Making startboxes dependent on the number of players in the game is something I've done sometimes; I'm not aware of any other mapmakers making a habit of it, and I haven't done it in every map either.
On some maps it feels like cramming a large number of players into a small startbox kind of forces a lot of players to take Recon chassis to spread out and expand quickly, rather than each player having a mex or two to start near.
quote:
What makes this map so good is that there is no static frontline that always forms in the same place.
There are choices where to expand, and how much to defend. |
I do not think that you would achieve this property in most maps simply by shrinking the startboxes. Inculta's heightmap, metalmap and dimensions do very little defining where the front line should be.
The current version of Fallendell expands its startboxes from just near the river to the entire east and west sides of the map with more players. However, I feel that if the startbox did not expand that in a large team game people would just rush the three-mex clusters anyway and so it would not make much difference.
(Fallendell is primarily designed for 1v1 and small teams, in which case the direction you choose to expand at the start is a meaningful decision; in a team game you can just expand solidly in every direction at once.)
To take another example the startboxes of Aurelian expand a bit, but that is largely so that everybody who wants to place a fairly bulky ship factory can do so without causing gridlock.
In terms of adaptive
metal I only remember doing this in two cases:
- To ensure in a large teams game that the starting metal for each team is reasonable, without giving too much metal near the start position in a 1v1
- The middle of Rogues River has two supermex in FFA and large teams to make it a place worth fighting over; I did not desire that to happen in 1v1/small teams and so the supermex are not present in that case.
Are there any maps that
aren't mine that make much use of this?
