mafe said:

Hello new melee mapper!
Always nice to see new people around. The business of melee mapping can look superficially simple, but it has a virtually unlimited number of potential pitfalls, and while you seem to have good sense of what is appropriate with respect to creeps and items for example, you have also made many typical "rookie mistakes":
1. Main base design: There isnt enough space to comfortably build a base or for any of the usual wall-ins. Putting main bases (and expansions) on highgrund is most of the time ill-advised, since they become very hard to attack.
2. Creep placement: Creeps should also positioned in such a way that it is unlikely that units will run into them by accident (such as when moving to a rally point on your army that is somewhere out on the map). This isnt the case here unfortunately.
3. Pathing. In fact I have to split this into several sub-points:
3a. Gaps between trees: There should be no gaps at all between trees. Check with "p" and "ctrl + d" and compare your maps to standard ladder maps. On standard maps, the forest locations are nearly 100% purple, whereas on your maps, there are countless gaps. Trees should be placed exclusively with the size 1 or 2 circular tools, and only by individual clicks such that new trees align perfectly with existing trees. Do not plant trees by "holding and dragging the left mouse button".
3b. Buggy ramps: At the bottom of several ramps, there are bugged unwalkable tiles. Again, check in the same manner as with trees, and hide water with "w". You will find some tiles which are pink (or at least the edges of these tiles). This often happens when you have ramps leading into shallow water. To avoid this, do NOT place ramps directly into shallow water. Instead, raise the terrain until everything around the ramp is out of the water, then create the ramps, then lower the terrain again. For whatever reason, this avoids such bugs most of the time.
3c. Small gaps between doodads everyhwere: Again, such gaps should be avoided since small units can pass through while heroes cannot, which can for example be used to save footmen from a blademaster, which isnt posssible on normal ladder maps.
4. Too many too narrow chokepoints: This generally nerfs melee units. Any chokepoints, especially ramps, should normally be at least 1.5 boxes wide (box = those squares that appear when you first press "p"). I assume some of this is to encourage boat use, in which case it could be acceptable.
5. Orcs/humans cannot place a main building at the northeastern expansion.

Apart from this technical stuff, there are also some dubious gameplay design choices:
6. The portals are almost useless in their locations. Unless you explicitly go for a surprise attack, they are too far out of the way so that going the direct path should most of the times be faster.
7. Use of naga units as creeps: Creeps and (campaign or regular) units are balanced with different stats. Naga units are much stronger/give much less exp than regular creeps and are not recommended to be used as creeps. Lucikly they are only at main bases, where they dont matter as much.
8. Units facing weird directions: Just select all units of a camp and "ctrl + leftclick" to make all of them face the same direction in one second.
9. The gold amount in the mines is unusually low.
10. There are some "none" item drops. Is this a leftover from previous versions, or did you forget something here?

That's all for now. Visuallly the map is fine (though any map can always be improved with a few more doodads in the right places), and again, creeps and itemdrops are mostly good which few people get right immediately. Maybe some itemdrops are a bit too strong, so if you make some updates, maybe look at them too.

Overall, not a bad first map by any means, but still you should make some update with respect to several of these issues, with a special focus on some of 1-5. Until then, map set Awaiting Update.

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