Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Since the release of the new demo I've been watching on which maps people play. I only counted games that lasted at least 30 minutes and had at least 2 human players. It's nice to see how many different maps are being played on. I've seen games on 24 different maps! I've recorded 93 games in total.
Although I've seen 9 games on both The Northern Province and Warfare in the Wilderness 8P, I think The Northern Province is the most popular map! So congratulations to GWB.
Other maps that had a high score were: Lake Wololo (8 matches), Oasis Struggle (7, but at this very moment there are 2 games being played on this map), Valley of Dangers , Land of Hills , Across the Desert , Grassland Clash , Kaderto and Warfare in the Wilderness .
Surely these results aren't very reliable as I undoubtedly missed a lot of matches.

A conclusion I drew from this is that people like to play on maps with narrow entrances and easily defendable places (The Northern Province, Lake Wololo, Valley of Dangers, Kaderto, and Warfare in the Wilderness (8P) and Land of Hills a bit as well). Do you agree on this conclusion? If so, I know what my next map should be like.

That's certainly the way I feel
I like the conflicts to be focused into specific places, and I also like the defenders to have an advantage. (with narrow spaces you can put towers and archers there to hold back a large force for at least a short while) This gives the defenders some time to gather their forces while the attackers wear down the towers. It also means the defenders can counter attack in order to force the attackers to retreat. I saw this on The Northern Province in a 4vs4 match, two of our team on the right were under attack, so we launched an attack at the enemies which made them draw back to defend. (because most of their soldiers were out attacking) These kind of tactics make for very interesting gameplay!
P.S. Thanks for gathering this info!

For me the most important reason why I like narrow entrances is that it is hard for the enemy to scout me (I hate it when the enemy sees everything I do and I do everything to prevent that from happening). When it comes to fights I prefer battles in the open. But counter attacks like you said are interesting too.

I'm about to start working on a new map, but I would like to make it a 256x256 map. I will try to make it the best map I've ever made. It has to be awesome.
But will 256x256 maps be included?

I played two games on TNP the last few days

Not yet, there are some problems we have to overcome before we can allow bigger maps. The biggest issue is actually the minimap. Currently every tile on the minimap is 1 pixel, and thus units of players are also shown as 1 pixel. This is very easy and works well. But 192 takes up all of the space on the sidebar. If we simply scale the minimap from 256 to 192 it will look very bad, because units which are normal 1px will be smudged across 4 tiles in a blurred mess. If anyone has a suggestion for how to fix this we're interested to hear it.

Another problem is that the A* pathfinding could fail over long distances. If you told your soldiers to move across the entire width of the map it might run out of nodes. (we currently allow a maximum of 65,535 nodes) It will also need to allocate more memory and use more CPU time, so the game could freeze for a moment when you tell troops to move. And we can't just "block" the player from moving troops a long distance: what if the player feeds the troops when they are on the far side of the map? The serfs will then have to build a route there. This problem can probably be overcome but will require some work and thought. A small increase to 256 might not break it, we can test. But if you map has a lot of twists and turns that will confuse the pathfinding it might be a problem. (even now I think you can break the pathfinding if you create a "maze" which means it has to create a lot more nodes before finding the correct route)

Okay, well I've started working on it anyway.
It's an island, I'm sure that makes it easier to handle, and it won't be very maze-like. I think Remake will be able to cope with it!

Edit: about the minimap; the only thing I can think of is to not show the whole minimap at once, but only 192x192 tiles (so there will be a part you can't see). That's not ideal of course.

Thank you.
But... my map is older and probably better known so I think that is a reason why people play that map.
Funny to see how good Dutch people are at map editing and not only in KaM.

not really... i really liked your map TNP from the first time i saw it.

Well that might be so, but I think your map is liked for other reasons:
- It has an interesting design and is, unlike my Warfare in the Wilderness, not symmetrical
- It has narrow entrances and watchtowers at the start which makes it also fun for people who don't play that aggressively
- The terrain looks pretty good

Thank you guys!
I will always have maps in which players start with a school and an inn so you aren't playing for 10min before things start to get interesting.

I was thinking about this to. But if you'd make it like the big *playscreen*, where you can command your units, regarding the scrolling part, that'd be nice.
I'm sure my english wasn't good enough to explain it properly, but you might have an idea of what i mean.