optimum" mining rate is achieved by a miner count slightly greater than 2 miners per mineral block. Most mappers do not address this at all, be it ignorance of the issue or indifference to the issue itself. I'm not suggesting to to address it or ignore it, but it's important to be aware of the issue. The only real "solution" to "fixing" it is by splitting up your mineral formation. The natural mineral formation in (4)Forte is perfect for this, and greatly reduces the effects of wandering. This kind of formation can get awkward and annoying very quickly, so the application of this is limited for practical purposes. This also would potentially reduce damage done by certain types of splash based harass (reaver/storm/lurker and tank to a lesser degree). It would be far more viable to implement this at some expansion than in a main or nat, even to a degree of practicality.


Forte's natural mineral formation.
More information on wandering can be found here:
http://www.panschk.de/mappage/newsscript/viewarticle.php?newsid=22
http://www.yellowchrome.org/1com/sclegacy/final_review.pdf (pdf)

In your main base, if your mineral formation should be near atleast one map edge. If your formation is perpendicular to the map edge it's near, the closest mineral to the edge should be 1-2 tiles away. Note: problems with minerals placed on the bottom most row of tiles, and in bottom left and bottom right; see more in Positional Balance section. If your formation is parallel to the map edge, the minerals should all be 1-4 tiles away from the map edge. A mineral is 2 tiles wide and 1 tile "tall", by the way. Measure horizontal distance from map edge from the mineral tile closest to the edge. The "room" between the minerals and the map edge is necessary for several reasons. First of all, it allows players to potentially build between their formation and the map edge, this may be useful for a multitude of reasons. Secondly it allows players to move units around the formation, to run a scout or ground harasser around the minerals without being forced to go through the gauntlet miners make, and to drop ranged harassing units, such as lurkers, reavers, tanks or vultures, or even high templars. Removing this room potentially makes the base "safer" from certain forms of harass. Lastly, it makes it harder to lose miners to accidents where a miner being moved while being inside of another miner due to mining stack bumps or is bumped behind the mineral formation in such a way that it is stuck, and cannot be removed except by air transport. This is annoying and easy to prevent by creating this room.
It is possible to make an acceptable and comfortable mineral formation farther from the edges than I mentioned, significantly farther even, but if you get too far away the starting location tends to feel lost, in the middle of no where kind of feeling. If done properly this won't be a problem, so if for some reason it's necessary to place your formation farther away, go for it. I wouldn't do that just to be doing it, however.

The natural is perhaps a little more flexible than your main base in some aspects. Your natural is usually in front of your main base, and pathing from the main to the middle of the map usually runs through it. It is less common but certainly not unheard of for your natural to be behind your main however. As such, there are different "rules" to making a natural depending on which way you choose. Either way, a natural needs to have enough room for a mineral formation and a resource building. Almost always the natural also has a geyser. Front naturals are harder to make because you must account for room for the unit pathing that runs through the base from the main to the middle of the map. Thus the orientation of the main choke (often but not always in the form of a ramp; ramp orientation refers to the angle it juts out at, and in how units must approach the ramp from the main or nat) and of the mineral formation is important as well. Ideally, the optimum resource building location in the natural will be in such a place that neither it nor the miners heading back and forth from it to the minerals will not disrupt the pathing, but that it will provide some form of protection to the main choke by taking up space. This is important for all three races with regards to Fast Expoing, not only to Zerg as was the case classically.


Python's nat.

You can have a wider or tighter nat, there is a lot of flexibility here. You can also experiment with tighter or wider nat chokes, which tend to be much wider than main chokes. It seems that the most comfortable nat is a fairly wide one, but with an offset tighter nat choke. For example, (4)Python 1.3 has a fairly roomy natural, you can definitely place extra (non-necessary) buildings in it and still have plenty of room (depending on the situation), but the nat choke is relatively tight, and "offset", it forces pathing to go from the nat choke directly to the main choke, avoiding the resource building itself. This offset pathing is what allows the natural to feel roomy. This is not by any means necessary, you easily could be fine with making the pathing run directly into the resource building, with the main choke being "behind" the resource building. It's important to try and make sure pathing doesn't run through the miners, as this is awkward, because units will get stuck running into miners. However, the map (4)Othello deems this unimportant, and runs pathing right through the miners anyway. But even in this map, pathing does not only run through the miners, there's a viable path that avoids the miners, it's just not always the path units will choose on their own. Your ideal aim with the nat is to design the nat and its choke so that protoss can effectively wall to some extent using a correctly placed nexus, pylon, forge, gate and possible 1-2 cannons. You don't want it too tight that these buildings can't all fit, and not too open that these buildings laid side-by-side leave gaps larger than 2-3 tiles.

An important part of every nat is a "nat cliff". This cliff is either behind the mineral formation, or to the side of it. It is usually directly opposite and facing the main choke. The cliff is important because it occupies the space where tanks could otherwise be placed to hit the mineral formations from outside the base. This is annoying and has all kinds of balance issues associated with it. This "cliff" is sometimes a highground matrix, highground with the smallest possible isometric lowground "holes" (4)Python 1.3 and (2)Destination 1.1 both have a little bit of this. The cliff could be a pool of water. The cliff could be a combination of both. It also could be an area of pure highground (note that "highground" is relative, and could mean "basillica" in twilight if the nat was "dirt", or "high basillica" if the nat was "high dirt", or could even be lower than the nat but functioning the same way (like the dirt "cliff" in Reverse Lost Temple)), from which ranged units can harass aspects of the nat. The nat cliff could be right against the mineral formation or geyser, or several tiles away. (2)Destination 1.1's nat cliff is relatively thin, but it also is relatively far from the mineral formation, opting to use up the space in a more useful, efficient manner. This works here because of how the pathing works. I would classify this nat as being the same type as (4)Python 1.3's, with a tight nat choke but wide nat.

Another important aspect of the nat cliff is the "ovy spot", a spot where zerg overlords can hover over safe from enemy ground attacks. Usually, this spot oversees the nat choke or part of it, and/or the minerals and/or gas, allowing zerg to use his overlords for lasting scouting. This is not necessary, but nice for zergs. Note that a complete absence of a safe nat cliff, for example a nat cliff which has a ramp leading up to it, is very hard on zergs, as it forces them to scout more with zerglings or drones, units which losing could really hurt their macro due to the nature of larval economics. A safe overlord serves the scouting need, and is safe, so it won't die until later, if at all. Safe is a relative term here. (4)Python 1.3's nat cliff is "safe" for overlords, but if the overlord is too close to the nat choke, some form of vision of the top of the nat cliff can easily allow the other player to kill the overlord. Initially however, the overlord quite safe. The nat cliff is large enough that zergs later on can move their overlord to safety, but out of useful vision, or atleast limiting the overlord's vision. It's important to consider how aspects of the map will change as the game goes on, and how those changes will effect how gameplay will turn out then.

The orientation of the mineral formation of the nat has further implications on gameplay and how you must allocate the nat's space. The nat formation may "face", or rather "have its back to" either the map edge, or the openness of the map, the middle. There are varying degrees of this, as it can be closer to or farther from the map edge. If its back is to the openness of the map, you most likely want to leave sufficient space behind the mineral formation for static defense room. Specifically, often this is room Terran might use to place turrets vs Zerg to defend from Mutalisks. This building room could exist to the sides of the mineral formation, or on some cliff or isolated/seperate area behind the mineral formation (eg the min only plateau in (3)Medusa). This building room really must exist somehow. The reasons for having room behind your mineral formation in your main also apply here.

