#Making maps CW3 vs CW4

61 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

woeful linden
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We know that the player base for CW4 is multiple time bigger than for CW3. Yet it would seem the map making community for CW3 is more active than that of CW4.

Any ideas why? Does it have something to do with ease of use of the editor? I'd not think so, because I think the CW4 map editor is much better than CW3.

Is it just that a few dedicated fans post CW3 maps? I keep seeing new names crop up. There is of course the "make a map" achievement, so if it is that, then I'll live with all the achievement maps in Ixe in return for a larger ultimate map maker community.

mighty gate
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Imo the CW3 map editor is easier to understand, so maybe thats something to do with it?
But also, alot of the new CW3 maps are made by specific people, like Martin (forgot second part) and Rennervate (they have changed their name now iirc), so maybe it's just because of how fast they upload maps, that CW3 gets more

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Also I just had a thought, about how PAC and FPS maps are ALOT more popular than vanilla style maps in CW4, and get uploaded more, while vanilla style maps in CW3 are what get uploaded more, and are still pretty popular there.
So maybe, the fact that to make the popular CW4 type maps, you have to use 4RPL, is an issue, as it isn't very obvious on how 4RPL works, while in CW3, most of it is already there in a simple and obvious way.

plush grail
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Reasons why I didn't make any maps in CW4 yet (from most important to least important)

  • The CW4 editor felt unintuitive (although that doesn't take away that I also had issues with the CW3 editor when I was first learning it).
  • CSM scripts in CW3 are a lot more evolved than those of CW4. Even if CW4 had the same CSM scripts, I'd still prefer making CW3 maps though due to how CSM works better gameplay wise on CW3.
  • I prefer the rating system of CW3 over CW4. (In CW4 it feels like there is no good metric to compare 2 maps that have been launched at a different time, so I would have no idea if changes I make in my maps are liked more or less and so I can't really learn).
  • I prefer 2D over 3D as I can just make images for 2D rather than 3D meshes.
mighty gate
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Oh yeah
The scoring system in CW4 sucks imho
It would be alot better if you could see downloads and likes, so you can actually know if people liked it or not

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And how many people beat it compared to how many people at least downloaded it

woeful linden
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Please explain "scoring system" in a bit more detail.

mighty gate
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Oh
the scoring system is that 1-10 thing iirc.
Ok, so I just mentioned that and then talked about the downloads thingy instead.
certified buttrcat move

woeful linden
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Also this:

  • I prefer the scoring system of CW3 over CW4. (In CW4 it feels like there is no good metric to compare 2 maps that have been launched at a different time,

I'm not clear on how CW3 did this better or allowed the comparison being mentioned.

But as for your comments, buttercaT, Do you have any idea how many people complained about the downvotes in CW3? It probably drove some people to the brink of insanity that their maps would get more downvotes than downloads, for instance. Or that 1-ratings were more than map scores. ALl those and a number of other things.

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but, you meant the map ratings?

mighty gate
# mighty gate Oh yeah The scoring system in CW4 sucks imho It would be alot better if you coul...

Ok, so I can understand the 1-10 scoring system going (which I'm guessing is the downvoting thing, I don't remember a CW2 like downvote system existing in CW3), but I do still think the download thing would be nice, for the reasons I said here.

And with CW4 likes, you can only upvote, so it wouldn't really be a bad thing, unless people will get really upset that a map has loads of downloads but not many likes.

I'll just quickly explain more, about why I think I want downloads back.
So, in CW4 you can't see how many downloads you got, only completions and likes, but my problem is that I can't see how many people actually tried the map out, which kinda sucks for some reason imo, tbh I ain't sure why lol, maybe I just like to see people at least try my maps that I put hours of effort into, which always gives a nice feeling in CW3, so I have at least some motivation to make maps there.
In CW4 I can barely make a map for over 5 mins now, because I barely have any motivation, probably for the reason I stated above.

Maybe it's just a personal thing, but idk

mighty gate
woeful linden
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OK, so you really just want to know whether your maps are at least tried rather than ignored because of the reputation you have as a map maker? Not saying what your reputation may be, but you allude to micro, etc, So like I just don't even download particular genre maps, you think your maps may suffer a similar fate and that discourages you?

mighty gate
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In CW3 I go for micro in most maps, but I can see that at least people tried to beat it, and didn't just ignore it because its made by me or something.
Maybe I'm thinking too much about this though lol
Anyway it's getting kinda late, so I'll come back to this tommorow if that's good

plush grail
woeful linden
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you actually counted the number of scores on a year-old map?

