Hello, fellow tacticians!

My recent discovery of the RS2-development-kit on Steam and nymets1104's extremely helpfull tutorial videos on youtube have convinced me to start my own map! Here in this thread I plan to report about my map's concept and the overall progress. I don't expect my very first map to be a super-duper map, and obviously it won't be very complicated, but I do think that my map will end up to be unique in some respects.

That's because I'm a very big fan of realism. For now, I think that this will have the following consequences for my map:

• The map will allow fire fights at longer ranges than the vanilla game. LOS on many vanilla maps is very, very short. And most maps are cluttered with cover and random stuff. I need to watch out though as increasing the drawdistance of foliage (grass) is very demanding.
  
• The mode will be territory with 1 or at most 2 objectives (only one objective will be active any time)
  
• Tickets will be very low. Number of tickets = ca. 2x amount of players - two lives per player. So really you need to approach the objectives without casualties. It's more of a mixture of skirmish and territory, really.
  
• No hurry (ample time limit)
  
• I pay special attention to terrain. E.g. a road needs a roadside ditch, a wood/jungle has very distinct zones (thick bushes where sunlight hits the ground=outer edge, few undergrowth in the inner sector where the treetops' foliage blocks the sun), most importantly, I'm also struggling to reduce players' movement speed a lot if they're moving through thick undergrowth, mud or on steep slopes. Going somewhere should take some time and you need to choose where to commit.
  
• I'd prefer to leave any support assets out of the game (no arty, no recon, etc.)
  
• No snipers, no RPGs.
  
• I'm probably going to add lots of little bumps in the ground. Going prone should therefore be more usefull/secure than in vanilla RS2. Also, grenades should be a bit less deadly if you're prone (because the shrapnel hits the bumps... at least I hope so. Not sure how the game handles grenade explosions). At the same time, I try to avoid obvious "islands of cover" that many vanilla maps feature.
  
• Longer respawn timers than on vanilla maps.
  
• Longer lines of fire (less LOS-blocking objects and terrain) should really reward teamwork. With longer lines of fire, there is no chance you gonna make that lucky sprint from cover A to B if your enemy misses a single shot. Your enemy will get not only one but multiple shots at you while you're crossing. Suppression (delivered by your teammates) should be mandatory.

The basic combat scenario can't really be very realistic though. The idea is that the leading vehicle of a marines convoy got ambushed by the VC on a road. The platoon follows up, dismounts and tries to drive the attacking VC back, search/destroy their base. The US platoon (32 players - perhaps too many for the map size...) starts on one side of the road, the VC in a little patch of jungle on the other side of the road. The marines first need to cross the street, make it across the guardrail, across the muddy road ditch through the dense outer jungle into the deep jungle (first objective). VC is supposed to draw back across a little stream. The crossing will be controlled by a VC-MG position on a hill (ca. 200-300 meters from the crossing) which is also able to spray (blindly) into the jungle. The other side of the crossing is a relatively open (bushy) gentle slope where the VC have a small slit trench to defend their hut/base (final objective).

Now obviously, the marines need some boost to overcome the VC's advantages. Their grenadier should be quite an important asset. Maybe a single arty strike and shorter spawn timers could help the US too. I also plan to make the US ammo crate easier accessible than that for the VC. I hope that - due to longer range fire fights and very limited respawning - ammo will play a role. The US will have their crate at the road (their trucks) while the VC will have theirs at their MG position (which is only connected to the rest of the map by a relatively exposed track). Ammo carriers (players running back to fetch ammo to distribute amongst their reammates) would make a lot of sense on the map.

I hope that the map provides for interesting fire fights. E.g. the MG overlooking the crossing should be relatively hard to take out because of the distance (in combination with the lack of snipers) and its well chosen field of fire (no easy/covered approach). Ideally, the marines should manage to suppress it. A nice tactic to deliver suppression on the VC mg would be an US mg firing from cover and concealment of the jungle, with his fire being directed by a spotter (who stays hidden with a LOS on the VC mg position).

The big question still concerns the tactical appeal and replayability of the map though. Obviously, after playing the map once, every marine knows about the slit trenches and the MG position. Obviously, this is very important information. I'm not quite sure where the replayability will be other than in teamwork and execution (positioning, directing fires/suppression). The vanilla-game depends a lot on commander-abilities. I don't want that. Splitting up the team is not really a tactical factor given how small maps are in RS2 (compared to the effective range of weapons).

Do you have any comments, any ideas, any feedback? :)

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Here is a first screeny of a section of the road and the road ditch where the US marines will be starting.(not ingame lighting/shadow)

https://ibb.co/kEqpBR