If your turret room is not part of the nat room itself behind or to the side of your formation, as could be the case if it's on a cliff behind it, you want to place the minerals as close to the cliff edge as possible. While 1 tile between the cliff edge and the mineral formation is acceptable ((4)Othello has enough room for turrets in both the nat and on the nat cliff), if your sole building room is this cliff/cliff-edged area, you probably want zero or fewer tiles between your formation and the cliff edge. Fewer than zero probably sounds weird, so let me explain. By enabling Place Buildings Anywhere you should be able to place minerals on the sides of cliffs (for example, on ramps). As such, you can place your minerals on the cliff itself, partially or fully (depending on if the cliff is to the side or above/below your formation). If this doesn't look good, you can use tile editing to remove parts of the cliff which you normally can't place minerals on, by replacing it with terrain that you can place minerals on. Or you can use some variety of both.

For formations facing the map edge, the distance between the minerals and the map edge is important to consider. If the distance is relatively long, you probably want turret space directly behind the minerals. With a shorter distance, on the sides may suffice. Basically you're considering from which direction will mutalisks attack, will shuttles approach to drop reaver, etc. This is all about harass.

Your expo layout is one of the most important aspects of your map. It determines a lot about gameplay, and executing your expo layout with your concept is one of the key tasks in map making. The big aspects of expo layout is determining how many expos you want, whether they're "neutral" or "owned", whether they have gas or not, how many mineral blocks they have, and the value of the mineral blocks and geysers. Also you must consider distance between expansions, distance from the players by land and air, and the relative "safeness" of the expansions.

It's pretty common these days to have four bases per starting location, with three of those bases having gas. For (2)maps, it's common for the map to have four to five gas expos per player, as there aren't other starting locations' worth of resources to pillage. Most of the time, the natural has gas, and almost always the main base has gas. The big question then, assuming you're following the standard expo layout model, is whether the third closest base to the player should have gas or not. This is almost exclusively a conceptual call, there's no definitive way to decide either way. Same goes for the safeness of each expansion. Will the expo be in the open? Will it be isolated? Will it be an island? Will it be semi-island in some manner? Will it have a single choke? Will it be vulnerable by drops and harass but relatively safe from ground attacks? Will it have a large choke or a small one? Will it have multiple chokes, and of what size each? Will the minerals be vulnerable but not the resource building, or the other way around? How about the geyser if it's present? Should a safer expansion have more or fewer resources? A less safe one? Should an expansion have few mineral blocks but high mineral values on them? (3)Tear's of the Moon features mineral only expansions which have four blocks each, but 3000 minerals (1500 is standard) on each one. (3)Outsider's semi-island gas geysers have 2500 gas (5000 is standard) each. I can't give suggestions here without looking at the map as a whole, I can only give these basic ideas.

An "owned" expansion is one nearer to one player. If you have an owned expansion, you must have another expansion for the other player(s) as well to be fair. You can vary positioning somewhat without hurting gameplay much, such as in (4)Fantasy, but it's safer to just mirror everything proportionally. A neutral expansion is one equally distanced between players, that players have the opportunity to fight over. Owned expansions tend to be favoured, part of it is that the distance to a neutral expo is almost inherently longer. Also, you need to have enough resources, and using neutral expansions usually reduces the total amount of expansions available.

You don't want your expansions too close to eachother, and you don't want two "owned" expansions owned by different players to be too close. Either pull the expo away, or make it a single neutral expansion. Exceptions for the former occur with the nat and 3rd base often, and for the latter with island and ground expos, which are more acceptable to have in close proximity than two ground expansions. It's impossible to give definite distances, and hard to even give relative distances for how far apart expansions should be. A lot of it depends on your concept, the economic and strategic worth of your expansions, and how your pathing works. Experimenting, and testing is crucial to figuring out what you want. As far as I know, there is no ideal way to setup a map. Even in the perfect final versions of the best promaps ever made, you still have room to tweak things here and there, and even sometimes make large scale changes. It's hard to see fully the implications of every change on gameplay and balance, and that's what makes mapping so hard. Mostly, just give your map some test runs. If it feels comfortable and is conducive to your concept, keep it, else, change it. Go with your gut instinct is all I can suggest.


Othello has a very good expo layout.

It tends to be pretty obvious to everyone that you want a positionally balanced map, a map where every starting location is fair. An (in)famous positional imbalance was in (4)Lost Temple. A protoss at the 12 spot had a hard time vs a terran at 3, because terran could siege tanks on the edge of his main base and give protoss hell as he tried to leave his natural. Terran also was very close to protoss' nat cliff, making it even easier to exploit tank drops on the cliff. Furthermore, in zvp 2gate was exceptionally strong in 12v3, because the distance between the two bases was so short. Scmdraft's symmetry tool makes positional balance a lot easier to execute without much effort, whereas lazy mappers would often just leave minor positional imbalances in their maps, as counting tiles by hand and manually mirroring the map was a real pain. Also, the lack of inverted ramps in the past forced mappers to include positonal differences to allow use of default ramps instead. Note: positional differences tend to be imbalances, but the difference is often easier to see than the imbalance itself, the implication and consequences of that difference. As such, mirroring your map perfectly is basically necessary to create the highest possible quality map.

There are still some less known positional imbalances mappers have accidentally left in their maps in the past. The big one that comes to my mind is the infamous gas issue. There are long detailed studies proving the existance of the gas issue, and I have no wish to redo them or to even restate everything found in those studies. Suffice it to say the optimal location for a vespene geyser is directly above the starting location, and directly to the left (directly to the left doesn't actually exist, there are two directly lefts, one is a tile up and the other a tile below, both work). Mining gas with 3 workers should mine optimally if the geyser is in either of these places. If the geyser is anywhere else, mining with only 3 workers will result in calculable and significant difficiencies in mining, requiring 4 workers to mine "optimally".
The gas issue always exists, but the mapper much choose where to address it. Moving the geyser to an optimal location will fix the positional imbalance of gas mining, but especially outside the main could create a new positional imbalance making the geyser safer or more vulnerable to attack or harass, or put the geyser in the way of pathing. The agreed upon compromise is to address the gas issue only in the mains, as there often is no positional imbalance caused by the main geyser being moved, due to other unrelated concerns taken care of with mains ensuring their security and comfort. Note that almost all (I can think of only one exception, Katrina) promaps after a certain point address the gas issue in the mains. Old school maps, such as Luna retain the gas issue.
More in-depth information on the gas issue can be found here:
http://www.panschk.de/mappage/newsscript/viewarticle.php?newsid=2
http://www.panschk.de/mappage/newsscript/viewarticle.php?newsid=10
http://www.panschk.de/mappage/comments.php?mapid=1481

Addressed in an earlier section, mappers must be careful that their mineral formations mine equally (or as close to as possible) for all players, positions, races.

The bottom-most row of tiles are unuseable. Also, five tiles in the second to bottom row in the extreme left and right corners (first five and last five tiles of the second to bottom row) are unuseable. These tiles are covered by the interface HUD, including the minimap and action box. It may wise to address this in some manner depending on the circumstance. For example, in (2)Spinel Valley III (an iCCup map), there is a cliff overseeing an expansion in the top right and bottom left corner. Failing to address this issue results in the top right cliff having an extra tile of space to use. This would allow for example a sieged tank to significantly more safely sit perched on the cliff raining down destruction with its long range. Most of the time I would say this "positional difference" is negligible, that it creates no significant imbalance, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Positional differences lead to positional imbalances, but a positional difference does not necessary cause or lead to an imbalance. A negligible positional difference is one that does not create some sort of imbalance. My policy is that if you can fix a positional difference without hurting anything else, fix it. If it's pretty obvious the difference isn't going to hurt anything and it would be for whatever reason either really hard to fix, or would hurt something else to fix, leave it alone. Just don't be lazy about it. If it could possibly hurt gameplay in any possible way, you should fix it. If you can't fix it because it would hurt something else, but it does create a problem or a potential problem, then that's a sign of poor execution or planning, more on that later.