But then you talk about up/down votes so I'm still a little confused

plush grail
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By CW4 upvotes I mean this green thumb up

20230114005145_1.jpg
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Shit, I was supposed to talk about "Ratings" instead of "Scores" for CW3

20230114005438_1.jpg
woeful linden
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it's tricky to figure things out if you conflate scores with votes or likes

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anyway, I understand now, thanks for your patience in explaining things

plush grail
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Was my bad, I mixed those 2 names up

woeful linden
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so back to my original question, the fact that you don't have that information dissuades you from making maps?

plush grail
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One of the reasons for making maps is to learn to make better maps. If I have no idea whether my maps are getting better or not (because there is no rating), I won't learn as much

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Or like "oh this map is better rated than mine, I wonder why? And then you can play that map and see what that map did different compared to your maps."

daring basin
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  1. burnout from cw3 mapmaking. i put a lot of effort into cw3 and felt like i exhausted a lot of my ideas there.
  2. terrain making is difficult. working with 20 terrain levels vs 10 levels is a lot. working with terrain granularity (e.g. making your own slopes) is even harder due to terrain spikes being hard to work with visually in top down. in cw3 i knew exactly what i'm shaping, in cw4 not so much. new terrain tools help, but there's only so much you can do with just fractal generator and mesa, in fact using them can be a detriment because maps that use them mostly end up feeling the same.
  3. theming is even harder with multiple sliders to tweak for each terrain level. only 4 default themes means there's not many options for base terrain to start with, as opposed to cw3's 20+ themes to pick from. out of those 4 themes, only the first one feels coherent, the rest feel haphazardly put together.
  4. making custom content isn't as easy to get into. i can code and i can do good-enough-pixelart, but not make 3d models, which has been discouraging and usually where my ideas would end.

note these are things i personally ran into and not an indicative of issues other people may have had. out of all the mentioned factors, burnout is definitely the largest one. the rest is just things that may make me go "maybe i don't feel like making a map after all" in the off chance i feel like trying to make one

woeful linden
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I keep hearing that players and mapmakers consider map download counts for various reasons. I think we should put it back in IXE, but I also keep trying to figure out a way that we can perhaps show the number of times a map has been started, both in the aggregate and per player. The thinking here is that it is a better indicator of popular maps ( assuming they are played many times per download).

Way back, one version of the game did in fact upload the number of plays each time a player submitted a score.

But, and this is a big but, there are numerous difficulties with deriving this number and with it's accuracy.

Just some of the difficulties I see:

  • reload/restart from a save, even one frame in, does it count?
  • Player has to be online for all attempts to be counted centrally
  • if the play counts are only counted when a score is uploaded, some number of play attempts will never be reflected.

Some other problems with this now escape me as I type this, I'll update the list as and when I think of them.

For now, I'm putting this out here to gauge others' interest in this and whether it'll make for a more useful indicator instead of, or in addition to, the download count.

plush grail
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People playing a map says more about the popularity of the map, the rating says a lot about how much people like it and how it compared to their expectations.

The CW3 rating system still seems the best system we had so far and I feel like the removal of it was a mistake (although I could have accepted if it was just with a rating of 1-5 or a simple "upvote" vs "downvote")

daring basin
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i feel like [per player] stats are generally going to be more useful than [aggregate] stats due to abuse potential, especially if players become more aware how the stats work due to both types existing and being displayed
score count > how many times map was started IMO (also per player and not aggregate)

mighty gate
queen perch
# woeful linden I keep hearing that players and mapmakers consider map download counts for vario...

I think these metrics are immensely useful. Download #s are useful in and of themselves.

I think # of attempts type metrics are also useful.
I also think a lot of the shortcomings of these methods for obtaining this data will tend to even-out in the long run.

The one primary counter argument here is possibly speedrunners and their possible like 100(+) attempts per submitted score. If a not very popular map were to enter competition, the 5ish speedrunners could drastically change the metrics for the map.

Didn't some of the previous games have 'average completion times'? Would be interesting to see how drastically those could be skewed by 1-5 people 'waiting' on the final nullification until 2 hours, etc. I'm not sure if it was a problem

I don't really think people will purposefully try to skew metrics, but averaging them per player seems better anyway.

I also think that these sorts of metrics could allow a sort of 'Auto-tagging' process for difficulty - - if someone wants to comment on that, probably best to open a new thread - don't want to derail this one any more than it is.

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"- reload/restart from a save, even one frame in, does it count?"

