Not anything crazy or me complaining about anything, I’m just curious what is the community’s opinion on the maps. (Well I guess partially complaining but not really) but overall I feel like the maps have become a bit old (when I say this I’m talking about air but, I’m always open for Ground and Naval!) I feel like nothing new is really here I understand they probably aren’t the most important but surely (for Air Battles at least) it isn’t the most difficult thing ever. I understand if they’re is some sort of challenge to making them but I wish there was at least something new to the map rotation. Overall the maps are okay they feel bland but it’d make sense if they’re supposed to be not because they actually are (personally I love Sinai) I just feel maybe we could get something new? If there are any new maps and I just didn’t know, tell me so then I can enjoy the intricacies, trees and occasional building of them!
Other maps?!? I wouldn’t know about any other maps, the match maker keeps giving me the same map and mode over, and over, and over…
poland (winter), poland (winter), poland (winter), poland (winter), poland, cargo port
-Gaijin matchmaker
Garbage. All of them. Complete garbage.
Their FANTASTIC map designers put borders on old, good maps and design new corridor maps that only benefit the brainlets that can only hold W and left click.
I think that alot of them are garbage and poorly designed, but the community is also unable to give proper feedback for potential fixes that the maps need. See the comment above mine for an example.
I think where alot of maps fail is cap placement, spawn placement, and density relative to the size of the map.
First is cap placement. There should not be any cap that is in an open area, and there should not be any cap that can’t be attacked from all sides without funnelling players into a corridor along the far side.
Maps that does this poorly are Sun city, Seversk and Attica. All of those maps have caps placed along the borders of the map, and they don’t allow for multiple angles of attack. If you want to flank a cap on those, you either have to go up through the middle of the map, or go along a singular corridor at the edge.
Maps that do this well are Advance to the Rhine and Mozdok. They both have caps that can be attacked from numerous angles, and they offer plenty of flanking opportunities.
Second is spawn placement. Maps that suffer from this are any map with just one spawn, Poland/Winter Poland, and the large version of Ardennes. These maps have open spawn placements, which leads to plenty of spawncamping and exceptionally poor gameplay. Single spawn point maps should also be removed, since only having one spawn decreases variety and increases spawncamping.
Third is density. This is more complex, but Gaijin is really bad at making maps that are physically larger. Sun city and Attica both show issues with this, because they are both physically large maps, but they offer way less gameplay compared to smaller ones like Rhine or Sweden.
Couldn’t explain it better
Air maps:
Air RB -
Maps themselves are fine, and even size is often okay.
Problem is objective design, not map design:
All objectives are clustered in 3 or 4 gridsquares in the center of the map, with airfields in a column above and below theese objectives.
What this means is CAS and bombers fly to the middle, people hunting CAS and bombers fly to the middle as well and a massive furball develops that dilutes individual contribution and causes serious snowballing that prevents longer-term approaches such as simple climbing to effective altitude or energy traps from happening or at least severely limits them.
Due to the serious snowball problem in ARB, you could be having a thrilling energy/dogfight with a cool opponent and then you make them stall out and slam them, open the leaderboard and see it’s now 2vs8 or so.
Solution is fairly self-evident:
Spread the 4 bases across the whole width of the map to spread out bombers, and make multiple small ground battle frontlines evenly spread across the map in say, thirds.
Finally, introduce 3 rear airfields by side and forcibly split the 16 players into 3 groups of 4 + the 4 airspawn bombers.
The result would be matches taking longer to hit snowball tresholds due to critical player masses being more spread out and fighting more intimate, entertaining fights using the entirety of the map rather than a 16x16/32x32 square in the middle of a 64x64 or even 128x128 map.
Demonstration of the column effect:
Spoiler
This is a 128x128 km wide and tall map. A gridsquare is 16x16 km. Where does the action occur? Within E-F and 4-6. Look at all the map that is wasted!
Now, let’s look at ASB with an equally large (128x128) map. Observe how widespread the objectives are:
Spoiler
Even on small sim maps (64x64 km), player density per unit grid is far smaller:
Spoiler
(i need to get new screenshots. These are getting deepfried each time I copy them from an older thread lol)
Air SB
I mostly fly propeller planes and up-to early vietnam era jets (ergo: WVR combat, mostly subsonic, mostly guns or weak short-range missiles), and the maps themselves are satisfying in a strictly map sense. I wish for more pacific maps beyond Moresby, but that’s just flavour.
