i thought this was going to be a song about king of the hill and its quirks

hey arent you the guy who made pro via

hey aren't you the guy from jews did 9-

oh wait you aren't

I just ran through it and it's very compact, which is GREAT! It looks like a lot of fun but as always we won't really know until we playtest it. Hopefully it plays as well as it looks. :D

EDIT: There is a LOT of ammo around the point and I'm not sure how that will effect defending. There are two large, two medium, and two small packs all really close to the point.

i thought this was gonna be a song someone made about koth maps.

I'd take anthem over flake and railbridge anytime. Fubar approves of this map

Here's my attempt at pathing this out: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1811521/awfe2.jpg
(EDIT: Forgot link)

Red is the chokey main route and green is flanks, purple is connections between them (so is orange) and Blue is apparently supposed to be a choke route but it'll rarely be taken save by out of position players. The flanks are too independent from the main route; on viaduct they meet up at least right before the capture point, but here you have to split up your team into watching like three routes or else you risk getting a scout behind you.

- The flanks sprawl and branch in awkward ways, either being too long for the connection they give on the choke and major zones of interest, or being too short and having long connectors off them onto the choke. This has a massive negative impact on push/hold mechanics at low playercounts.

- I know that the cap of the structure is supposed to be of the most interest, but right now the area around it is way more likely to get fought on because of how the map is laid out. It takes too long to get to the point for how diverse the paths around it are, making holding it forward as if it's mid on a 5CP map better than holding behind or even on it.

- With the previous point, the cover and other tactical advantages (eg highground, enclosed area) are all in "boring" areas and ON the capture point. This would be great, but there are no good places (for example) for a demoman to hold and spam onto the point, which are also OFF of the point - The places that seem good for it, are very hard to retreat from without getting easily caught-up-to or pincered; The best holding spot is On Top of the cap point because of a total lack of cover anywhere else. I don't know if this is somehow to try to bandage the problem where.

I see a bunch of potential problems that kind of counteract eachother but from what I know about maps in games with spatial control I don't like the layout of this map one bit. I know that I'm theorycrafting a lot and I'm being more precise than I have any right to be here but I really really really feel like you should scrap some of your flanks and try to shrink or chokepoint most of your larger and more open paths, because you DO have a bunch of nice ideas (and art) here, but that they'll likely be ruined by layout issues.

This map looks really fun to play with the FaN.

I was told this might make a better 5CP mid, but I really don't want to turn it into a 5CP map. At any rate, the longer routes are meant to be ways to flank the point more easily, since as you said it's better to hold it forward.

It doesn't seem like a big deal... the main thing I watch for is engineers. Pickup size is a pretty trivial change though, anything can easily go away or be made smaller.

Giving tons of spongy flanks on a forward holdable map like this will only make it annoying to forward hold and boring to push, because there are no options for pushing in choke and you basically make transition plays on the choke route impossible. I mean, it would be reasonable, but the mechanic flanks have is that they punish teams for not defending them. Making them hard to defend just punishes the defending team /for/ forward holding. Yeah, it might work well at low level play, but once you get coordination involved it ruins the KOTH flipflop because of the terrain around your point. It's like you're going for two kinds of a map at the same time. You need to balance it for forward holds or balance it for points holds, one or the other, but your architecture screams "forward hold" while your layout screams "point hold". Or vice versa. I can't even tell at this point, because it seems aimless, but I can tell there's a cognitive dissonance between the way your paths are laid out and the cover/geometry of the map itself.

That's a lot of theory crafting, but really I'm not sure why it would be a bad thing if a map isn't specifically designed to cater to either a forward hold or a point hold, instead potentially being viable for both, with both methods having potential drawbacks that you will need to account for.

Because it will make comp matches into clusterfucks.
You can make a map where both are good, but the reasons they would work on this map are clashing.

So I actually did run this in Highlander a lot during development--not great, high level teams or anything, but some basic coordination from good players. Holding forward tends to be harder than you make it out, I think, because of how the battle at the point works. It's pretty easy for a spawning team to wipe players holding it forward because of the spawn times and size of the map. I do agree that the flanks need some work but I don't think it's as dire as you believe. However... that could all seem that way because, as I said, no one was super high level.

Anyway I'm not gonna do anything to it until some teams play it, whether that's teams from here or elsewhere is pretty unimportant to me. I'd love for you to back up the theory with a demo of a couple rounds if you can. What I want more than anything is to make this a better map for better players and then leave it alone forever.

Highlander is bigger than 6v6. I think the map may work well for highlander, definitely, but you might not have enough cover for it, which is why it looked like a 6s map for me, to begin with.

Everything I've said up to this point was oriented around 6v6 play. There's just too many passes for a forward hold for 6s, and the paths around the point seem like they're balanced to keep heavies down (which is actually a good thing... keep it like that, if I'm right). The flanks need a little work for highlander but in terms of 6s I believe they're outright a disaster; too much noise and complex area around the cap point to be cohesive with forward holds. It might work well, and I'll giggle at myself if it does, but even then it would be better for 6s forward holds with better flanks. If that's how you want to balance it, too, you might want to add more interesting cover like the stuff on the spire, to the forward hold areas too. I think I'm out of things to say for now, unless another piece of bad communication pops up.

pls rename thread to koth_anthem so i don't keep clicking on it every day forgetting about it, thinking its an anthem for king of the hill

I've been looking for maps to play 3v3 with, do you guys think this would work at all for 3v3?

It would probably not be great in 3v3 though I guess I don't know?

anyway, I put out a B3. better optimization, slightly different connectors and pickups. http://forums.tf2maps.net/downloads.php?do=file&id=5268&act=down

Someone should pug this and call me bad

yyler is THE MAN! Someone should play this map a crapton and give him FEEDBACK!