I think it only makes sense to count something as an attempt if an attempt is made - - in other words - - the player should DO something.

mighty oriole
# queen perch "- reload/restart from a save, even one frame in, does it count?" I think it on...

I will say on most maps I will run the map for a few minutes; sometimes to see timings for creeper, but other times just to see how the map develops and if I would want to play the map. While I would like to say "player has to build a unit" or something close; you then have 4rpl puzzle maps (K75s brain map recreation) where the player doesn't build anything. Or you have things like 4rpl building player units automatically. Short version, I think trying to measure 'attempts' is an impossible challenge; but you could probably get close in more instances than not. From there it depends what you want to do with this metric; just showing it as part of the map details could be fine, but I would not use it for things like measuring difficulty.

mighty gate
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Is there a way to find 'unique attempts' I think that's what some games call them, where it will only show one score from 1 player?
Just and idea ig, don't know if it will help due to how you can change names in most games so far.

woeful linden
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all scores uploaded is accompanied by a key. Either the game key (KC site or GOG), or the Steam key. So knowing who submitted a score isn't much f a problem. Incidentally, that's what gets banned when scores are uploaded with offensive usernames.

As I laid out above, "unique attempts" is difficult to determine. I think in the next game we'll revert again to locally check and only allow uploading of an "improved score" from the same user. But that doesn't solve any issues around reflecting accurately how much certain maps are played.

This thread really was originally intended to find barriers in the CW4 mapmaking process that is perhaps preventing mapmakers form making more maps for CW4. Unfortunately, on the basis of discussing whether feedback to the mapmaking community is part of the cause, we're now discussing the matter of download counts and or play-counts for a map.

Not that it's wrong, just that I'm hoping to keep the scope of the discussion broad. 🙂

mighty oriole
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In an attempt to bring the discussion back on topic; I wonder if CW3s map editor having a lot less options than CW4s and players aren't getting as overwhelmed when they open it is a factor. A late fix for this we could try for CW4 could be making a Steam guide for the editor, that might help players new to the editor learn how it works.
How much effort would a tutorial on the editor be for KC to build into IXE that plays the first time you enter edit mode or the mission editor (or just as a button called 'tutorial video')? Alternatively could there be two editors, one a relatively simplified editor that cuts out the more advanced options, the other enabled in the options menu with the full selection of options.
Also back to a previous discussion, having CPACKs on the Steam workshop that players can add to maps without doing any file manipulations might be an option. If making PaC/CSM was just a case of subscribe to this workshop item and push a button in the map editor, that might get a lot more people trying to make CPACK heavy maps.

summer saddle
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I have only suspicions, nothing I can put hard evidence behind. I don't think there is a great solution to the 'curating maps' question. Everything that's been tried, a large number of people haven't liked. One factor to keep in mind is that while there are more CW4 players, the playerbase is significantly different. The way they've reacted to different map types is different. I think a good part of the difference might just be in that. The audience for the games evolves with each one.

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I also don't think CW4 lends itself quite as well to mapmaking as CW3 did. Again, can't prove it, but I think part of this may be casualty of going 3D. It's made the game better in some ways, but there's always something left behind with major changes.

quiet perch
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I've never played CW3, so I can't comment on the differences between the editors, but I can give the perspective of a player new to the franchise. Also with my history as a player to give you an idea of how players come into the game.

I've been playing total war and civ games for a very long time, occasionally also other rts or tbs games. Google knows my taste in games. I learned about the game because youtube put Angory Tom in my feed, with a few PAC maps. I then put CW4 in my steam wishlist and bought it during a promotion. I first did the farsite expedition campaign, which seemed like a tutorial with slow build up to a grand finale. At the time I assumed that span experiments was a 2nd harder campaign for players finished with farsite.

After finishing Farsite I went looking for PAC maps in colonies. I played those in last in first out order, till I got to the point were autobuild was introduced. PAC maps older than that weren't fun anymore imo. Older pac maps tended to be worse than newer pac maps. Not all, but I felt like it was a trend. And it's easy to get an lpac overdose, I really prefer classic pacs now (are these called butrpac?).

After being done with the pac maps I went to span experiments, completed 4, but those 4 were way to easy, just painting the map. I opened a few others randomly in the constellation, but they all seemed similar. So I was a disappointed puppy and abandoned span experiments until I read about holdem 2. Now my span experiments is at 5/26.

