Welcome Back!

Four months ago I looked at the forums in despair. They were dead and the Age of Wiki was down (and still is). I had tried making a map in Valve's Hammer Editor, and struggled, but persevered after discovering a step by step guide on making a real, practical map. I was inspired and decided to make my own, but for AoE3. You can read more about that here.

Anyway, before we get stuck into Part Two (Designing Your Map), please re-read part one here. Remember, we are now making the actual map for the Micro-Duel scenario we described in Part One. You should also be familiar with the scenario editor interface and basic mechanics, which we covered in Part One.

Now let us begin.....


Initial Map Layout Planning

Before we boot up the game, open the scenario editor and start plonking units and buildings down we need a plan. We need to know exactly what we will need to put where, and how the whole map is going to function. We need to know how the player should progress and experience the scenario.

While a knowledge of triggers (comming in Part Three) will help with understanding how the map will come together, this guide hasn't taught it yet, so I will teach you how to plan this in a very simple fashion. Please consider elements and mechanics you have experienced in other scenarios, you should know what is possible and what is not, but don't worry about how it will happen until part three.

Ok, so for our specific map, how will things work??? Well, that is usually up to you, the scenario designer (there is a reason they call it design). However because I am teching you with an easy-to-follow guide, I will do this thinking for you.

How it Will Work

The map will be divided up into compartments, each with some units for player 1 and player 2. The players will always have the exact same number, type and strength of units in each compartment so that winning comes down to micro and tactics alone. The players will need to fight in each compartment one by one, until a battle in each compartment has been fought. Then, at the end, the barriers separating the compartments will dissapear, and the winner will be decided by a final battle with all the remaining units. This is how success in the early battles will be rewarded. The more units you save early on, the bigger the advantage you will have in the final fight.




Now let us design the battles as follows:

Battle One: Each player gets 10 musketeers

Battle Two: Each player gets 10 skirmishers

Battle Three: Each player gets 10 Hussars

Battle Four: Each player gets 10 crossbowmen and 5 hussars

Battle Five: Each player gets 3 Hussars and 5 pikemen

Battle Six: Each player gets one falconet, 3 hussars, 5 musketeers and 4 skirmishers

Final Battle: Each player gets 3 hussars, 7 pikemen, 3 skirmishers, 3 crossbowmen and five musketeers PLUS whatever units they have left over from previous battles


This might seem a bit uninspiring, but the idea here is to learn scenario design by first making a simple scenario. You can get creative when you go out and make your own.


How the Players will Experience it

When making a scenario, you should always consider "how do I want this to happen from the player's perspective?" You should be thinking about what the players will see, what they won't see, what they should be able to do and what they shouldn't be able to do. Will the players be able to instantly understand how to play or will you need to explain the map to them first? Put yourself in the player's position and imagine how you want your scenario be experienced by them. Think of the little details as well as the big ones. Then think about what you need to do to make this come true.

For example, what if your opponent drags the battle on for two long? Will this ruin the enjoyment of the battle, or should we just consider it a valid tactic? Do we need to put a time limit on the battles or just maybe make the enclosures smaller to discourage running? Hit-n-run is part of micro, but with a large enough enclosure and unlimited time a troll could easily delay his loss indefinately. This is one of the little things we will need to consider later. First however, let us write out descriptively how we want our scenario experienced.

The experience: The game will load and the UI will be disabled. Overlay text will appear on the screen welcoming the contestants to our scenario. The text will then briefely explain how the scenario works, then wish the contestents good luck. The UI will then be enabled and a timer will count down to the start of the first battle. The battle will then commence in compartment one. The players will have to use their micro skills to win. Once the battle is over, a timer will count down to the start of battle two. This will continue for the rest of the six preliminary battles. A timer will then count down to the start of the final battle. The barriers will dissapear and any remaining units from the first six battles will be free to fight in the final battle. Depending on the winner of the final battle, text will appear congratulating the winner, and the game will end.


The little details: Each element of this desired experience conjours up little details that will need to be resolved. I have already considered the question of dragging battles out, so now I will quote other elements of my target experience and discuss the considerations below. While in this section I mainly talk about the things we need to think about, you will find out how we actually solve these problems later in the guide, and in part three.