Positional variety is a phrase(term?) used to describe purposefully created positional differences. This variety could very well lead to imbalances, the point of positional variety is to add some diversity to the map's gameplay and add more strategic elements to the map. (4)Python 1.3 has positional variety in its layout, in how two mains are close by air and far from the opposite main by air. (4)Iron Curtain has positional variety in how the map could be land-based or island-based depending on positions. (4)Fantasy's whole concept is focused on the idea of positional variety.


Positional Variety to the max

It's very hard to create a perfectly proportionately mirrored rotationally symmetrical map, but almost necessary to do so in a four player map. You may find yourself "needing" to get rid of some space somehow to ensure good mirroring. While I would say this is a sign of laziness or poor execution, odds are you're not aiming to make the next OSL map, and it would be more work than it's worth to perfect it. Things like main base space are the easiest ways to have different but acceptable values, so long as both mains have enough space, and the starting location is the same distance from the nat in both mains. The sizes of smaller areas, such as most expansions, aren't as flexible. Shrinking or enlarging a smaller area, because it's a relative larger amount of space compared to the size of the body is almost inherently creating a positional imbalance. Also, don't mess with distances. You want equal distances always and everywhere. You can test distances as a measure of time or as a measure of tiles, both ways should work.

Measuring actually is a very important tool, even with all of scmdraft's power. For three player maps and four player maps not x, y, and x/y symmetrical, you have to have a sense of size and distance to make things remotely equal or equivalent. Simply measuring and adjusting can do wonders here. I usually count by placing mass pylons to fill an area. Pylon are 2 tiles tall by 2 tiles wide, squares. Being small and square-shaped, pylons are ideal for measuring as they can fit into all areas atleast 2 tiles wide/tall (and no building can fit in a 1 tile wide/tall area, so that space is largely irrelevant). They save you the time of counting tiles since you can easily place rows of pylons down and either count the pylons, or note the difference in existing units belonging to whichever player you have selected. If you measure two areas and they have the same or close (with mains +/- 4 is probably as different as you want to go if you can help it) number of pylons filling them, they are probably acceptable, all things else acceptable.


76, 77, 78... what's that Mom? Alright. Seventy...uh... FUCK.

I wanted to put these in two different sections, but I found myself unable to seperate the two, though they are seperate at times. Good space management tends to stem from good planning, and good planning is basically good space management. Space management is the key to mapping as far as I'm concerned. It's about efficiently using all the space available in a map in a useful manner. This is related to sizes, distances, and shapes.

The key here is to avoid "wasting" space. Now, I want to make a distinction between "using" space and "filling" space. You should be "using" as much of the space as you can, and "filling" none of it. "Filling" space is looking at your map, seeing a blank spot on the map, and putting something there, often an expansion, just because you don't want to waste space. While avoiding wasting space is obviously good, putting some bit of terrain or some expansion there is not a good use of that space. Odds are, your expo layout is already made and fits your concept relatively well. Adding another expansion then to fill space has messed up your expo layout. Odds are, this expo is too close to some other expo, has no strategic value, or is excess money in your map. You don't want to saturate your map with money. It's not good for maintaining stable gameplay. Money saturation tends to make players play really boringly and turtly. You want players to have to move around, but you don't want everything too far apart as well. These considerations are all things you must make when designing your map's concept.


Little bit of wasted space.

If you have a void spot where you just for some reason haven't used the space, first look around it. Maybe you can increase the size of a nearby area. Maybe you cut space for one area to make sure something else would fit, and it turned out it fit with extra space leftover. While this is a pain, go back and enlarge the first area, and redo the next area(s) until you've used all the space. It definitely isn't always this simple, and the work involved can be ridiculous, but it's much better than wasting space. Wasting space is often an implication of a poorly or inadequetely planned concept, or some failure in implementing the concept, in the map's execution. I'm telling you, you need to use all the map's space. If you can't do that, something is very wrong with your concept. One general constant with space management is that you should never make a two player 128x128 map. It will be inherently bad. You will either waste a lot of space, or your expo layout will be too spacious, too spread out. The best (2)128x128 maps are (2)Hwarangdo and (2)Monty Hall SE. (2)Hwarangdo was bad, and (2)Monty Hall SE was too weird for anyone to like. That it was 128x128 probably did help accentuate the drop-based aspects of the semi-island map's concept, but that's not to say it did the gameplay a favour. Also, four player maps with x and y symmetry will usually waste space. The best maps like this are (4)Andromeda and (4)Troy. Both have semi-island tendacies, as islands and/or semi-island expansions make up an easy way to use otherwise unuseable space. Both feature very large centers. (4)Andromeda's center is a gigantic wasteland. They tightened it by filling space, by adding a near-unuseable expansion.

This leads to planning your map. Learning how to properly plan your maps can save a lot of headaches of having to remake aspects of your map. First think about your overall concept. More on concept later, but you must think of a general concept. This concept could focus around some experimental or unique feature, or some combination of features. Maybe you just have a certain expo layout in mind and you want to make a map using it. Either way, your "concept" has several components you must consider. First, what's your "main concept", the real idea behind the map, the thing you're focusing the map around. Then think of an expo layout, and the overall structure of the map. Where are the mains? Where are the nats? How are the mains or nats shaped? Where will the main pathing run through? How about secondary pathing? Can you fit a full expo layout into this map? Have you made sure your main and secondary pathing all makes sense? Do you have a blend and balance of more open and more tight areas? Do players ever feel cramped or stuck in a wasteland in any area? This stuff is all stuff you do in your head, write down in notepad, sketch on paper, draw in ms paint, whatever. The real planning has yet to come.


I hope Starparty doesn't mind me using this image, this is a basic plan for map he made for the Teamliquid 2v2 tournament.

Open up scmdraft, go to Options -> Grid -> Custom. The grid I use is 0x0 initial offset and 512x512 static (make sure to click enable on the left). This grid creates 8 boxes by 8 boxes on a 128x128 map. You can use a different grid, but this is what I prefer. Then, open your favourite non-ms-paint image program (photoshop works really well) and recreate that grid of 8x8 equal squares or whatever. I'd say first experiment a bit in making a main and possibly a nat as well in scmdraft and testing it in sc to make sure it feels comfortable. Figure out how much space it uses up relative to your grid, and draw it in your image editor. I like photoshop because I can do everything in one corner, copy and rotate it for every corner. This way I can perfectly mirror my plan. Fill all the space in your drawing. The best mapper I know, Testbug, does all of this with pencil and paper. His drawings are amazing, really precise, and he thinks in terms of scmdraft, that is all his spaces on paper are perfectly proportionate to how much space everything will actually take up. That's why I suggest going back and forth between scmdraft and your paper/image editor to make sure the stuff you're drawing is realistic.


This is exactly what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, this plan happens to suck. Note the complete lack of idea on what to do with the center.

Once you've got your map basically completely planned out on paper or in your image editor, making the map comes down to just copying your plan, making changes when necessary. Maybe you'll find your plan had too small mains, or too large mains, and you'll have to fix that and find a way to allocate space appropriately. If you find you're having a hard time using all of your space, finding you're wasting too much by filling it with cliff or something (for example behind some expansion to prevent it from being tanked from behind), or find you can't fit everything you want/need to, go back and rework your plan. Your plan on paper or in the image editor is probably easier to edit than your map itself is. Once you finish your map completely, go do something else. Wait a day or so, then go back and look hard at your map (you also can go post it at broodwarmaps.net to get feedback to help this process). Just look at the map, and/or a picture of your map (File -> Save Image, then open the very large bitmap in a program like photofiltre and resize it to 768x768, and save it as a jpg; you can also use for example the program Irfan View (free download, as is photofiltre) to brighten the map picture making it easier to see).


