Of course this map needs to be played in a simulator, besides all the new maps should be playable in simulation
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Nice post! Brought up some stuff I hadn’t thought of like city names not being on the map. There are tons of nice towns in the valleys, would be cool to see them displayed better.
The ‘flat areas’ are definitely not as bad as they look on the minimap in my opinion, in game they blend in with the colours and don’t stand out that much. Aside from maybe 2 of them, they wouldn’t be noticeable for anyone who didn’t know they were there. They could also be used as ground battle locations. dynaf airfields does somewhat conform to the ground, but they still need relatively flat ground below them to work, can’t just put them anywhere
Anyways I really think this map would be a breath of fresh air and it has by far the most potential out of all the large Operation maps. We already have ~15 flat maps in EC, only 1 with proper mountains and ~2-3 with decent terrain. From a gameplay perspective I think it’s perfect and gives much needed variety.
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BTW
i have recorded some videos of my one hour journey to end of map
additional(unused) space is like 30-40km, for synai and only downwards
pookie
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That is a good point about the flat areas actually, I hadn’t thought of it that way. But it seems to me that much of the conflict should center around the flat area in the middle that follows the valley. Since the other areas are impassible for tanks (and most other vehicles to be honest) the fighting would take place around the valley center and/or the towns in it.
Using the picture from my other post, I made this.
- Red lines would be the main axis of advance that would likely be repeated every game, due to the constricting terrain.
- Yellow is terrain that is, realistically, impassable to ground vehicles. Mostly the mountain peaks.
- Orange to Andorra la Vella is like a “side objective” that doesn’t really follow the main axis of advance, however it is important because that city is the capital of Andorra.
- Purple are minor axis of advance that are mostly along very tight canyons/valleys, and so those would probably be limited to a few vehicles or like road convoys.
- The small bits of blue are marking off tunnels that the roads take under the mountains.
It skirts the southern border of Andorra but does go through the Spanish exclave I previously mentioned.
But, since in game some of the areas are taken up by “airfield terrain” that is built into the map, there can’t really be “cities” (towns really) there because of the flat ground.
But, the flat ground like you mentioned would be good for static ground battles, however that is kind of the reason I marked the “axis of advance,” which is where any ground battles should be focused. In my opinion, that area is already flat enough for ground vehicles, such that the other flattened areas probably don’t need to be there.
Honestly more than anything the random flat areas where there should be stuff just bothers me lol
Additionally, I think a map like this can get away with like 2-3 bases per side instead of 6. They might have to face east/west to not mess with terrain too much. Anyone who is trying to get to the bases needs to go over the mountains, where radar will pick them up; or through the valley, where other people are going to be flying.
There could also be static AA emplacements on the top of the mountains that flash when firing at an enemy that tries to pass by; but they should have incredibly low accuracy. If you’ve played Ace Combat 4, the mission Northern Eye is kind of the vibe I’m going with for these emplacements.
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Wasn’t it advertised as going to be an EC map in its Dev Blog?
Yep, I’ve heard that convoys replenish and drive to ground battles, but I’ve almost never seen it happen so I’m not sure if it’s a requirement since convoys can also spawn without any ground battle present.
I’m actually working on making a custom mission for Pyrenees and have spent a ton of time flying around looking for good base spots, and scouting out road-bases. I think there’s 2 large ‘main’ areas where ground battles could spawn, with roads passing through.
These marked in the red circle/triangle
Those 3-4 valleys on the left are super scenic and definitely wide enough (one of them is located by that castle picture in my original post)
I love your idea of having a battle in Andorra la Vella
Yeah sure, bases don’t need as much flat terrain, and can likely fit in a lot of the valleys around the map like Afghanistan, but there’s plenty of good spots near the center too
I love this! This is actually how I plan on using AA for my custom mission
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Rereading this, I meant bases as in airbases. Like runways, not the bomb targets.
Due to the terrain difficulty I think that fewer airbases would be better for this map.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a ‘reworked’ Pyreness map in Air Sim Battles with everything added in. +1
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Pyrenees is too sexy of a map to not get put in sim 😤😤
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+1. We need new, bigger maps. Also bumpy, cover rich maps.
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I´ve been an advocate to bring this to SB ever since it got added, it would really be nice addition (even an upgrade imo) both visually and gameplay wise for 10.0+ and even below that with some tweaks!
Huge thumbs up!
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This is exactly why they wont add it
someone shame this man
Pretty sure I know who it is lol
squishy would neverrr
You can make votes public so everyone can see who votes no on objectively good ideas. 99% of the time the people who vote no don’t raise any actual arguments against something, much less a good argument, and tend to do so because it would either directly or indirectly harm their fav nation/vehicle, or just don’t like the poster and as such wanna spoil anything they do/suggest no matter what.
Kind like throwing themselves under the bus to make sure someone they don’t like also gets hit, which is embarrassing and childish.
Late reply, but, as far as I can tell it is a limit with the engine. I watched the “custom map” tutorial for the cdk and tried to “make” one to verify it lol.
The engine currently uses a pixel heightmap image as basis for maps with information about topography baked in with (basically imperceptibly) different shades of black. The heightmap has to be a 2048x2048px image. It uses cell size (meters) * resolution (constant 2048) which = the size of the location (also meters). So a 128x128km map has a cell size of ~62.5m, meaning between every “point” the game uses to calculate elevation, there is 62.5m of space.
But, since the game can only use a 2048x2048px image to determine this, any larger and the spaces between points will get too big. For example, a suggestion of mine,
was approximately ~555x~740km. But since the game can’t do maps that aren’t perfect squares because of the way the imaging works, to fit the whole thing it would need to be ~740x~740km. Dividing 740,000(m)/2048 (resolution) means that there has to be a cell size of approximately 363m. I did try to render that just for fun and the editor crashed, lol, so I think it might be out of the question for now.
I think the current limit for map rendering/creation using the current engine would probably be about 100m/cell, giving a map of 204.8x204.8km. But even then it would be stretching it, and the map would probably look really jank.
So unless they figure out how to either up the resolution, fit more data into a smaller picture, or reconfigure the engine, these maps are probably as big as we’re going to get.
I do hope they do something about it though, DCS sized maps for EC would be awesome.
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Yes please. This map has been in the game for ages and has interesting terrain. Why not include it in sim?
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Make the biggest map possible. Pleas!