Help with spawns.

If the map is as small as it looks, spawns are always going to be an issue.
Still, try things out with only one zone for each team first, then test it out.
Some maps don't always need complex systems, so just try to make changes based on how a few test games go.

 

Lately I've just been doing what Bungie does on most of their maps - Keep It Simple, Stupid (no I'm not calling you stupid ). Place a lot of neutral respawn points in logical places - near cover but not behind it, facing open space for movement and in a direction players will want to travel at spawn. Place them in clumps so teams can spawn all together if need be. Then let the spawn system handle most of the rest, though team-specific hard respawn zones may be appropriate if the map is large enough and set up for that style of play (if so, label them as TEAM ONLY). The fact is that Reach's spawn system is decent for most situations, if imperfect, and most elaborate spawn systems I've seen on other people's maps, with all these stacked zones and whatnot, tend to still have problems of their own. Just accept that occasionally people will spawn in each other's laps, and no matter how many zones you set up you are not likely to fix that.

The only exception to the KISS rule for me is on large scale maps where I expect lots of objective games to be played. In those cases I will set up flag and bomb away zones for each team. Otherwise, I only do what I just described - lots of neutral spawn points and one or two hard zones for each team, MAYBE a weak zone for each team inside of the hard zone and focused around their base/initial spawn area.

 

You are correct, keep it simple. My tutorials will help you understand how the different zones work and how to use them. See my signature below for the link.

Some people say you need to stack weak zones, like 4 or more, to get a really good spawn system. But what they describe contradicts bungie's official statements on how the zones work. Also, you never see zone stacking on any of bungie maps. There is a reason for that.

weak zones are the weight of about one ally. this means that if you have a respawn point that is covered with a weak zone, you are telling the spawn engine to treat that point as though an ally was standing there next to it. If there is no ally, then the question you have to ask is, "Is the point safe from spawn killing to the same degree if an ally were standing there?" If the point is in the base, then it probably is. Otherwise, you don't want to make that claim and fool the spawn engine into thinking it is safer than the spawn engine would calculate itself.

And if you stack several layers thick, then you are saying that the points in the zones are extremely safe. The spawn engine would then trust you and use them when it would otherwise think that the spawn points are in danger. The more weak zones you use, the more you are overriding the spawn engine, and you don't want to unless you know what you are doing.

And I have yet to see a case where someone needed to stack weak zones on each other to get the proper behavior. One person stacked weak zones and strong zones, and said it was necessary, because the strong zones were not working as bungie claimed. I looked into it and discovered that too many weak zones (I think 12 or so) would make strong zones fail altogether. I cleaned out his map and tested, and sure enough strong zones worked just fine when only a couple weak zones were present (and not stack on each other).