This is how that map turned out. Note how not following the plan exactly lead to disastrous failures in space management, the lack of an idea for the center in the plan resulted in... a lack of an idea for the center in the real map. This map didn't make it to a beta version.

Theorycraft on how the map will play out, how you'd play if you could test it right now (even if you can test it in a real game, it might be a waste to do so at this point). Look at every area and try to see if you can see anything wrong with the map. Find all sorts of little and big issues you can, and start writing them down in notepad or something. Start thinking about how you would fix them, and if those fixes would mess something up. If you have an issue that fixing would create another issue and fixing that issue would cause another issue, it's probably less work to start the map over from scratch (or if applicable an earlier version) instead of fixing every issue bit by bit. That usually creates a mess. Don't be lazy. Mapping is hard and takes a lot of time, you don't have to do it all at once though.

At this point you should open the map up in starcraft and play vs a comp, and just get a feel for the bases, test the mining if you haven't already done so, and just start building a base and moving armies around. Kill the comp except for one building if you need to. Note any and all "issues" or "uncomfortable" or "awkward" areas. Anything "awkward" about the map is probably a real issue you can fix. Your "finished" map is like that "rough draft" your teacher in middle school made you write. And you wondered why she wouldn't just accept your paper as it was because it was "final" as far as you were concerned. Well, this is your beta map. It is by no means a finished product, unless you are incredibly gifted, skilled, talented, and fucking lucky. Odds are very low that your map will not benefit from being remade from scratch using your beta as a model. Just like going over that "rough draft" some time after finishing it, you'll be able to analyze your work with the scrutiny almost of another person. It's hard to judge your own work, especially after you just finished putting so much time and work into your project. Give it some time, but not so much time that you become disinterested, and then go over the map again and I guarantee you'll be able to find problems with your map. Some of them will be really silly easily fixable things.

After you've heavily edited or remade your map (remaking takes a lot less time, but if you planned well-enough you might not have to remake your map, or it will atleast take less time to do so), it's time to really start testing the map. Find a friend, post the map on teamliquid.net and ask for some help testing the map. Start figuring out what's wrong with the map from an in-game perspective, and start editing again. It's unlikely you'll have to remake the map at this point if you paid close enough attention after the first draft, and tested the map for comfort. It's possible though that you'll find you need to remake it. Do it though, you'll be far more proud of your third version of the map than of your testedly flawed second draft. What's the point of wasting so much time on something that you can obviously see is flawed when you are capable of putting very little time relative to the total time into fixing it?

So I talked about concept in the space management section, but what exactly is a concept? The concept is basically the idea behind the map. It's more than just a layout, or a feature, or collection of features, or the execution of all those features in relation to eachother. A map's concept is basically the combined collective assortment of all features and how they interact with eachother. This includes aspects of the layout, but often the layout is just the simplest way to execute the concept in a way that works best. One of the big problems I see in newer mappers is that they do have some sort of concept in mind, and then spend their whole map compensating for their concept. I find that the best map is a map that has a strong concept, and the whole map accentuates the concept. You should be able to pick up a map and say "this is the concept". For maps which seemingly don't have a concept, more basic, often "standard" maps, you could call its concept "the standard concept", though I would say that the map's concept most of the time still deviates from the "standard" in some way or another. "Standard" doesn't really exist anyway, it's a theoretical model to think after.

It's definitely possible to have a bad concept, but a map with a bad concept could still end up better than a map with a good concept if the bad concept map is executed better. While a map's concept is important, the execution, the space management, is more important. It's more important to have a comfortable map that players can just pick up and play than a map with a great concept, if the map is awkward and uncomfortable. However, a map with a more interesting concept with the same level of execution is likely much better.

In building your concept, there are a number of different features you have at your arsenal. Employing these features helps you refine and balance your concept. Your concept may inherently include some of these features, or you may just find them useful, a complement to your concept. Inverted ramps and large ramps are pretty common now, but I would still classify them as being "features". Both inverted ramps and large ramps are easy to use, just copy/paste existing ones, tile edit them if you need, or if you need a slightly different sized ramp (or bridge) just figure out which tiles they repeat and construct it through copy/pasting smaller parts together or through just tile editing. The obvious advantage of inverted ramps is for positional balance, and larger ramps allow for more diverse terrain without disrupting pathing at all. Default sized ramps work great as small, defensible, main chokes, but they're hard to move maxed armies through. So if your main pathing leads through some area where the altitude changes (from high to low or low to high) and you don't expect players to use some alternate path instead (maybe a path that leads through their expansion that you expect them to rally to), you should use larger ramps. How big a ramp should you use? Depends on how mobile you want that choke to be. The more useful as a path and less as a choke you want it, the larger you make it, and vice versa for the opposite. Bridges are much more selectively useful than generally so, but they basically work the same way, favouring a more choke-oriented approach. I would say there are few uses for tile-engineered bridges these days however.

Another common feature is the neutral building/unit. You can place any building or unit in the game as a neutral unit as a unit-sprite belonging to player 12, as explained above. There are a variety of useful uses for neutrals. Neutrals always form some block of sorts, a block you can't create or can't easily create with terrain alone. Usually the block in question is one that you want the players to be able to remove. There is one exception to this. The khaydarin crystal (protoss special building, as seen in (4)Othello), does not in fact have 10,000 hp, it is simply invincible. You are unable to attack it. One use for this crystal formation is that it is prettier than null tiles, and can be used to cover null tiles when you're using them. Null tiles as explained above can be used to completely block off paths that shouldn't exist but do due to the nature of how starcraft places isometric terrain, and how the different terrain types interact. In (4)Othello, this crystal is used to create a tight path, and using this crystal rather than some terrain/tile method is simply faster.

One of the best ways to use neutral buildings is to temporarily close off a choke (partially), such as the psi disruptor in (4)Othello. It tightens (4)Othello's nat choke, making protoss fast expand builds vs zerg more viable by making them easier to pull off using a wall of sorts than it would have been without the neutral. It's useful to use a neutral for this instead of terrain, because (4)Othello's nat choke would otherwise be cumbersomely tight later in the game. As such, a low hp building was chosen so that players can fairly quickly remove it if they wish. Neutrals are a great feature in maps because they add more choices to players, and how they wish to interact with the map. Making a more interactive map with a simple method like this creates all sorts of potential for making for more interesting gameplay. Overdoing it can be detrimental by annoying players though. Neutrals can also be used to create semi-islands, by blocking the normally land-accessible choke/entrance to the expansion. You can vary the hp of the building by picking whichever building has the corresponding correct amount of hp for your wishes, and by stacking buildings. Of course stacking neutrals effects hp a little differently than simply using a higher hp building since splash damage will kill it faster. This makes stacked buildings very durable walls early in the game, and relatively flimsy later on. You can use any building as a neutral, but most mappers use "special buildings" rather than "buildings" so as to not leave potential to confuse players (you could use a gateway, but then every player playing vs protoss might freak out when they see the gateway, whereas in a melee game you'll never see some create a xel naga temple).

