Star Sapphire

Star Sapphire was my first Three players map I have ever published, and it behaved quite well during the play testing phase, I learned quite a bit about symmetry and how to design maps in general from the challenge it possesses to make a small sized 3 Players map like this one.

The triangular set up of Line of Sight blockers in the middle of the map makes for some very very interesting positioning battles, where a small force can easily outflank a big force, giving the tactical advantage to the defensive player if the aggressive player gets tunnel vision regarding his push.

The layout is in general quite tame, but since the map is very small for a 3 Players map these things reverberate across the entire map and the relative distances, where the Rush distances are around 15 seconds shorter than average sized maps, because of this the map tends to give very fun and aggressive games where both players can’t be very greedy because they can get easily punished by doing so, so they must commit a decent amount of resources into defensive forces, which slowdown the growth rate of their economies.

Regarding the tileset of the map, this is based on a drawing on DeviantArt I found a couple years ago that I thought was quite interesting from a color perspective, but it took me a while to get my texturing skills honed enough so I could pull off the general idea I had for the map, and overall I’m quite pleased with the way it came out, but I still regret a little the huge amount of time put into the texturing of it, none the less I can be proud of my achievement.

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Useful Links

TeamLiquid Thread: KTV Maps Volume III
SCReddit Thread: KTV Maps Volume III

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Changelog

V 0.2.15 [2013/12/09]
♦ Minor pathing improvements.

V 0.2.14 [2013/11/10]
♦ Minor visual improvements.
♦ Changed the edges around the main bases to a more natural looking Cliff style.

V 0.2.13 [2013/11/04]
♦ Minor visual improvements.
♦ Fixed pathing around doodads at 3 o-clock main base.
♦ Several changes around mineral lines in Natural bases.
♦ Old overview

V 0.2.12 [2013/10/18]
♦ Published.