Map ideas based on interesting start boxes.

we need more maps with interesting start boxes.

Small Supreme Battlefield V2 and Skulduggery 1.6 are the only maps that I can think of that has more then 1 starting location.

Think were Colorado_v1, with an additional start boxes for the East player on the hills on the west side of the map. In this case it would be a forward start location that is easily defendable; however, it is harder for your team to support.

An interesting map idea would be where one team can start in NE and SW, while the other team can start NW and SE. The team splits their players between their 2 starting corners and expand outward. Each corner would need to be self contained, as directly supporting the other corner would be hard to do. as they expand, one team will gain control of the center and combine their areas, while the other team can attack them from both sides.

Maybe a long narrow map where both players start close together on the S corners, forcing northward expansion for both teams. Add some layered terrain barriers such as sea and mountains to slow down the northward expansions even more. This would probably encourage early air to expand northward, as only they could build on the land on the other side for the sea, encouraging more air battles with no land/sea support, until they are able to expand up. Controlling the sea to prevent northward expansion would become vital, though I would make the north sea far enough away to discourage plopping a ship factory. Lots of interesting strategies to push north and slow your opponents from pushing north.

My experience is that maps with weird start boxes (Skulduggery, Valiant Saltscape, etc) are typically not broadly liked. In the case of Valiant Saltscape it is explicitly disliked by many people because of its non-standard start boxes.

I don't think it is impossible to make a good and popular map with "interesting start boxes", but I think it probably requires subtlety. An unsubtle thing like "put a startbox on the other team's side of the map", as Skulduggery used to be, typically just leads to quick and unfun games mostly decided by blind rock-paper-scissors start position choices.

quote: Maybe a long narrow map where both players start close together on the S corners, forcing northward expansion for both teams.

I feel that this is likely to result in a lot of cheese games and the north end of the map going largely uncontested. Rogues River when close start positions were enabled was a bit like this.

quote: An interesting map idea would be where one team can start in NE and SW, while the other team can start NW and SE.

This seems more promising to me.

An alternative would be to add a teleporter between the two allied corners; this would make the idea viable for 1v1 as well. I am pretty sure that this can be done by copying some Djinn technology into the map itself without needing a separate mod.

quote: 1) Maybe on randomly generated maps the startboxes could be somewhat random?

I think that making weird startboxes work well for a map requires conscious map design around those startboxes. It may be possible to modify the random map generators to employ the required principles, but I would not just slap non-conventional startboxes on the current randomly generated maps and expect to get a good result.

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A related idea is to introduce some randomness to the start positions. I have made a few maps which employ this (in particular Rogues River and Faultline). Not sure that is quite what you are looking for though.

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quote: 2) Isn't there a way now that we can get actual circular maps? I don't think we have any yet though.

This technology exists. With a bit of mapmaking effort I believe an elliptical map (and presumably other convex shapes) are also achievable (as in, this requires no further changes to ZK itself). I have a couple of sketches for 1v1/small teams maps using this feature but nothing I have found the enthusiasm to turn into an actual working map yet.

Prestige, Desert Rumble, Jurassic Sands and Mechadansonia all suffer from placement RPS to varying degrees due to the triple starting spot options. It feels most prominent on prestige 2v2/3v3 - I've had a memorable game that was lost just because of the placement of factories and not which factories were picked.

However, Mechadansonia is the only map of the 3 where the startboxes intersect with level geometry in a way that allows for interesting plops (hovers in the river from the ledge, boats around the back?, spiders/gs up on the platform, gs/amph/hover on the pond. Using Mech as a case study for starting box gimmicks might be a good place for a mapper to begin in this regard.