Strategy Informer  

Author: Greybeard. Size 50 X 50, File Size 7.8mb, Minimum Ram 128Mb, Max Players 2-8. inspired by an Ikonos satellite image of the atoll from space. This is a large map which does a more than decent job (if I do say so myself) of recreating the actual atoll. This map uses Cavedog Archipelago and Chinahook's archipelago completion (beta) tilesets. Land units can traverse the shallow areas, but many of the smaller ones will be almost completely submerged and their weapons will not work until they hit land. This leads to interesting tactics that change over time, as level one land units can easily be destroyed when mostly submerged, but the larger level2 and level3 units have both more armor and can tend to fire back as they are larger and their firepoints tend to be above the water level. All areas of the map can be reached by either land or sea, a couple of liberties had to be taken with actual map topography to allow this. Resources are plentiful, even excessive.

Thanks to Chinahook for much help and support in making additions to his on-going archipelago completion tileset project which specifically supported making a map like this. This tileset builds on the work of a few others (some fixed archi shores (Sphere) and shallow water tiles (Tangaroa)), and then added many other sections such as narrow shallow channels and corners which allowed for diagonal coast. He also helped with a major heightmap change in mid-map construction due to a shift in shallow water height for all archi-completion shallow water tiles. And best of all the tileset isn't finished... it's still being worked on, with more stuff to come.

The map supports 8 start positions, with positions 1 thru 4 starting in rough corners, with the possiblity of using odds and evens as teams for the first 4 positions. The AI is set to hover, and works quite well due to the abundant resources.

Map requires tamec2004 and tak2004 for features... see readme in download for further details and credit.