Warpath

Here I thought I didn’t have much to write about, though I’m not exactly happy with the way the game is at the moment, I’m not all that angry about it, either, and then here comes Teatime’s Epicenter rant...

First, the roof, well, someone HAD to put the roof there to begin with, you don’t get a rooftop in a map if the map’s author doesn’t put one in there. Yes, they really do need to fix the ability to shoot into (and out of!) the respawn there, and it’d be nice if it had a cleaner look to the area, but still, the roof didn’t just appear there by itself. If you take into account the lack of conc jumps as well, then it makes sense to not have a ladder there, as you force people to use some life (rocket/pipe/gren jump) to get up there. It’s a good position for defense and offense alike, when used properly. Great for killing sentries and for taking that long jump to the point.
As for the fence and the ability to jump over it, I’ll be the first to admit I’m one of the ones that has no problems repeatedly doing this in pub games, but I must say it’s nearly impossible to do when the map is defended properly (something rarely seen). Quite frankly, I think the biggest mistake people make is trying to defend the map with sentry guns, as a pair of hwguys and a soldier or two can lock it down quite easily (and again, I’ve been known to defend the map as an engineer quite often as well). There are no really good positions for a gun on this map, plus, especially with conc jumps, the engineer’s going to have medics in his face while he’s trying to build if the rest of the defense can’t manage to keep them away. As a conc jumping medic it takes just as long to get to the APC near the enemy base as it does for the defending engineer. That’s why there’s a delay on the flag gates opening, to give the defense some chance of setting up, and a large part of the map’s strategic value (what little there is) comes on the part of the offense that aren’t dedicated to capping the flag, the job of which should be to suppress the defense until the flag capper gets there.

The sad fact of the matter is that, while the map is fairly well balanced, a good flag capper is never going to get a positive score greater than zero on this map. I sometimes wonder how many people out there cap on it simply to hear people whine and complain about having to restart the whole mess all over again. Most of the time this map seems to draw out the people saying ’no caps’ and turns into a deathmatch brawl, and the whole point of the reset is lost on those that have trouble grasping the map’s balances. Personally, I’d just like to see them fix the roof so that the respawn is not open to bombardment (and outside people not open to interior sentry guns mowing them down unseen). As the map currently is, a lone scout cannot break a well placed defense, but can absolutely destroy the standard pub setup in a heartbeat. Scouts can’t get past guns that are set well, nor do they stand a chance against an hwguy, and if you move to medic you need to be sure that your defense is doing better than the enemy’s defense. If you don’t want people jumping the fence, ask a teammate to stand in front of it and shoot people, it’s really not that hard.

As for dustbowl, I think the map’s author should be burned, but cjumping isn’t really a problem anyway, since you’re never going to find a scout or medic that can wrestle the lone gren bag from the sniper. Warpath’s all about the hwguys, engineers, and snipers having a big TFC Arena fragfest at CP 3, and it’s quite rare for a scout or medic to have a chance at hitting the far 2 points anyway, let alone manage the 2 quick conc jumps required to cap the last one before the 2nd to last is available. Besides, good teamwork would mean that you could get to the last one and have your teammate cap the 2nd to last while you’re standing on the thing, instead of going at it alone.

Of course, we could always get a couple of bunnyhopping hwguys in there and really have some fun, all three of these maps are good for that.