The West Dev-Blog

1.23 is going to introduce custom fort battle maps – as stated earlier. This post is going to explain this a bit more detailed what is going to be changed about the fortbattle maps.

Every fort is pretty individual because of its size and building levels. Well, of course unless the levels are maxed out, but that goes without saying. But the building levels are also not fixed for the forts – once we have custom maps, we’ll introduce destructable building structures in a following release, but that is not the topic for now. What matters is, that we have all these forts with different building levels and the battle map should reflect this fact.

So what’s going to be changed to make this happen?

• Every building is present on the map, and the better the level is, the more advantages will be given to the sectors that belong to the building.
• Character class sector bonus: Every tower will belong to a certain character class. Characters with the right character class that are located at such a building are going to have an additional bonus next to the sector bonus that the building structure is already providing.
  
• The player limits are going to be lowered for the small and medium sized forts. There’s still a discussion going on about what the right values should be, but the initial version is most likely to set the limit to 30 players per side for the small and 60 players per side for the medium sized forts. Please note that there are unavoidable technical limitations that are limiting the number of players above the limit of 128 players, so please don’t even try to suggest to raise the limits instead of lowering them. Also, statistics of the battles show that most battles are played with about 60-70 players in average. So the limitation is mostly only hitting the small forts. The intention is to strengthen smaller alliances in the game, as the maximum limit does not involve so many players any more. Large battles can of course still happen at large forts, so the impact should be acceptable for the game.
  

And this is how it could look like (the map is done by me for testing purpose, please don’t start arguing about the bad sector layout):

This is the map in a basic configuration

This map is the same as before, except that three towers are now enlarged.

This introduces of course quite lot’s of changes to the tactics of the game play: The forts are most likely going to be not completely symmetric, then the topology might give an advantage to certain movements on the map. The smaller fort battles are going to be more tactical because of the lower player limits. All in all, battles are going to be, like the forts themselves, more individual and more unique. The motivation is, that we hope to see more battles in effect of these changes.