There are some useful ways to use neutral units as well. Ground units which are always invisible (mines, dts) can be used to block expansions without detection. In (4)Arkanoid neutral buildings are used to block expansions, and units can be used in the same manner. Invisible units have the added bonus of... being invisible, to provide a different mechanic, to effect balance and gameplay a little differently. You can even block a whole choke off with a wall of dts if you wanted. This brings me to another point: you have to consider how your features effect not only gameplay, but balance. Zerg obviously is going to benefit from some use of dt walls, or mined expansions since zerg starts out with detection. Some features more or less effect all three races the same way, others are more race-selective. I won't get into which features you should use if you want to help which race as if you think about it it should be fairly straight-forward, and I wouldn't necessarily rely on using features to balance the map. Features are more for making a map comfortable or more interesting, to complement and accentuate the map's concept. Note that neutrals will almost always block pathing to some extent if you aren't careful, so be careful.


Flothefreak's (4)Mirage II used neutral mines to delay the taking of the natural in this island map to favour zerg

A more recent use of neutral units is the egg wall, seen in (3)Plasma. In (3)Plasma the egg wall was used in conjunction with two mineral blocks on either side making the wall accessible for workers but not any other land unit. The egg walls are most interesting in that they have a relatively high armour value (10), making them sturdier walls vs weaker units, making them last longer. These work very well at making a map, expansion, or area/path semi-island. The minerals are optional, but you can abuse shift + mine + move to go through them anyway.

Then there's the mineral block. Mineral walls can be used in different ways, but all function to temporarily block off chokes. The classical use of a mineral wall was literally a row of say, four minerals of 32 value or so, and the players were expected to mine them out with their scvs, a feat nearly impossible if the mineral wall was too far from an expansion or main/nat, and annoying even if the mineral wall was near a resource building. Then there was the use of an expansion's mineral formation as a mineral wall, and this was much easier for players to adapt to. With both ways, depending on the formation of the mineral block, it was possible to hop over the minerals using stacked workers, building a pylon, using mines, unburrowing units underneath other units, etc. These semi-blocks were very interesting, most notably used in (4)Requiem. The relatively new and far superior method for using mineral blocks is to stack 0-value mineral blocks on top of eachother. This could easily be used as a wall, but so far has been used only with a single stack blocking some choke ((2)Destination, (2)Heartbreak Ridge. In (3)Medusa these stacked 0-value minerals were used for a different purpose, to be used to hop over a neutral block, making it useful to mine out the minerals near your own mineral only path neutral block to prevent your opponent from using them against you. The advantage of these walls is that a miner doesn't have to leave the mineral block to take resources back to a resource building, which can save huge amounts of time, and prevent you from getting confused and accidentally putting what appears to be a retarded/rogue/buggy miner back on normal mining. Another advantage, is that you can mine as many blocks as there are all at once, whereas you can only mine one block of a classic mineral block at a time since there's only one (in one place). One worker will do the job perfectly, but five workers will get the work done faster if you can afford it. This gives players more choice in the matter and all-over makes mineral blocks far more viable and versatile.

The tight path has been semi-popularized as a way to make two player maps work: forcing players to use the whole map and creating less linear pathing and less direct main pathing without disrupting early scouting. You've seen it in (2)Bluestorm1.2, (2)Peaks of Baekdu2.4, (2)Loki II, and with a version using a sprite instead of pure terrain in (4)Othello. The tight path is a path which only small units can traverse, medium and large units think they can, but can't, and will get stuck trying to pass through. If a tight path is part of the main pathing, you'll need to manually move your units and/or rally in such a way that bypasses the tight path. You can create a tight path really easily with a cliff edge and a sprite (and testing), or using pure terrain. You can create this simply by making a terrain "bridge" of sorts out of one or two isometric squares. Odds are this won't inherently be a tight path unless you get lucky, and you'll likely have to tile edit picking tiles which "stick out" more.


Peaks of Baekdu's tight path.

(4)Troy featured a ridiculous concept that I can't possibly leave out. The "Troy Gate" for lack of any better name, is a "gate" of sorts created by placing two neutral assimilators at some exact position relative to eachother (see the map itself for this placement, or the many maps which mimicked it). The gate relies on the fact that the plain geyser's tiles stick out farther than does that of the assimilator, that a geyser is wider. Destroying one assimilator (I believe this works with an extractor or refinery as well) thus tightens the "gate", making it a standard tight path. Destroying the other assimilator makes a gap so small only ghosts can pass through (they can walk through walls, right?). They either have unbuild-on-able tiles under the neutrals so that you can't rebuild the assimilators, or have positioned the sprites off the tile grid (I'm not sure which, potentially both work). That aspect is optional, if you wanted a gate you could re-open then by all means leave them build-on-able (you probably want to make them depleted). This is a great mechanic for making semi-island bases by placing a troy gate on all chokes leading to a base. Alternatively, this could be used anywhere else to potentially block some choke or area.

A far less often used feature are the use of neutral spells in maps. The only two spells which work this way are Disruption Web, and Dark Swarm. These neutrals are permamently placed versions of these spells, which as normal effect all players. You place these through unit-sprites just as you do with normal neutrals; they're under unit sprites -> neutral -> protoss and zerg respectively. As a quick reminder, ground units under disruption webs cannot attack, and workers and ranged units (excluding reavers) will always miss (not including the effects of splash) units under dark swarms. The implication of having these two spells available includes a massive list of diverse effects. It's hard to list them all, because for one there are so many, and two they haven't been fully explored. To be honest, these spells are rather extreme as far as features go and as such have limited practical uses. Dark Swarms can be practically used isolated in open areas to make players have more to worry about strategically in their maneuvering and unit positioning (such as in (4)Persona), and in rows to make some path safe from ranged attacks. You cannot stack spells, it will crash the game. You cannot place a spell partially on a cliff edge or some non-walk-on-able terrain or doodad tile, it will crash the game. You cannot place a spell partially outside of the map (by placing it on a map edge), it will crash the game. Disruption webs can be used for practical purposes in isolation by "blocking" a single choke or an open (or less practically, a tight non choke area), allowing players to micro more to attempt to force their opponents to go under a disruption web momentarily giving them an advantage, and forcing players to micro more to avoid stepping into a disruption web during battle. (6)DMZ used mass amounts of disruption webs to create as the name suggest, a demilitarized zone (for ground units). This could be useful in making an island map, or in making a semi-island map more island-like. Disruption webs in too high volume can actually lag your cpu, so be careful if using mass disruption webs. Mass dark swarms can potentially have the same effect. As such, it's more practical (and subtle) to use isolated single spells or spells in very few number. Mass anything is not too terribly elegant anyway.
You can find more postulation and experimentation on the use of spells in maps here:
http://www.panschk.de/mappage/newsscript/viewarticle.php?newsid=30

While perhaps not a feature on its own, I thought it would be pertinent to mention island maps. While not really ever popular, island maps were atleast far more common in the past. In both the korean proleagues and in wcg. Island maps are infamous for being annoying to play, in that you have to play so radically differently, and for being surprisingly imbalanced relatively. The infamous (4)Gorky Island proved to be a disastrously terran favouring map. Key to winning that map was to be terran or have a terran ally. That aside however, island maps have a lot of potential to be the most unique and interesting maps from a mapping perspective, it's a shame that there's such a stigma on them from a gaming perspective. The standard main/nat layout is crucial to modern gameplay, but is a huge limitation on how you can use the space of a map. Not only that, but there's arguable a lot more diversity in how you can setup an island map, while the gameplay doesn't change too greatly from change to change. Perhaps though that's part of why island maps feel so stale despite radical differences between them.

