Flying Saucers

In this map you play against a couple UFOs. There's one


Two


Three


Four of these guys


Each one relentlessly firing off explosive after explosive.


Your job is to reclaim earth's territories from the cosmic invaders. Problem is, each territory is under constant bombardment from the flying saucers. So how does a brave earth soldier fight against the Martian marauders? You've got some options.

The primary, and easiest way to fend off the saucers is to hop into a Hornet, fly above the UFO, and fire onto the weak spot located directly on top of the invader's ship. A successful attack incapacitates the saucer for a full thirty seconds.


There are other, more difficult options afforded to the defenders of Earth. You can simply drive a Warthog underneath the UFO, and spray fire across the ships weapon launcher, hoping to destroy the oncoming explosives before they reach you or your teammates. The same technique can be executed using one of the stationary turrets on the map.


The most difficult method, but also the one that requires the least amount of equipment, is to jump into one of the map's giant man cannons. Each one (except for the four leading to and from the two main bases) propels you up and over a saucer, giving you a window of mere seconds to toss a grenade into the saucers weak point.


That's the basic game, temporarily knock out the UFOs then take the corresponding territory. The attacker's base is supplied with two Hornets, two Warthogs, and four mongooses. The defenders are given four Banshees to protect the saucers with.

The weapon setup is similar to the normal Avalanche map. I did however take out anything explosive besides grenades, and I also removed any weapon with a “piercing†bullet (any weapon that can destroy a fusion coil with a single shot), otherwise it would be far too easy for the attackers to simply shoot the UFO's fusion coils before they had a chance to hit the ground.

So no Battle Rifle, sorry...

To compensate, I've maxed out on Needlers. And to make up for the lack of explosive anti-vehicle weapons, I've put a total of six stationary turrets on the map.

One worry I had with this map was that, due to the weapon change, vehicle momentum might totally shut a team down. I don't want one team to gain control of the skies with either their Banshees or Hornets and just trap the other team inside their base. To prevent this, each base comes equipped with a stationary turret that can be used to fend off flying machines.

I should also mention that I put Magnums where the two Rocket Launchers and the Spartan Laser would normally be. Magnums are unusually powerful in this game, allowing a single attacker to shoot the UFO's fusion coils before they have a chance to hit the ground. Use the Magnums wisely however, as they have been given fairly long respond times.


Lastly, I'd like to say that I intentionally made this a very open ended map. The map is essentially four environmental hazards, each with an off switch. In my opinion, such a mechanic provides a very unique, but also basic kind of game element, one that could easily be used for many different types of games. With that in mind, I've moved every different kind of game objective from their normal positions on Avalanche to underneath the four flying saucers, making it easy for anyone who downloads this map to create their own flying saucer game variants. Imagine a game where the players must incapacitate the UFOs so that their VIP may safely pass through the goal underneath it, or a capture the flag game with a big flying saucer protecting your flag for you. Play the map however you want to.

And here's one last picture showing how the saucers are positioned on the map.

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[/FONT] Download Flying Saucers
[FONT=&quot]Make sure to change the territory capture time to twenty seconds.


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Thanks for all the positive feedback guys.

I searched around the website, even used Google, but I can’t find a description of conquest. Would anyone mind explaining to me what it is?

I used two watchtower bases to make the each saucer, and you know how the watchtower base pieces have little sloped indentations? Well, in the indentation on the saucer’s top watchtower base I put three power cores, on the bottom indentation is a grav lift which pushes out the fusion coils. The explosion from the three power cores up top destroys the grav lift on the bottom.

It’s pretty interesting how all the forge pieces on Avalanche just happened to combine in such a way that I was able to make this map. Like, if the watchtower base was just a plain disk and not a disk with an indented ramp I wouldn’t have had anywhere to put the power cores or the grav lift/fusion coil firing mechanism.

And without the two different kinds of explosives (fusion coils and power cores) I wouldn’t have been able to give the saucers an explosive weak point. If I had fusion coils on top of the saucer instead of power cores, then the explosion of the saucer’s weak point would throw off the spawn times for the other fusion coils, messing up the firing of the rest of the saucers.

The bubble shield idea did occur to me, and there are actually four of them on the map, unfortunately fusion coils pass right through bubbles, destroying them immediately.

I spent awhile thinking about how equipment might be used to help take a territory. I considered deployable cover as an option, but a single fusion coil immediately destroys it. Then it occurred to me that the player could use deployable grav lifts to force oncoming fusion coils to float back up into the air before they hit the ground. And that technique works, but the coils caught in the grav lift don’t explode, and if the coils don’t immediately explode it throws off the rest of the fusion coils spawn times. So one successful grav lift would affect all four flying saucers.