Friget Planets c596

Description
"Friget Planets," (Frigid?) by gtarjon, is a pack of three different-ish maps - Csilla, Galidraan, and Yavin 8.

Each of these maps is very similar to the others - they all feature mostly flat open areas of whitish terrain, surrounded by very jagged hills. It is unfortunate that the maps are so similar, but it makes the criticism tidier, because they all share some core problems:

First, wide-open maps like these are pretty poor design decisions. With as little terrain variation as these have, despite whatever the terrain may look like, they play essentially the same as the default munged map. Secondly, none of the maps have any AI planning - which means that even in the rare cases where there are props or hills to run into, the AI do just that - they run into them. Thirdly, while all three maps have new s added, none of them are added to the conquest objective, and some simply don't have capture regions. Please make sure to read the "getting started" documentation to learn how to correctly add new s to a conquest map.

The one map that is a little different - Galidraan: Castle - is different because several Yavin IV props are scattered around the map. This would be acceptable if it were not for the fact mentioned above (no AI plans) as well as the fact that the objects are placed so poorly. Most of the objects aren't grounded to the terrain, and you can walk under them, look behind them - it just looks bad. Make sure to be careful placing your objects. One other map (either Csilla or Yavin 8) also uses some props along the side of the map (Hoth snowpiles), and they are equally poorly placed.

On top of everything else, the maps are all included twice in the .zip archive. Why this is so I have no idea, but it unnecessarily doubles the size of the . It's not terribly large to begin with, for a map pack, but there's absolutely no reason to include the maps twice.

To the author, I would suggest some more test maps before future releases, and make sure to run your maps (as a beta test map) by a few other people to ensure that they're up to snuff.

-Mav