Featured Map Review: Tournament Desert 4
Our goal for CNCLabs is to move past judging a map with a simple PASS or FAIL grade but to work through the map problems with the author so they not only understand the problem but also would know how to fix it. By sharing this information through this forum and the Maps Staff Journal, we aim to help the community as whole produce higher-quality maps.

Getting a map setup correctly can be hard enough for a new mapper. With all the elevation tools, texture colors, trees and props, many choices have been made during a maps creation. If you add in the complication of setting up the map for skirmish with all the areas and pathways you know there has been a commitment of time and effort put into this map.

I'm sure you've heard the phrase that a building should be built on a solid foundation. This same idea applies to map making. It can be extremely frustrating to spend hours, sometimes weeks creating a map only to find out that you’ve made your map or your bases to small. This was the case with this map. In keeping with our ideal of teaching and working through the problem with the mapper, we went through the process of correcting the problem before making our recommendations.

We communicated on several occasions after sending out the initial map review and worked together on getting the final map you now see in our download section. A whole new texture theme was used and many trees were added to a resized map with all areas fixed. The name of the map was even changed to "Stuck in the middle with you". Get the map here.

The lesson learned by this review is to measure off your base areas before working on all the details. Start your map on a solid foundation. Any comments about the map or the review are welcome.

Thank you for your feedback on the map and the review.

Supplies
I've always felt that the USA player has an advantage when it comes to collecting supplies because to the terrain issue. With that being said, on this map I look at these players as having an equal advantage at this single supply location. Maps are not required to have more then one supply location within their base. I may be wrong, but I've never seen an AI player build a second supply center when the docks are this close together. Even if extra room were made available where an intended supply center might go, the AI would probably build their supply defensive turret there. So I treated this as a single supply location with extra supplies.

Supplies can be collected and the Supply Center can be "built" on any side of the dock, so as far as collecting, I don't see any abnormal advantage in this case. Also, I've never seen the AI player split its collectors efficiently and work both docks at once as a human player might do. So even with a second dock within inches of the next, each collector will wait and take its turn as always and work the supply dock closest to the supply center until it's empty then move to the next.

Map Review
First understand that his map is not changed and I'm modifying a copy of the map so I can take screenshots and illustrate my points and show different ways problems can be fixed. As with this map, if I just said, "Bases are too small and so they would need to be fixed before we can accept your map.", they might not even put in the effort to fix the map or submit another map to us again. However, if I show them, step by step how to fix a problem (like resizing the map), they may move forward and do these changes. Plus, if it's something they didn't know how to do, well then I've taught them something.

The point of the first review is to show the mapper what the issues are and ways they can fix the problem. The author can edit their map as they wish and send me their revised copy at any phase during its remake if they would like something checked out. Many maps go through several changes before becoming the final copy that's added to the download section. I get emails like, "Can you look at these pathways and see if I did them correctly?" This is exactly what we want. The first review should open the door and let the mapper know that they can contact us and we'll do our best to help them get their map fixed and added to our site. In most cases, the second map by this author will have no problems as they learned a little something by the first review and the on-going process of refinement that goes on afterwards.

By Contrast, the map review used to be a simple statement that said, "Your map doesn't meet our requirements". If you were lucky, the reviewer might list the reasons why. I think we've come along way.