Tileset Type: Desert/Archipelago

Size: 25 x 58 (18.5 meg download)

Players: 2-8 

AI: profile set to default

Notes:

V2 changes:

The map was altered using Datanut's additions to the Earth Desert tileset, now at version 2.1.  Specifically, the small river to the south now is attached to the large river at the north via one of the new river mouths. In addition, the formerly isolated and land-locked area of the map to the left of the large river is now accessible to the map in general via three shallow water areas.

My Second attempt at making a real place using Annihilator. Wetumpka is the site of an ancient impact site in Alabama USA. The actual real crater structure is about 6.5 km in diameter.  The real terrain is nothing desert-like at all, and in fact the city of Wetumpka resides on the piece of water-locked land on the mid-left of the map.

Nevertheless, the satellite photo of the terrain looked desert-like enough, and the desert tileset and 3rd party additions to it had the advantage of having "stacked-cliffs" which all a reasonably close emulation of the actual crater terrain... so there you have it.

The map offers a rough and canyon-gouged terrain in the north end, all of the canyons either opening or terminating at the river or the flat area directly south of the rough northern end. The middle of the map offers a water-locked piece of land to the left and the actual Wetumpka Impact crater structure to the left. The crater itself is horseshoe shaped and open at the bottom left. The walls use the stacked crater tiles to try and recreate the actual "lay-of-the-land". South of the crater is a desert area which is created using either dunes or desert-archipelago transistion tiles. The very southern left corner has more rough terrain. Along the way, various mesas and desert plateaus are used to try and roughly follow the geography of the original satellite picture

The terrain means gameplay is quite different depending on where you start. The water-locked land at left is easiest to defend, but also the toughest to get off of. The northern areas are also easy to defend due to the chokepoints in all the canyons, but it's tough to put a base together amidst all the rugged landscape. The crater area is also easy to defend and has a little more room. The south is easiest rolling for tanks and kbots, but also easiest to attack. Resources are slathered all over the map, tons of reclaimable rocks, trees, geo vents, lava flows (which even steam as they enter the water), etc.

The map supports 2-8 players, with odd teams of 1-3-5 being at the top and 2-4-6 being at the bottom (roughly).

Thanks to Chinahook for providing a copy of the desert-archipelago transistion tileset (mine was corrupt). Overall, I'm quite pleased with how the map turned out.

Additional thanks to Datanut for adding river mouths and a conversion of archi-shallows to desert-shallows to the earth desert tileset, which made this version of the map possible.

Upsides:
Great terrain, tons of resources, extremely varied in gameplay depending on where you start.

Downsides: Mini-map does not reflect terrain well at all... the desert cliffs almost disappear, although it looks better in-game.

Enjoy.

Greybeard