I have a sceond judge with his own scores and reviews on the maps, so my posts are not going to indicate the final scores. I will get him to post his and then we will determine an average score based off the two of them.
Closing thoughts.
I'm thinking of banning adaptive maps from this tournament format entirely.
I've asked you to create something around a certain format, and you've given me something different entirely with a cope function to allow what i've asked.
This makes for some of the most gimped ass maps that should not be considered tournament worthy.
Adaptive maps are a cancer upon making content that actually provides a good experience for your users, and you're seeing players revolt from author made maps entirely because of it.
You can check your reclaim counts in the Ozone Editor.
You're not using the GPG one like old man biass, so you should be taking advantage and not giving me maps with hundreds of thousands of reclaim more than any map reasonably should have. If you don't know what is a good amount, check other maps.
Reviews below: (These are not in winning order)
Adaptive Millennium Valley
Aesthetics: 2.8
Fine, but ultimately inconsistent.
The first thing I want to mention is that while most of the ramps have been indicated on the map, a couple outside of the spawns have not. As if they had been forgotten about by the map author entirely.
This also appears evident in the use of props around those areas, as typically tree groups will have part of the group floating in the air when placed on a ramp.
Textures are fine. They're above average for the FAF standard, but the choices used and some of the scaling is off.
Tropical textures like the ones used here are older supcom ones, let call them a 4 in resolution. Later FA textures are considered a 12.
You also didn't use one, but I assume you ran out of ideas on where to place it.
This is pretty common for rather generic themes, so I'm not going to care about it too much.
Decals on this map are what I want to talk about the most here. Starting with that they're not considered enough for the majority of players to know a ramp exists where you place them. This is because many players don't play on the required graphics settings.
This is where I would have used that remaining texture layer.
A network of canals? have been placed through the map and end up at the small bodies of water around the sides. Some bodies of water contain decals around the edges and some do not, presumably because they are not passable.
I would have done something different to the passable bodies instead of leaving them blank because the end result is subpar and inconsistent with the rest of the map.
The aforementioned canals have a second purpose, which is to break up the bodies of trees instead of leaving them in one large blob. This is a positive in my opinion.
The mountains have two differing styles of decals applied to them, which I found strange.
First is the same (two, but in really only:) mountain decal used to cover the entirety of any above water cliff face. This method is a solid "okay" from me. If you were to do it again, I would recommend using a second (third?) decal to break up the repeating patterns that a single decal often creates.
The second is the use of a number of normal decals that bare a striking resemblance to my own methods.
However, they're ineffective without a precise placement of other factors such as your textures, secondary decals to break up patterns (what I spoke of earlier) and a good lighting setup.
I failed to notice them at first, to be honest.
See attached. I changed the lighting on the RIGHT image.
I wonder which method you tried first?
The use of the Aeon decal on the plateau is incredibly weak, and shows me that you were failing to fill in space on what is a plain map. This is why it often helps to incorporate lore elements into your map to provide you a reason to fill the space.
The decal seems out of place and can block your ability to see the mass icon that it sits directly upon, which is very bad.
Gameplay: 2
Badlands is a 4v4 map, and considered by many to have a large amount of reclaim. So much so that in 1v1 games, players typically require a special build order to utilize it. It has 20,117 mass, and 92,095 energy.
The Bermuda Locket is a 20 km map that supports 2v2v2v2 gameplay. It also is a map that requires special build orders to utilize all the mass available. That map has 77,375 mass, and a small 8,390 energy.
This map, that're we are judging for 2v2, has a whopping 72,977 mass, and 151,512 energy. This a major pitfall of submitting an adaptive map that tries to cater to everything, in a tournament for ONLY curated 2v2 maps.
There is far too much reclaim and the entirety of the fighting on this maps will be revolved around it. This might be fine for the first 5 minutes of a game if you like that, but makes the rest of it very weak.
Map control along the mexes in the middle mean you only get +2 mass if you hold it because instead of any expansions for each player, there is only one mex. However if you're first there, you're pocketing over 1400 mass in large rocks.
The rest of the mexes also follow the same pattern of being dispersed at random and are not grouped in any real way. Spamming will be king here, to the detriment of your other options. That's if you don't suicide over the mid mass first.
The plateaus do not add anything to the game, players will just edgebuild them.
Variance: 2.
Same thing, you all in on the midmass and then spam tanks to control isolated mexes and reclaim. You might see a drop on the enemy plateau if one side has reclaimed enough to win air, but any more conservative strategy outside of spamming for 20 minutes is not worth it.
Theme: 4.3
This is the full mark ill give you without any custom props. Any darker of a map overall and I would have penalized you for being too close to winter, though.
To close, It's never going to be worth it to submit adaptive maps to tournaments. Curate your experience for the requirements that have been asked for.