There are two large subcategories for island maps: pure island and semi-island. A pure island map is like Dire Straights, where air units and/or drops are necessary for the entire game. A semi-island map is one where you can choose to continue using air and drop exclusively or transition into more land-based play. There's more diversity in how to make a semi-island map, with plenty of diversity in air maps period. One of the more famous semi-island maps was (4)Estrella, where only the main bases were on islands and the rest was a land map. This left plenty of room for both island and land based play, leaving the option open for players whether to pursue islandish play or to go to land-based play as soon as possible. More recently there's (2)Monty Hall and (3)Plasma, which use features listed above to create semi-island maps, with more of an emphasis on land-based play. Less recently was (4)Arkanoid, which used mass neutrals to create a macro-heavy semi-island map, with again more of an emphasis on land-based play, but plenty of room for island-based play, especially as players could be perfectly dependent on their starting "island", as it gave 3gas over 3bases, removing the need to pick island or land based play in order to expand.

A map people probably don't consider an island map at all is (4)Andromeda. This map is a land map with a degree of semi-island to it, rather than being a semi-island map with a heavy degree of land-based elements. Andromeda features a main/nat system which gives that key-to-macro-play three bases through its mineral only expansion within the main. It has two neutral islands players can compete for or for one player to take both of. Furthermore, the chokes are so tight to the lowground neutral gas expansions that they can be walled off easily making them semi-island expansions. If a player decides to play the map island-like, he can quite viably obtain 5gas and 6base from his main, nat, mineral only, both islands, and one semi-island through island-based tactics, and abuse the elements of the map which favour air and drop based play (the expo layout being spread out on the edges of the map) and win on the traditionally considered fully land map through island tactics.

Island maps semi-island to some degree tend to be better than pure air maps. Just the transition to making drops viable is a huge leap in adding diversity, and then making drops not only viable but necessary further adds to the gameplay. Making air-based, drop-based, and land-based gameplay all viable in the same map is the best way to make an island map in that it offers players the most options and making gameplay very diverse.

That's pretty much the key to any map concept: giving players choice, a variety of options, to make for non-static gameplay that can't quickly get stale. Of course it's perfectly viable to make a concept vastly encouraging one particular style of gameplay, but even then leaving open options and the element of player choice is still important to some degree. Your aim is to make an interesting map, not to remake a map everyone already plays, but you must cater to the players to some degree else there's no point in making the map no one will play.

Decorating your map is in some ways not at all important, and in others very important. Simply, good decoration shows an eye for detail. If you are inclined to skip decoration or decorate your map poorly, odds are high you're inclined to skip a lot of important details in your map. Simply the act of going over every aspect of your map to decorate it can be a great way to check if for any problems in your map. Decoration is the last part of making your beta map, your rough draft. My feelings are that you should decorate the map as if it were finished anyway. Being lazy is never good, only easy.

The first step in decorating your map is to make sure all of your edges are attractive. This usually means getting rid of straight edges. You should've done this already or atleast addressed it as you were creating your map in the first place, but it's possible you could have overlooked something. This goes back to the section on shapes. Next, start placing terrain. Basically, anywhere you have room to place another type of terrain that won't change your edges or the buildability of the terrain at all, you should do it. For example in jungle terrain, if you have an area made of dirt terrain, and it's large enough that placing jungle and/or mud terrain. Just filling a block of dirt with a block of jungle though while it is a step up still doesn't look good. It tends to look better to have splotches of terrain intermixed, fractal-esque looking patterns etc. Exactly how to decorate a map is very style driven, so it wouldn't even be useful to explain exactly what patterns I use, since you can make just as good a map with a different approach.

The key really is to just avoid any areas that look "blank" or "bland". Just as in spacemanagement though, you don't want to just "fill" space. If you need an area to be unbuildable and you've chosen to use rocky terrain, see if you can replace it with ruins terrain. Ruins and jungle both look a lot prettier than dirt and rocky terrain, especially in contrast to dirt and rocky terrain. With snow terrain, and this may sound funny, but try to avoid as much snow terrain as you can as it's really bright and can hurt your eyes easily in game. For desert, crags in small amount are build-on-able, but in larger amounts use unbuildable tiles. In areas you want to use crags but need it to be buildable, either replace the unbuildable tiles with buildonable tiles which look good, or just be careful when placing crags. If you select a building or mineral to place scmdraft will darken all areas you can't build on, making it easy for you to see when unbuildable tiles are being used.




Notice the difference in brightness?

After you're satisfied with the terrain decoration (and you'll probably find areas you want to work more on later), it's time to move on to doodad decoration. Especially here is there a lot of room for style differences. I prefer to use lots of doodads, and in conjunction with eachother. In Jungle, if there's a plant doodad, there's probably another plant doodad next to it. If there's an area where I placed a lot of plant doodads, time to put a skeleton, or the weird fungus looking thing that comes before plants in dirt doodads. Promaps tend to be pretty skimpy on the doodads. They also leave in ugly tiles that don't mesh (e.g. Longinus II), so I wouldn't take that for the "ultimate decoration style". I go through every terrain type I used, and if it's possible to place a doodad for that terrain, I do. As this is style based I can't suggest what you should do either way.



After you've placed as many doodads as you feel inclined to place, there's one other way to spice up your map. I've seen this done mostly in Jungle terrain. Tile editing. With tile editing you can place for example rocky terrain on the edges of cliffs and such, where it won't effect gameplay, and it just uses terrain you probably otherwise would have left blank dirt. Tile editing can also create custom doodads by piecing together different doodad parts which happen to look "good" together, usually only with like-doodads (plants with plants, bones with bones, etc). You can place parts of doodads in places where you can't fit a whole doodad if it doesn't look bad. I don't use this a whole lot, except for practical purposes, such as filling in spots I'm concerned could function as tank holes with doodad pieces and such. Or you can do (4)Zodiac's approach, and place random tiles that look terrible to fill it in. Especially in bases, I mostly use doodads you can walk-on and build-on. Doodads you can't build on but can walk on are more rare (I think only in broodwar terrains?). Most doodads are relatively large (4 tiles or larger) and block pathing (you can't walk on them), and are often better placed on the edges of cliffs, on the sides of the map, out of the way. In more open areas it's fairly safe to place obstructing doodads sparingly in media res, but they can annoy players, so be careful. Decoration at the expense of gameplay is silly, but you are trying to make a fairly "natural" looking world.



Decoration is the last touch to your map to make it both more attractive, and as a last-minute review of your map. Making your map look good is perhaps unnecessary, but really makes your map look better to everyone. I think you're much more able to feel proud about your map if it looks like you put in as much detail as you possibly can.

So now that your map is decorated, there are a couple things you should do. First, go to Scenario -> Map Description, and write in some poem or background on the map's name or something like that in the description. Put "map by (your name)" or something to credit yourself. "Map is gosu thanks to Nightmarjoo's epic Mapping Guide", whatever. Change "Untitled Scenario" to your map name (you have figured out a map name by now right?). In the bottom, change the race of the players you're using (1-4 in a 4 player map) to "user select". Make sure all eight players are "human", and not "inactive".


Um I don't ever leave in the player count in my map name in the description, I typed it here by reflex.


Now, go to Scenario -> Forces, name Force 1 "Players" and Force 2 "Observers" (spelling is important). For Players uncheck "Allied" and "Share Vision", for Observers uncheck "Randomize Start Location" and "Enable Allied Victory". Drag the players you aren't using (5-8 in a 4 player map) into Observers. Now, go to Triggers -> Trigger Editor. Select everything and delete it. Paste in the following exactly as it is:
+ Show Spoiler +

Now, click on the thing with the check mark and the box and it'll give you some error thing, just click ok, and close the trigger editor window. Save your map. Now, place the starting locations you aren't using for players somewhere in the middle of the map, or whereever. "Save as" your map and name it ending in (o) or (Ob) or something like that so you know it's an observer version. You can do the next step in your observer version of the map or your regular one, doesn't matter, go to File -> Save Image, and save the image. Resize it so that its largest dimension is 768 (in a 128x128 map make it 768 pixels x 768) (Scmdraft saves a HUGE bitmap, little more than 4000x4000, at 16 megabytes, ridiculous). Save the image as a jpg for further size compression, and delete the bitmap. Optionally, you can use some image editor such as Irfan View to brighten the colours of the map in a way that looks good and makes the map easier to see from the picture. Your map is now complete, until you decide to edit/remake it several times to perfect it.