The text will then briefely explain how the scenario works

How will we do this briefely? Look at me writing this gigantic guide for simply designing a map layout! Is it even possible to concisely sum up our scenario in only a few words? Yes it is, but we will have to be smart with our use of language.

The battle will then commence in compartment one

How will people know where on the map the first battle will be? Will we tell them or simply position the camera over the spot?

Once the battle is over......

How will our triggers (comming in part three) know when the battle is over? Will we use a time limit, or say it is when all enemies are dead for one player?

barriers will dissapear

What will we use as barriers? Walls? Or maybe those stockades from the official campaign? How will we stop the units from fighting before the battle begins? Maybe we will use a combination of stockades to separate the forces pre-battle, and then walls to contain the main battle. Or maybe we will just place houses on the map and convert them to the required units with triggers later when the battle starts. Also, what if someone decides to troll by destroying the walls and escaping the enclosure? Will we make the walls gaia and somehow ally both players to gaia? Or will we make the walls belong to player one or two and just make them invulnerable with triggers? If we do that what if the attack-horn sounds from the enemy trolling by attacking the walls are distracting to the other player? What if the player who owns the walls just deletes them? Clearly, we cannot let the walls belong to either player.

Why can't we just use cliffs as enclosures and teleport the units wherever we need them? That is a good question. It is possible, but difficult as you will find out when we cover triggers.

any remaining units from the first six battles will be free to fight in the final battle

Will protecting certain units in certain enclosures give an unfair advantage, or is that just part of the scenario's strategy? Will the positioning of the units in the enclosures become an issue, delaying them to the middle for the final battle? Should we just teleport them in?



As you can see, there is a lot to think about. It is better to plan now before we go plonking units on the map!


Balance Considerations

Balance is a must in any online scenario. Ever played a Collosseum game only to find out afterwards the host had a double unit spawn rate? Not fair is it. You must make the game play exacltly the same for EVERY player in your game. Thankfully as we only have two players, this is going to be easy. There is a second element to balance however, you need to 'nerf' any 'overpowered' tactics that might be used to either troll or auto-win your scenario. For example, if we use a trigger to make the musketeers Guard Musketeers, but leave the skirmishers as veteran/un-upgraded it will ruin the counter system. It is for this reason we will need to consider the following balance elements in our scenario:

Civilisation: Will we allow people to pick their civilisation or force them to pick the same one to make it even? Will we set the scenario in Discovery Age and use triggers to balance our units as we see fit or allow people to choose post-imperial and ruin any semblance of balance? Clearly we must pick a nice neutral civ, for example the portugese or the spanish, and force each player to choose them. We will also insert a trigger to immediately exit the scenario if it is started in post-imperial. We will disable home cities just to be safe (even though there will be no home-city shipment delivery point on the map).

Unit Balance: Most microing occurs in ages II and III, so we will simulate those conditions with our unit balancing. This means all the units will be set to Veteran. If we had just made each unit as it appears by default, we would have Veteran Skirmishers facing off against regular musketeers and crossbowmen, which is simply imbalanced. However: We may want to boost the hitpoints or attack of our pikemen ever so slightly, or alternatively leave the hussars as un-upgraded because we don't have enough pikemen present to make the counter effect noticeable. The best option will be to just activate the vertan upgrade twice on the pikemen, so that the Hussars remain as veteran to face off the Falconett in battle six.

Tactics: Some tactics are just anti-fun. For example delaying indefinately to avoid an inevidable loss. Others are just unfair, for example exploiting any flaws we might leave in our scenario. What if one of the units are overpowered and we have inadvertently destroyed the counter system with our 'balancing'? Only playtesting can find that. Playtesting will be covered in a future installment of this guide. Other tactics might be 'questionable', for example positioning the units inside the enclosure after a battle so that they will be able to be more effective in the final battle. When it comes to those things, you as a scenario maker have to make a decision. How do you want your scenario played?


Anyway, we won't have a scenario unless we begin actually making the map. Let's get started!



Creating Your Map

Firstly, boot up Age of Empires III to the main menu. Then press 'Help and Tools' then Scenario Editor. A blank green map will load.

