My brother and I like to team up against CPU players and with the new expansion pack, they are tougher than ever. I actually had 2 games where the CPU attacked with serious level 4 units (AT AT's) which it had never done before. Great Job Lucasarts! However, in order for us to have a fighting chance, we play FORTRESS maps which are great except for a few things:

1) Gates are not evenly distributed about the perimeter.

The last game I played the CPU attacked before I was ready, but all my gates were on the opposite side, which meant I had to go all the way around before I could engage. I have also seen lots of maps where 2 gates join in a corner from opposite walls. Please have gates be no closer than 20 wall blocks from the nearest other gates and only 1 per side.

2) Starting Turrets are too far from walls.

When you are being attacked, they are only good for defending against units that are short ranged and attacking the wall directly. Other units can set back and attack without worry. The only time they really come into play is after the enemy has penetrated your walls, which is pointless by then. Please have the random placement of starting turrets be no more than 1 cell spacing away from a wall.

3) No Starting AA turrets.

Would it be possile to put 1 AA turret in the middle of the camp rather than a turret? By the time an enemy reaches this inner turret, you are pretty much hosed. However, 1 AA turret can keep you in the game longer by not allowing a single ship to kill all your workers.

4) FORTRESS maps seem to only include 1 terrain type.

I would like to see ice, asteriods, lava, water (islands)... types of terrain used on FORTRESS maps. Perhaps you could even make the terrain type one of the game setup parameters. :)


The CC xpack is a great update to a great game. I am looking forward to many more gaming hours. I hope that these suggestions can be implemented in a patch. Thanks.

The random map generator is a little hard to work with on wall, gate and turret placement. I have put in many, many hours trying to get those things to place correctly in custom random maps for both AOK and now in SWBG. The way that gates are placed, for example, follows a formula that moves around the whole perimeter of the wall, and it is very common to get two gates forming a corner.

And the turrets (towers in AOK) are placed as a certain distance from your starting CC, but the calculation varies from side to side (it seems different N & S than E & W), so if you try to place the turrets closer to the walls, they often endup 1 tile outside the wall

The only way to really change those features would be to meddle with the game engine itself (which LA bought the rights to from Ensemble Studios), which I don't think they want to get into in a patch.

By the way, if you want to try out a really different, more advanced type of Fortress map, you should try out the one I created (a rms, not a scenario), called SuperFortress, which starts with a little better placement of the turrets and walls, and adds AA turrets, plus every type of military building, animal nursery, war center, and the whole base has power cores distributed about. It is great for RM or DM or Terminate the Commander games, though the computer AI does not play the best in RM ( because the forests are all outside of the walls and after taking advantage of the stored carbon bins in the base the AI kind of shuts down sometimes). It is available here: SWGB Heaven Downloads: Random Maps (http://swgb.heavengames.com/downloads/list.php?type=Random) or here: Mr Fixit Online's SWGB RMS Downloads (http://www.rtscentral.com/readPosting.asp?PostingId=654519)

By the way, this map has randomized terrains also, as do most of the ones I have posted at these sites.