One thing I ommitted was a section on triggers other than observer triggers, maybe triggers which show player resources, anti-hack triggers, triggers which display text, etc. I don't know everything there is about triggers, as a melee mapper I've never focused on triggers at all. There are a couple options you have for using other triggers if you don't know how to. The easiest, open up a map that has triggers you want to copy, and copy them and paste into your map. Or if you feel bold, you can go to Triggers -> Classic Map Triggers and attempt to use the interface to make your triggers. It should be fairly self explanatory, if you need help with it Staredit.net is a good place to go triggers help, with Broodwarmaps.net being a viable secondary choice (broodwarmaps.net focuses on melee mapping, not trigger editing, but there are still people there who know about triggers and may be able to help).

Vac's map. Let's call this #1.


Knightofni's map. #2


Neobowman's map Greth. #3


Spinel Valley 3.1 by Testbug. #4

#1 is a (2)128x128. It attempts to make this work by using complex combinations of neutrals. This can be very annoying to players, and generally implies the map wouldn't work without complex corrections, substitutions, and in general means too weird a layout or concept was used, as far as I can see. The map tries its best to use all the space, but 1. the mains are much too large, a waste of space, and here and there you can find fairly useless pieces of the map. The expo layout is of course far too spread apart, an inherent flaw with the map size. The distances are very weird, partially effected by the map's size, and partially effected by the use of neutrals and map's very strange expo layout. The mineral formations could be better.

#2 is a hybrid island-land map with a very strange main. The main works because the map starts out islandy. The outer ring of the main seems quite useless however except as a place to drop units if players decide to play the map like an island, which they most likely won't. The area is much too large to defend, has no expansions except near chokes from the inner area (and those expansions are very poor min onlys, they might as well not exist). It's not needed for general building space. The thing in the center dividing the two players uses a lot more space than needed, and in general signifies a complete lack of ideas on what to do with this space, showing a severe lack in map design.
It's very important to plan a concept and layout which uses all of the map's space effectively and efficiently. Often this means warping your concept around a proper layout instead of the other way around. I find mappers often attempt the latter, which of course results in a poor map. Good concepts are usually flexible enough to have room for modification, some fluidity. A good map requires a good layout, good use of the map's space, and a good concept. A good concept is something interesting, be it merely a unique layout, or some facet of the gameplay, and something that perfectly complements the map's execution, its layout and structure.
The first gas expansion in the "main land", the bottom half of the map is absolutely necessary, but the space given to it is simply too great. The chokes are just too far from it. I don't even think it needs additional chokes, just the neutral blocked one. The corner expansions also have too much space in the exact same manner. Then there are those neutral xel nagas. Then there are gas expos too close to eachother at the very bottom, and an almost unuseable double gas expansion near the top. By this point I'm completely lost as to what the point of anything is in the map. It appears to me to just be "filling space" instead of using it. The middle is an uninteresting wasteland.

Interesting Wasteland.


This map.

I should like to say that #2 is superior to #1 layout/space-wise simply by not being 128x128.

#3 Ok now we're getting somewhere. This map has fairly efficient use of space. Most importantly, basically all the space is used for something. That alone is a really good start. However, this map still isn't perfect (just talking about the layout, not addressing balance or gameplay in the least bit). The mains are oddly shaped, and the sl is placed too far back in the main imo. The mains also I think are too large. The nats are too small. They're just not spacious enough. Maybe he can transfer some space from the mains to the nats or something. The nats are missing ovy spots. Pretty bad mistake, this is an elementary feature all maps should have. Of course, I see no viable way to create an ovy spot by this point, reflecting poor planning. Furthermore, the center island expansions are way too small and way too vulnerable. They're basically unuseable, and yet represent 40% the map's gas, and 1/6th the map's minerals. That's a huge percent of useless resources. Also, this is ~16% of the center used up uselessly. That's ~12% of the map's total space "wasted". That's bad =/
Creating an ovy spot could be possible by subtracting a significant portion of of the mains and adding it to the nat's allocated space, and morphing an ovy spot out of that while also attempting to fix the nat's size/space problem as well. However, this could cramp the mains. It's possible to fix this by altering the layout of the mains and the sls. However, it might be that it's not possible to do this without messing up the 3rd gas expansions, which essentially is the heart of the map's concept. Thus if this is the case, the map's concept is getting in the way of the map's layout. That's bad. Luckily I think these fixes are possible without disturbing the 3rd gas expansions (or much atleast), but I can't know for sure. At any rate, I'm confident the main will feel awkward to some extent. It just, doesn't look pretty. You'd be surprised what "not looking pretty" implies or indicates. It's like, looking at a retarded kid and you know he's actually mentally retarded because he looks weird. You can't explain why he looks weird, but he just looks unhealthy somehow, distorted or something. That's what these mains look like to me. Note that, a retarded kid's body is functional, and these mains even with edits should be functional, just not optimal.
Um also if the island expos weren't useless, I should want them to be the same distance from the 3rd gas expos vertically and horizontally, which from the picture atleast to me they appear to not be. They also should the same distance from eachother horizontally and vertically. If one condition is fulfillable but not the other, it implies poor positional balance across the map somewhere.
Taking a gander at balance for a bit, the lack of an ovy spot, the ease of terrans to build correctly placed turrets, the lack of any real tight areas aside from the main ramps (essentially the utter lack of tact or strategy in the map's battleground(s)), and the long distance from the zerg's nat to a safe gas expansion (the mains only, in this map. In a case where zerg would must rely on using lurkers preplaced on a ramp to defend himself, the 3rd gas expos are utterly inadequete by the ramps being easily climbable (the lurkers being too small to guard a too large gate), and by the geyser itself being easily killed outside of lurker range), this map appears quite t>z.
So basically, we have here a map which for the most part fully uses the map's space, but whose poor layout design/planning result in "used space" to be unuseable and thus wasted, and whose concept and further aspects of the layout get in the way of gameplay and balance. This map is better than the first two in that it does use the space fairly well, but still far from being perfect. I would say this map is both not good and not well-made, though perhaps it is close to being one or both.
Hm a last minute suggestion to the author, I might see what effect rotating the map so that the geysers of the 3rd gas expansions are at 12/6/3/9 has. I think that forming a square with the island expansions being points of that square is detrimental to the map. I think that a priority should be to find a way to increase the islands' space so that they are not tankable in any manner (tanks should not be able to hit the minerals or building itself). I think rotating the map as I have stated might possibly be a mechanism to facilitate this change. One obvious side effect of implementing this is that it will greatly tighten the map. You would want to remove the temple stuff in very center. I think moving the islands appropriately along with clearing the very center will make it adequetely open enough. The map will be tighter, but ideally there will still be enough room to move around simply due to the multitude of paths present for players to weave through.