Now we want a bigger map, so click File --> New. A diaglogue box should come up. Keep the 'Type' as blank, and the 'seed' as '-1' (Tip: Where-ever you see the number -1 in the scenario editor, that simply means 'default'). But change the number of players to 2, and keep the number of teams as 2. At the bottom of the box choose 'Large'. Leave the 'debugger' unchecked. Then press 'Generate'. A new, bigger green map should appear (after a bit of lag). Now go to the 'Scenario' pull-down menu and click 'Scenario Data'. Change the number of players to 2 and click OK. Now is probably a good time to say that the scenario editor is full of bugs, so that fact that we had to change the number of players to 2 twice should not be surprising.

Ok, time to place some units and buldings in accordance with our plan. Create enclosure 1 for battle 1 at the top of the map. To do this click the 'Objects' pull-down, then choose 'Place Objects'. You can filter the objects by unit type, for example to only list movable units (handy for finding the units for our battle) click the right-hand pulldown menu in the dialogue box that has appeared and choose 'units'. The left-hand pull-down changes the player of the unit you will place. Seeing as we want the walls to be gaia (so they are not owned by either player), click the left-hand pull-down and change the active player to 'gaia' (Tip: You will probably know 'Gaia' as 'Mother Nature' in the game. It is the imaginary player that the game engine treats as owning all the animals and treasure guardians in the game).

Now we want to place some walls. There are two options: The hard way with individual segments from the Place Objects dialogue box, or the easy way with the wall-placement tool. I will show you the easy way. First, make sure the active player in the 'Place Objects' box is 'Gaia' and then close it by pressing 'Esc' on your keyboard. Then go to 'Scenario' --> 'Place Wall'. You can now drag out your walls easily. One click places the starting bastion, then move your mouse and you should see the wall stretch out. Click again to place the ending bastion and everything in between.

Create the enclosure, then go back in to the 'Place Objects' dialogue box to place the units we need for battle one (remember to change the player number to Player 2 for the second player's units). Tip: The unit names in the Place Objects box have prefixes in capital letters to help you. For example the musketeer is called 'INF Musketeer'. INF=Infantry, CAV=Cavalry, MAN=Mansabdar (special Indian units), MONK=Asian Explorer units, NAT=Native, MERC=Mercenary, REP=Repentent Mercenary, SALOON= Saloon unit, SHP=Ship, SEA=Water Gaia unit, SPC=Special units, like explorers and campaign-only units, YP=Asian-Dynasties units, XP=Warchiefs units, IGC=Stat-less cinematic units, GRD=Treasure Guardian, VIL=Villager, CON=Consulate Unit, AR=ART=Artilary. When you are done, your enclosure should look like this:




Now use what you have learned to create the rest of the enclosures plus the final centre battle. When complete your map should look like this (Tip: To get everything in one screen like this, go to the 'World' pull-down, click 'Map Elevation' and spam-click 'Move Map Down' for a while. Then press 'Allow Movement Past Ceiling' and hit 'Apply'. Then go 'World' --> 'Lighting' and set it to '304a'):





Now save the map by going to the 'File' drop-down menu and clicking 'Save As'. Then just give your map a name and hit 'Save'!


Congratulations

We have now made the foundations of the map. Look out for part 3 soon where I will explain triggers to you and guide you through the process of creating them for this scenario.

I have uploaded the map so far to the HeavenGames downloads section, click this link to download it. You can use that file to explore what I have done, and to use as a base for creating the triggers in part 3. I will be working with that file in part three, so even if you did follow all my instructions I highly recommend that you download it and use it for the next installment.

Where to put the file (and find the one you saved): Open Windows Explorer (File Explorer in Windows 8) and navigate to C:\Users\YOURLOGINNAME\Documents\My Games\Age of Empires 3\Scenario

This is for a Windows 7 Retail install, however the directory is probably similar on other Windows installs. Steam versions of the game probably have a different location, although they may also be in the same place. Save a scenario with a unique name, for example 'BlahBlahUnique' and then run a search for 'BlahBlahUnique' to find where it saves to (and where you should put my file). Remember that the .age3scn and .age3Yscn are the ones you want, just ignore the .bak files.





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[This message has been edited by anterior2 (edited 02-15-2015 @ 11:38 PM).]