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Originally Posted by Pursuivant
What makes a good Dogfight map, then?
My impression is that most of the Dogfight maps are way too small. While they've got interesting tactical setups and, in some cases, interesting terrain, I've notice that a running dogfight will quickly take players far away from the "fun" areas.
Additionally, the fact that the opposing teams' starting airfields are practically (or literally) in sight of each other just invites the sort of realistic behavior that online players hate - strafing and bombing enemy airfields to destroy planes on the ground and attacking planes that are taking off or trying to land.
Ideally, I think that any dogfight map should be about 20 miles/33 km square, with plenty of "interesting" terrain, such as mountains or islands, in between, and with airfields placed so that no team is at a disadvantage.
Boundaries for "protected zones" around airfields - where activities such as strafing, bombing, "vulching" heavily disadvantaged enemies, and "camping" are prohibited - should be clearly marked.
Practically, each team's airfield could automatically be protected by intensive curtains of light and heavy flak, since that was the real and effective way to protect airfields. Also, the risk of getting shot down by ground fire is a lot more obvious and self-enforcing to players who are inclined to break the conventions of online etiquette than being kicked off the server.
Strong flak curtains surrounding each team's airfield would also encourage lots of ground attack missions prior to "capturing" that team's base by landing aircraft or dropping paratroopers on it.
Based on those ideas, I'd like to see versions of the "Net Mountains" map that are much bigger and where the same map is set in different climates, both to provide different air temperatures and as "eye candy" to help immersiveness if the mission is restricted to a certain plane set. For example, the same map textured as jungle, desert, temperate or Arctic terrain.
I'd also like to see variants of the "Net Islands" map (the one with 8 islands around a central island) textured in the same way, but with the perimeter islands set about 10 miles/15 Km from the central island, and about 5 miles/8 km from any other island. The central island could also be turned into a mountain rather than being flat, making the map more interesting.
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Different ideas of what a dogfight map are then I guess. My thinking is along the lines of Dogfight1 or 2 where the zone is a small scale version of other maps. I think those are 90x90km but I'd rather see something a little larger at 120x120km with sets for perhaps generic "Asia dogfight" or "Europe dogfight" or maybe even a "Channel dogfight" type setups.
Some servers will setup the scenarios so there is no more than 10km between bases. Others will go for a larger setup. BF1 missions I design are setup so that time to target is roughly 5 minutes and time between opposing bases is about 10 minutes. Everything is setup roughly in a diamond shape... you typically find the fighters clashing between bases in the center of the diamond and bombers from either time attacking targets on the outside. Conscious decisions have to be made to escort or defend targets that way.
So any map I'd want to see added as a dogfight generic would need to have enough scale to be useful in that way but also have some bases close enough to accommodate the folks who want very quick action.
There's also the Italy online map which is fairly large and detailed but immensely useful.
I'm not sure of the answer here exactly but I am thinking hard about the variables. The problem being that even small maps take a lot of time to create.