#4. Please ignore the compound by the center gas expo, it's there in a new series of edits I entirely disagree with.
Otherwise, this map is really nice. It's (2)128x96. Thus it's already superior to #1. It uses all of the map's space, so it's superior to #2. The only tiny bit of wasted space is perhaps the tar between the corner gas expo and the nat. The area behind the nat cliff I've seen used to proxy tech, so it isn't useless, and thus it isn't wasted. And, the tar stuff imo is really the best way to use that space as it correctly filters pathing optimally. So you could argue it's not even wasted. If it is wasted, then it's a very small percent of wasted space. As close to perfect as you can get, imo.
The expo layout is well thought-out, has appropriate distances, sizes, and proportions. The shapes are good. The mineral formations are good. There are varieties in the map's battlefield(s), tighter areas, more open areas, areas on highground and on lowground, buildable and unbuildable areas. The map has series of chokepoints players can fall back to without the map being too defensible or turtley in the least bit. A variety and multitude of useable and viable paths ensures both comfortable playability and variety within the gameplay. The map gives players a lot of options. The map's concept is more in its structure and layout than in any single feature, and is well-thought out. Visually, the map is beautiful in game and in the picture. Just, everything about the map except those compound walls by the center expos looks really good. The map is as positionally balanced as is possible in sc. The map has both "owned" and arguably "neutral" expansions, key to an interesting expo layout in (2)maps.
Simply put, this map is very well-made, and good. I don't know how the map's balance is, but the gameplay alone is quite solid, the space is very well used, the concept is well-thought out and is successful. The map has a unique layout without compromising gameplay: players have a wide range of strategical options, the battlefield is interesting without being complex. Everything about the map is comfortable. Just, the map is good lol. You can play a slightly older version (without the ugly compound walls in the center!) on iccup.
The map is superior to #3 in that the map's layout and structure are better executed, signs of better planning, and the concept has very little potential to hurt gameplay in any manner. The map is less likely to be imbalanced as well, imo.

As a mapper, I really love (4)Othello 1.1. From a mapping perspective, it's incredible. This map's expo layout is basically perfect. The spacing is great and it works perfectly with the map's concept. The concept itself is to make a standard map with a huge emphasis on harass. As such, every base except for the mains are cliffable, creating a very high overall harass potential. The size of the 3rd gas cliff seperates the paths long enough to further strengthen ground-based harass. The close proximity of the 3rd gas encourages players to quickly take their 3rd gas, and its position relative to the nat is such that players are encouraged to rally to it. The result of this, is that the 3rd gas almost acts as more of a nat than the nat itself in some respects. If you consider the 3rd gas to be a nat, you have a cliffable nat with three large paths to defend with no chokes. You could never get away with that on a real nat, it's brilliant.

The cliffs take up a lot of room, so for the expos to be perfectly distanced apart with the mains being just big enough for use through the whole game is just incredible. The starting locations are placed such that it isn't necessary to waste any space behind them to protect them from tanks, and the mineral formations are able then to face the openness of the map further building on that harass supporting element. This also results in the main2nat distance being shorter than on even Python, further encouraging a macro oriented opening. As macro oriented builds are favoured, the potential for 1base or harass oriented openings to do damage is greatly increased, since those type of builds semi-counter heavily macro oriented builds.

As far as features go, the map uses two applications of neutrals. The neutral in the nat makes the nat work as well as opening up what would otherwise be a rather tight nat. This further supports the macro and harass oriented concept. The neutral in the main creates a tight path to the nat cliff, essentially making it a semi-island but still ground-accessible cliff for the duration of the game. This is a great way to make the cliff useful while alleviating the effects of the nat being so cliffable.

All that stuff I just mentioned, and not only do they have enough room for a large middle, the middle is too large, requiring the center cliff thing to further orient pathing in a twisted sort of fashion. The cliff can be potentially useful, so that and the fact that it's necessary to accentuate the map's pathing makes it not a waste of space. The only waste of space at all in the map are the areas between the water and the min only, but this space can be useful too, so it's not a complete waste. The water itself is necessary so tanks can't hit the nat from behind the nat, they have to use the nat cliff. This is necessary for the cliff to be the size it is and for the nat formation to be the distance it is from the nat cliff. Essentially, you have 100% space used usefully. This map is fucking good. The only complaint I could have about the map is that pathing from the main sometimes runs into the miners in the nat which is awkward and annoying. This is not however terribly detrimental to gameplay. Oh, one more complaint actually. The minerals suck balls for zerg. I don't know if that's intentional, but it's really annoying for zergs.

(4)Shakras is a map made by Testbug and Crackling at broodwarmaps.net. The map won Map of the Month in December 2007. I picked this map because it's pretty good, but not quite as good as Othello. To start off, I would say the map's concept is to arrange a standard map with a side oriented expo layout but with a central focus at the same time. Rush Hour III has a side oriented expo layout, but it's also side-oriented. This map's expo layout is not bad, but the expansions are a little too close in my opinion, though it does fit the concept very well. It's probably better to stick to the concept than to just make a perfectly spaced expo layout. The money being so easy to get however definitely leaves potential for gameplay to be boring and static.

There's some obvious positional differences going on, possibly you can write it off as "positional variety" though. The concept is well executed. The easy free money means the only way you're going to move for a while is towards your opponent and/or your opponent's expansions. Since the expo layout is side oriented, that would naturally suggest side oriented main pathing (except for corner vs corner positions). However, he shrinks the side paths by creating the large central highground plateau, which then also partially cliffs the pathing leading along the sides. This forces players to use the central plateau as main pathing despite normal pathing not wanting to. This then also creates sort of a king of the hill aspect of gameplay, where central control is important. It's not crucial though, leaving many options open for gamers whether they're losing or winning, and that's important. It's boring to completely support the winning player with your map.

The space management here is pretty good. There's a little bit of wasted space where there's water, and I can't justify it at all, but it is a fairly low percentage of map space, so it's passable for sure. The mains are decently sized, a tad on the large side I believe, though. The starting locations could be placed a little better and/or the mains could be shaped a little better. As such, the main2nat distance is a little longer than probably ought to be. Also, a little too much space is allocated to the nats imo, though it is all used well. The nats are a little too open however, making pvz FE a little awkward. Overall though the map is pretty good from a mapping perspective. I'm not going into balance at all here, it's relatively unimportant for what we're looking at.

Here's a map everyone and their mothers are familiar with. As such it's a good map to analyze, since everyone knows it already from a gaming perspective. Now let's look at your favourite old school macro map.

First thing that jumps out as me is some crazy positional differences, and some clear positional imbalances. First of all, every main has the gas issue, and has it pretty bad. Secondly, the minerals don't mine all the same. If I remember correctly, top left has both the slowest minerals and the slowest geyser. Alt qq if you get that spot in an iccup game. The nats are all shaped and even oriented differently, it's pretty silly. The mains are, as well. Part of that comes from a lack of inverted ramps, part of it is just weird old school mapping neglect to positional balance. The distances from main2nat are all different as well.

A LOT of space is wasted here, it's ridiculous. All of the water on the outside of map, along the map edges, is wasted space. A little bit of water would be understandable, behind the nats to prevent tanking, but this is ridiculous. The awkward and poorly placed mains and nats probably contribute to the wasted space to a certain degree. The mains are too large and spacious, inefficiently so. The center is actually relatively small and tight by today's standards. This is likely not due to effort, but due to the wasted space. If space was allocated better, the center could be larger.

The expo layout is decent for the map's concept. Even if it only consists of one poor six-block mineral only aside from the mains and nats, that is. These 3rd bases are all relatively neutral, slightly favouring perhaps one player over the other. This may be intentional, it may not; hard to tell. The bridges are excellent though. They add some useful positional variety, increasing the defensibility of the mineral onlys as well as increasing the strategic element of the map in general. The concept is pretty bland, the only thing I get out of the map is that it's a basic macro map which favours turtling. There's just, not a lot going on in this map. As such it's prone to relatively stale and static gameplay. Luna is definitely not a bad map, but it's not the greatest map ever made by any means.