Fission Mailed

Fission Mailed
Created by ST RIOT

Fission Mailed (Infected)

Supported Gametypes:
Infection Only - When I am less tired I will make a version with the spawns changed and objective items placed.

Map Description
The issue of the questionable stability of the Hamasaki 7 Fission Reactor has long been mired in red tape. Well, no longer will the shaky reactor cause power surges in our factories and headaches in our engineers. Deemed too unstable for repair, a team has been sent in to manually activate the self destruct sequence. The engineers are lazy, you see. Also, they forgot the password for the remote detonation link.

Oh and for some reason there are a whole bunch of zombies in there.

/backstory

Fission Mailed is a two stage map based around a nuclear reactor. The lower level is the fuel cell array, and each of the four cells is in critical danger of meltdown. The upper level is a series of catwalks attached to the central core. The big red self destruct override button is shining nice and bright at the end of a shielded corridor.

The humans start in two teams at the bottom (after fast roping in from the ceiling to give a quick preview of the map), and the zombies pour in from tubes in the ceiling. The lower level is initially isolated, which must be defended until the automatically controlled access ramps fully extend in three places, allowing access to the upper catwalks. The humans must then find a way to breach the defenses of the core and activate the carbonated self-destruct pop-top tab. Will it be mission success or mission failed?

UPDATE: After activating the self destruct, the emergency teleporter grid will come online. The teleporter in the bottom middle of the map will become valid, allowing anyone in the reactor chamber to escape to safety. This is essentially the doorway to victory for the humans. On the surface, there is a conveniently placed blockade complete with MG turret, which is by far the easiest position to defend while they wait for evac. Once the humans make it this far into the game, the zombies have little chance of winning. However, with enough coordination and enough time on the clock, the zombies will still have a chance at overrunning the small blockade

Hopefully this should encourage a much more focused approach to how both sides play the game, as the humans work to access the core and then escape and the zombies try to halt their progress.

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The fuel cells reaching critical mass:



This floor is pretty basic, clearly suffering when funding for the project ran dry. The two side teleporters/ramps lead to the upper catwalks, while the central teleporter/ramp leads to the center walkway. Too bad you can't see them in this picture, but one would be visible just outside of the bottom left corner.



The core and upper catwalks:



This section is pretty plain too actually. What do you expect, nuclear reactors are friggin expensive! Still, each part serves its purpose. Up top is one of the corresponding side teleporters I mentioned. In a stroke of genius, the reactor engineers placed the fuel cells directly below where hapless scientists are most likely to fall off the upper catwalks.



Waiting for the center ramp to fully extend:



Each of the three ramps operates in two stages. Due to the destabilized state of the system, the performance is greatly hampered. The ramps will deploy halfway after 30 seconds, and fully extend after one minute.



The core:



Two layers of defense stand between you and the shiny button. Well actually, in this picture, I already breached said defenses, allowing me to finally get to the fun stuff....



The button:



There is a label that says PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. But you are probably not going to read it anyway.



I know I didnt:



Activating the self destruct will cause fusion coils to fall for the rest of the round. They may be fairly easily avoided on their own, but when you have zombies chasing you...

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This is a gimmick map designed to encourage the players to actually accomplish a 'mission'. I submit it as infection because A) Hub of the Dead is due today and I have made three previous maps for it and abandoned each of them, B) the nature of the self destruct does not really lend itself to serious gameplay, and C) I ran out of money for weapons. I guess Save One Bullet has some advantages. Too bad you cant use grav lifts in SOB, because you could use them to effectively re-seal the core shields once you are inside!




Originally the core was supposed to be narrower and each of the four grav lifts was supposed to be destroyed to gain full access, but I accidentally made it too big to be covered by one grav lift alone. It looked too nice to redo so I just made this version.


What I think will be really cool is the multi-bomb assault version of this map, which I will adjust later this week. The bombs will spawn at the bottom of the map and everything will function the same (there just wont be tubes on top for zombies to fall out of, allowing weapons to be placed). The twist is that each team will be trying to bomb the same point: The central core, right under the button. Will this work? I am not really sure, but it sounds cool. In some way or another the defenses will be breached, but then each team will be fighting to get in there. This will probably not be too hard, unless the bomb reset time is very low and the arm timer is pretty high. The arming team will also get to activate the self destruct from the safety of the core, leaving the opposing team under a shower of coils while the arming team rides the bomb to hell behind two layers of shield doors...which is pretty unbalanced. Oh well.


