Advance Wars by Web Games

[Cheater Hater]

3v3 Specialist Strike:
This is interesting, and I like how each team has separate roles (assuming it's left vs right)--I'm worried the teams not on the mainland won't do much though.

Expanded Confluence:
Way too big, way too much going on. It also looks kinda ugly

Towers of Midnight:
This map is weird, and I'm not sure how much I want to use a weird map for something attempting to be a matchup of skill.

Clean Swipe:
Interesting map, though I don't like the fact that only two teams get an airport--land-only battles don't seem the best, though I haven't played a high-level one.

River Valley:
I like this one--the lab imbalance is more interesting, as is the accessibility of early airports (while not denying them to everyone). The ports seem near-useless though

[Bobchillingworth]

Actually, hm, I had instinctively assumed River Valley was supposed to be OS, PC & TG vs. BM, RF & CI (A,B,B,B,A,A) but I suppose it could also work as a L v. R match (A,B,A,B,A,B). That certainly would make the ports more useful.

[Xmo5]

My personal vote would be on clean swipe, but if you're interested, I just published a new 3v3 map because I was disappointed at the overall selection in that category. It's called Symbiosis.

Edit: Please keep in mind that this map was just published and could have symmetry errors etc.

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah, I like yours as well. Slight preference for River Valley though as I lean more towards a map with a larger scale, but would be perfectly happy playing on either.

[Xmo5]

Be careful, because River Valley really isn't as large of a scale as you think. I have similar reasons on the other maps, but what I don't like about River Valley is that:

1) The fronts are kind of small considering the number of units going through them and aren't really connected very well to allow for dynamic gameplay. The pipes especially limit mobility on the front. This is typically more prone to stalemates and paths clogged with too many units to reasonably fit through or fight through.

2) The bases are extremely close to the front, despite all of the available space, meaning there's very little to actually fight over. If you push your opponent back by a handful of spaces, the fight is basically over.

Both of those issues stem from the fact that the map is large on paper, but functionally, it's very small with a lot of wasted space. Compare that to a lot of the league maps and you'll find that competitive play tends to thrive much better when there's more room for give and take and battles are more enjoyable when there's more available front space. This is why I favored Clean Swipe; it actually has a larger, more connected front than River Valley, even with less than 2/3 the total map area, a good bit of which is wasted on water (though I don't care for all the roads in the center and lack of FTA counter, among other things). Just something to think about.

[Xmo5]

Also, I've got two other people who'll play now.

[Fenn]

Your Symbiosis map looks really nice, that or Clean Swipe get my vote. I dunno if Md.Tanks or Rockets will see much play from the Lab players given how close the opposing airport is, and 10 bases+ 2 airports per side feels a little high, but I see those as minor issues.

[Bobchillingworth]

Unless CH objects, I'm all for playing on Symbiosis then. Might as well help out by giving it a test run while we're at it.


Once we've got the map finalized, I (or someone else) will create a team thread for RB, where we'll discuss our preferred settings, CO bans & picks. The AWBW team is of course welcome to make a spoiler thread here as well.

[Xmo5]

Okay sounds good to me.

RE: Lab Units, my thinking with the rockets was that they might be very helpful in overcoming the water boundary there, and those players have a slightly higher income and an extra base to provide meatshielding. The md. tanks were more of an afterthought, but they're admittedly not not as useful here. Also, if we do decide to use this map, we can pick whatever lab units we want, those were just my suggestion. Finally, funding is a bit on the low side, but not detrimentally so (I hope), but that's fairly hard to overcome on a 6 player map while still keeping the size fairly manageable. I would have liked to add a few more cities per side, but it was starting to get fairly property dense.

[Cheater Hater]

No objections from me