Issue in ASB is again objective design:
- Convoy objectives have laser-accurate anti-air WHILE MOVING OVER ROUGH TERRAIN in WW2 vehicles capable of hitting planes 2-3 km out while engaging in evasive action.
- A.I Bombers’ speed is coded as “Gridsquare for unit time” leading to supersonic A.I bombers in subsonic jet BRs if you say, go to vietnam or rocky canyon making them impossible to catch with the likes of me 262, horten, f2h-2, f80, f84 and similar aircraft. Sabres can barely catch them after redlining the airframe for far too long and even that’s a toss up.
- “Air superiority” objectives do not respect the BR for travel times, leading to them expiring before the enemy can arrive and contest it on 128x128 maps.
- Air superiority objectives expire while contested, discouraging people from contesting them if they were on the far side of the map and victory wasn’t assured
- Aircraft carriers behave in irrational ways and will disappear into the corner of the map making them useless as a forward airfield.
- On some maps, certain objectives only seem to spawn for either redfor or bluefor. I’ve had a 2 hour Ruhr game and hadn’t seen a single bluefor bomber objective to kill as redfor
- On Denmark, a.i bombers bug out over naval targets near jylland and get stuck looping permanently giving bluefor free kills without having to intercept
- A.I defence fighters tend to crash on runways and cause it to SHAKE like crazy. You spawn in and you’re vibrating like in some funky 80s lowrider on steroids.
- On some maps, ground battles refuse to spawn under certain conditions that I’m yet to pin down. Smolensk has had long periods without any ground battles spawning as an example.
Ground
RB
My biggest issue with GRB spawns is the railroading and tunneling of players into shooting galleries and lack of options to use a hull-down tank with a long-reload, tanks without reverse speed and armour (or a open top casemate) as they were intended to be used doctrinally. Everything must face the enemy head-on and win based on whose gun is bigger and who has faster FPS reflexes rather than positioning, patience and teamwork.
For me in Air SIM. I’m disappointed by the total lack of new maps in the last 2.5 years and they are way too small past about 11.0.
Fair. But even so, why should I bother since my voice, and by the same effect, everyone else’s, is just not heard like, ever. Like, why try?
Ground and naval map design is just awful.
I feel like because of some console players and low budget pc owners are crying, gaijin decided to make smaller sized maps and of course made sure theres no good sniping spots. I said crying because they are still crying when they spawn in poland with 500m size. Air rb mostly doesn’t matter, there was a problem with the fog but they fixed it recently.
For ground:
If I had an option to play only 2-3 maps (Advance to the Rhine, Poland, “Old” Eastern Europe), then I would play only them. Might be a hot take, but every other map is unplayable garbage (except Sands of Sinai and North Holland), that were designed for the most passive gameplay and spawncamping.
For naval:
The same as for ground, but with awful spawn points. You basically can shoot as soon as you spawned in.
Don’t blame console players for something Gaijin did.
I problem with the maps is they are more like a list of tourist destinations rather than battle sites.I mean for GRB
They lack any kind of feeling or immersion.Holland is joke.Sweden just looks like a pretty village with a few sand bangs dotted about.
Japan looks like something from a samurai movie.
The maps should fit the general era of the vehicles using them or they should at least be made to be non era specific in design.
If Gaijin spent more time on the game play and less time trying to run a casino then things might look better in the game.
I play on X box x and have no maps banned or any map dislike,I play them all. I never asked for all the trees and sniping spots to be wiped clean.
The maps are garbage. Literal festering pile.
Air
I don’t play Air much. But my issue is when maps are just covered in fog down to ground level. Like okay you can avoid hills and such, it’s possible but it’s still an overall negative to the gameplay.
Naval
We really need to adjust maps that have only a single spawn for larger ships, in the middle of the water with no cover. Put at least a mountain in front of the spawn or put some close to spawn so I have somewhere to go when shells start flying. It’s especially bad in uptiers for example when facing Light/Heavy Cruisers with 6+ inch guns with only 4-5 inch guns in your destroyer, with no armor to boot. You’re basically screwed before you even spawn.
Ground
Delete Vietnam, Seversk, and Advance to the Rhine (the latter from high tier, at low tier it’s okay).
