Hey everyone,

If the devs are reading this, this mod blew my mind when I found it. Especially since there were weapons that reminded me of weapons (Grand Slam - "earthquake bomb" and Tremor AGAS - "Gatling Artillery") I dreamed up as a kid. I'm glad to have got to play this mod. Especially since it made a recent tough time much better.

Onto business, I've wondered why the guidelines for custom maps say "Has to meet the ROTR style supply placement. (1 supply warehouse / base area, docks and crates outside)". When I make custom skirmish/PvE maps (for personal use) I tend to have one supply dock/base and put warehouses outside the bases. I didn't know about the fact player bases should have supply warehouses.

Is it just for PvP sake that players are meant to get supply warehouses instead of supply docks? For skirmish purposes having a dock with lots of supplies seems better, especially if you like to turtle like I do. Turtling helps in skirmish when the AI swarms you along a few main, predictable attack paths. You have a reliable source of income for a while and so if you can't secure the supplies outside your base you still have a decent chance of surviving.

For PvP I can see turtling maybe being less viable and also you probably want to encourage players to go out there and seize critical map areas. I guess for PvP if players were meant to stay in their corners and harvest a huge pile of supplies there may as well just be a single map with no tech buildings or supplies outside the bases.

But that being said, for skirmish I think the big supply dock is fine. It makes it fun (for me at least) but maybe there is some subtle thing about RotR gameplay that I've been missing out on.

I was ready to share some maps I made for fun and then that rule about supplies made me stop dead in my tracks. I was curious as to what bad design decision I'd made with my maps.

Remind me, where are these "rules" you speak of?

I have my own guideline/rules for making maps and I don't think this is ever one of them, generally however what ROTR suffers is defender advantage mixed with slow combat/movement.
That leads to games drowning into periods of "quiet" where just waiting in your base, building up your eco and your stealth detection+T2 AA is better, especially if your a slow faction with the best artillery, Imagine if that faction also had a way to recover the husks of dead artillery and reuse them.

Sooo large supplies are to again, help the game keep going.Most ROTR maps dont have enough supplies, like the game revolves around people having 2 supplys to collect (Thats why fallen empire sucks hard, some factions can handle being on 1 supply fine while others get crippled to a halt)

Anything more then 2 is above average, that being said.
Should I write a thread/share my idea about map making? If your interested atleast.

The pinned topic "Approved maps guide" by XAttus has the supply rule I'm talking about.

I can't speak for PvP but in PvE I think defender advantage is always going to be strong whenever you can rapidly get fresh troops to the point that needs to be defended (e.g. put a war factory or barracks by the point you are defending). Also when you can repair/heal your defenders between attacks that would make you harder to get rid of.

When I break (AI) defenses I do it with overwhelming force e.g. 36 Shock Troopers + 10 Sentinels with Warden Missiles (all with full upgrades). I am quite sure most of my tactics would not work on humans. No human would let me get as far as the AI lets me get. But for me that's fine, because I don't plan to use those tactics on people.

I'd like to see what your ideas of map making are. You probably have much more thorough guidelines than me. Most of my map designs are all about trying out a "gimmick" e.g. putting oil derricks next to the supply depots. I usually just make some kind of "Take the Middle Or Die" scenario which is more fun with the AI because they drop what they are doing to take the middle back from you.

All my maps are based on a template where there is one dock per base and four supply warehouses to fight over. If players play 2v2 each side ends up with a supply depot to share. So I guess that's an "above average" number of supply depots?

Those guidelines are just if you want your maps to appear in one of the pinned "approved map threads" in the custom map forum. It's not a requirement that all custom ROTR maps have to follow if custom maps needed to follow guidelines that'd defeat the purpose of having custom maps. If you don't care about your map being part of the "cool kids' table", then there should be no problems sharing your maps as they are.

The only thing you actually "need" to do is name your thread properly as detailed here

I will answer you in a very technical matter why this rule is important and it's all due to how the AI is scripted to build their base expansions.

So how the AI build their supply centers :

The first one is to the nearest Dock with at least 25k - First minute

The second is to the nearest Dock with at least 50k - Fifth Minute

The third is to the nearest dock with at least 20k - Tenth minute

The fourth is to the nearest dock with at least 10k - Fifteenth Minute.


Suppose there is a 2v2 map and you are playing with an ally bot against 2 bots. Guess what will happen if you had a 60k dock at your base? , The AI will tend to want to take yours and not the one at their expansion, which can be rather frustrating.

On the other hand, if you place warehouses on the expansions , then that will mean that the AI will delay their expansion until the tenth minute which is kind of late

Expansion timings can be tricky, especially with the new 60k set up as it needs a rather tight timing on when the AI build their expansions near to what good "Minimum supplies" left in the dock otherwise they will either go haywire , spamming multiple supply centers on the same dock , or being annoying and trying to take yours ( which still happens....but at a lot lesser rate).

This doesn't stop you from making whatever supply placement you want. Just bare in mind there might be some derps here and there if you really care.

Of course, if you choose your custom map can also have a custom AI included in it. Just edit the relevant bits or create one from scratch. Just don't expect support for it, as it's not something that is very easy to get into nor is it easy to debug.

Well I guess my maps will have to stay away from the cool-kids table until I find the willpower to replay ~20 maps with the "proper" resource setup.

Thank you for that explanation Mizo. It helped me understand why the AI randomly started taking resources from my supply depots when I went up to medium (called "hard" in game) difficulty. I thought it was the AI being greedy and going for as many "protected by allies" resources as possible. Obviously I didn't think to compare my maps to ROTR maps to see what the AI did.

Ultimately I don't think this "resource grabbing" behavior is much of a problem, but perhaps there is an "IKEA Effect" in play which biases me to ignore the AI's greed for my supply depot just because it's my map.