Anyway that was a lot of reading. If you actually read it I hope you are interested in this map, and I hope it has not been done before. I plan to remake it on a smaller scale, focusing on making the breaching of the core a more daunting task with bigger rewards. This map was the most fun to make for me so far, and as always I appreciate comments.

Thanks!

ST

Fission Mailed (Infected)

 

I went to sleep knowing I forgot to mention something, and the killball tube is that something! The humans are supposed to respawn there if they are not killed by a zombie. I did not have the funds to make the structure for this prison that I wanted to, so I had to use that tube. The idea was that if any humans got the bright idea of suiciding to escape zombification or get more ammo, or just happened to get themselves killed in some other way, they would be punished by being easy zombie bait. I realize betrayed people end up there too, which is unfortunate. The zombies would not have too much trouble killing anyone camping in there, and it is open on the bottom so that zombies can get out (since dying holds no penalty to them). The original shape of this piece was going to be basically a big cup with a hole in the middle, making it difficult to camp.

So the tube is far from perfect, but I wanted to control how humans respawn. If anyone has a better idea I'm open.


As for sneaking into the core, it's possible you found a gap. I tested and tweaked it a lot but I might need to move them around some more. Thanks for that.

The cores that fall to the bottom level should be landing on the walkways, I will check that out though. Thanks for the heads up.

The button going unpressed is always a possibility. Maybe people will try to camp in the core, which is feasible, but the shield doors give the zombies a chance to get at them. There must be some other way to make an escape route that works!

The coils that fall before the destruct should only do so at 180 intervals if at all. Maybe if I brace the pallet against something it would work, because one stray coil only moves it, but a steady rain of them would destroy it. Hmmmmmmm



EDIT: Alright I just removed the tube and let humans respawn where they initially spawned. Whatever, no big deal. This allowed me to make the escape teleporters as I mentioned in this post. I also fixed the space that you could sneak past the grav lifts through.

There is now a way to "win" this scenario! Once you go outside, there is a turret covering the teleporter, and that should pretty much be game over man for the zombies.

 

You should try a less direct approach to get in!

The reactor works by using the minimum fusion core count option. All 32 cores are placed - 16 on the ceiling that are set to not spawn at start, and 16 that are always in the reactor. When you flip the mongoose switch, it knocks one coil down into a pile of the other 15 coils, and also destroys a never-respawn pallet that was holding the 15 coils up. The minimum fusion coil count is 16, so when the 16 in the reactor are destroyed by hitting the button, the ones on the outside start to spawn randomly. Without a pallet to hold up the original coils in the reactor, they also fall and explode, perpetuating the cycle.

 

Thanks for the comments!

The way into the core is not to just try to jump around the lifts. I am fairly sure it is impossible (although a well placed explosion will bypass the shield doors, for some dumb reason). There is another way in, look around!

The killball tube is gone, humans now respawn in the upper ceiling just like the starting points. Controlling the human respawns in infection games is an important factor to consider, though. There should be some penalty to dying without zombiefication. In this map, the penalty now is starting all the way back at the bottom of the map.

The teleporters are admittedly actually there with other gametypes in mind. I wanted an alternate way into the "bases" (the box shaped catwalk at either side of the upper level). Otherwise there are only two ways over to that section, which is too easy to defend against. The side teleporters (which are not accessible until 60 seconds in) also provide players with more than one fast way to the top, because once the action is towards the top I expect it to stay up there and walking all over the place to get back to the top is not fun. The central teleporter was a compromise - I worked for hours on different stair cases in the center, but they all turned out too bulky, complex, or ugly. The center platform ended up being much too big with any kind of staircase and did not match the width of the other catwalks at all, so I opted for the teleporter. The overall design of the catwalks changed a lot as I went along based on budget and aesthetics, so I'll admit it could stand to be redesigned.

That said, I actually agree that ramps alone would be better than the teleporters, I just couldnt manage to include it in the budget. The original way to get from the bottom to the top was via man cannon and tubes, but it ended up being too great a distance to cover and too messy.