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accidentel real enter, I hate discord, but will continue below 🙂

mighty gate
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buttrpac is just the name for my pac maps xd

quiet perch
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After 4/26 span experiments I went back to colonies, played a few easy maps and got bored again. So I used the tag system and looked for a hard map. The first map I found (self tagged hard by the creator) was talking up the difficulty a lot, but it was even easier than span experiments. At this point I decided to just make my own map. I then created an entirely vanilla map (Twin Volcanoes) which was quite the challenge for me at the time. Before publishing it I did test it and had to google stuff like creeper cutoff, frame to seconds conversion etc. When publishing I asked for feedback and was fortunate to actually get feedback from someone (Zekses). Played a few more maps of others.

Then I had an idea for a map build around stashes. In testing the stashes tended to be too powerful for my skill at the time, I could only fight them to a stalemate without being able to reach the greenar. So I went to the wiki and discovered that airships are the most energy efficient weapon. I then googled how to add airships to my map. The first result told me that airships weren't in the base game and that I should find a map with cpack, export and import that. So I did that with the Founder's airships, but then those airships worked differently from airships I had played with in colonies. So some more googling later I found that they were actually build in now.

The next map idea I had was a map where the AI would autobuild stuff and the player would conduct logistics + air operations. So I tried taking an autobuild script out of an lpac map and I could not get it to work. I could get it to work as lpac map, but not without all the stuff I didn't want. I think what I was missing, was that you have to go into "global control" and add the script to "pre". I don't think I've ever read this info anywhere, but only found out later by opening everything when I couldn't get my first own cpack to work, while I could get copied cpacks to work straight away.

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what a wall of text 🙂 One more post to finish the story I think.

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So eventually I got better at finding maps that are fun to play for me. At the time I liked long hard(ish) maps without a time limit. Good tags were long, hard, bad. Maps were the author had clearly spent effort on map design were also a good tell. And then I finally started being able to read completion times better. At this point I vastly preferred non traditional maps with vanilla units over other types of maps.

With my 3rd map I found a new problem with map design: they're too hard for most people. Only few players complete the harder ones. Which imo aren't actually particularly hard or tedious, just different.

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That was my perspective from a new player and new map maker.

My impressions are thus that:
New players often come in through youtube and the most popular cw4 streamer seems to be Angory Tom, who likes pac maps.
New players who have finished the farsite expedition have a relatively low skill level. The required skill level to do build in maps is low. And in colonies the difficulty of maps is all over the place, with boringly easy maps very popular.

And lastly: there are no easy step by step instructions of how to create a basic 4rpl map, nor a short tutorial of the map editor (that I found). There exists a video in which the knucklecracker explains what you can do with the tutorial, but to me that seemed aimed at people who were already familiar with map making from previous games. Information overload.

A new player making his first map, just needs to understand the "game" tab and everything else is fluff imo.

Putting guides on steam or the knucklecracker forums/wiki (indexable by google) will help, but then players have to seek it out. Putting a message in cpack reference maps (like the latest lpac by Fire) that speak to wannabe map makers and point them in the direction of the guide might help increase visibility.

quiet perch
woeful linden
quiet perch
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I can't comment on that, having never played CW3. I can just tell you about my experience and the hurdles I encountered as a player new to the franchise.

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To me the question isn't what can we do to get CW3 map makers to move over to CW4, but rather: how can we encourage new CW4 players to become colony contributors, who make maps with a minimum amount of quality (pesky creepercap issue).

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What I wanted to illustrate with my story, is 1) why certain maps tend to be more popular (pac and easy maps) and 2) that there are many hurdles to overcome if you want to start creating maps. Facilitate the overcoming of those hurdles and more new players will be creating maps, those maps will be of higher quality (on average) and retention amongst those new map makers will be higher because their first map making experience was more positive.

quiet perch
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I could explicitly list what hurdles I had encountered and observed in other people their attempts, but meh, it's in the story. Everything is intertwined.

deep elbow
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I export the basic terrain from 3 and import it to 4

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It’s just much easier to edit terrain in 3

woeful linden
deep elbow
woeful linden
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since in both games terrain is applied in top-down, I guess you're then saying that the additional 10 levels of terrain is the issue?

deep elbow
woeful linden
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can you please try to NOT ping me on every response? it gets a tad overwhelming

knotty locust
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For me, it's the complexity of making new custom units. in CW3, it was simple and easy to do. For CW4, I'm still confused. 😂

woeful linden
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wow, for me, that's just opposite

knotty locust
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I must admit, though. I didn't spend as much time on CW4 rpl as I did with CW3.
Priorities changed around the time CW4 was released 😉

drowsy frost
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To me one isn't more confusing than the other, they just require a different approach.