City Fights Back ..a multiplayer map for Red Alert 2 Contents 1. Map Information 2. Map Description 3. Requirements 4. Install & Run 5. Modifications 6. Known Bugs 7. Other RA2 Maps by the Author 8. MapEditing Notes 9. Credits 10. Legal ===1. Map Information=== *Author: Cannis *Map Name: City Fights Back *Players: 2-4 *Size: 100x118 *Theater: Urban *Resources: Moderate *Format: .MPR *File Size: 283Kb *Online Transfer: Enabled *Editor Used: Final Alert 2 v1.00 *Map Release Date: 7/22/01 ===2. Map Description=== A quality 2-4 player urban map, with well-defendable base locations surrounding a highly detailed, realistic island city. The inhabitants won't just stand by and let their city be invaded by warring factions. They have garrisoned many of their buildings. More importantly, as the game progresses, they will randomly launch several distinct attacks, which include: -> Stormtrooper Paradrop: A Navy SEAL leads a veteran infantry rush made up of a group of Telsa Troopers and an Engineer. -> Amphibious Assault #1: A pair of elite Rhino tanks come knocking. -> Amphibious Assault #2: A trio of veteran Tesla Tanks provide an electrifying performance. -> Terrorist Surprise: A loaded Flak Track chronoshifts past defenses and serves up 5 hot papayas. -> Nuke Strike: When you hear the siren, duck and cover. -> Weather Storm Strike: 'Nuff said. -> Demo Drop: 3 Demolition Trucks are dropped by cargo plane right where you least want them to be. Blowing them up while in midair is no defense. Muahahaha! Good situational awareness and skill at micromanagement is essential. To aid you in this, the map provides free radar, and bunkers offer SpySat capabilities. Garrison them to reveal the map, but remember if you lose them, the map will be reshrouded. You also can get help with resource management by capturing oil derricks, which will give you a nice piece of change when first captured, and nearly double the income while owned. Tips: Garrison ALL your bunkers and capture your 2 'home' oil derricks immediately. The bunkers will tend to draw fire from many of the Civilian attacks. While the Civ units are busy with your bunkers, quick-response backup units can wipe them out. Use caution when moving through the city. If playing against other human players, be opportunistic. When the Civs attack your opponent, move in and strike. Take out his bunkers to blind him, while keeping your own bunkers in good repair. If playing in Skirmish mode, Free-For-All will be very easy since the Civ units will do much of the work of defeating the AI enemies for you. For this reason, FFA should be played for amusement value only. In Battle mode, newbie players may find this map too difficult since all the Civ attacks (except for the Nuke and Storm strikes) will be aimed at the player. The last 3 attacks in the list above will only occur in the later stages of the game. However there is a way to make them happen earlier, which I've decided not to reveal here in this readme :) ===3. Requirements=== You need to have Red Alert 2 installed and patched up to at least v1.005 to play this map. If an earlier version of the game is used, player starting positions may be randomized yielding unexpected results. ===4. Install & Run=== *Included files: city_fights_back.mpr (the map) city_fights_back.txt (this very long-winded file) Place city_fights_back.mpr in your \RA2\ directory. Start RA2, and the map should appear on the map list. This map supports standard, meatgrinder, navalwar, nukewar, airwar, and duel game modes. ===5. Modifications=== -Bunkers act as SpySat Uplinks when garrisoned, and will be displayed on the radar screen. -Oil Derricks give 5000 credits when captured (instead of 1000) and produce 35 credits every interval rather than 20. -Mirage tanks do not mimic the same old 4 trees you're used to seeing. Instead they copy 6 different ones. Unless they're sitting on pavement they *will* be hard to pick out. -Amphibious transports (both Allied & Soviet) will not appear on the radar screen. The reason for this is so you'll get less warning when a Civilian amphibious assault is on its way, but of course this change affects transports the player builds too. -McBurger Kong does not appear on the radar screen, since there's no reason for it to. ===6. Known Bugs=== -Amphibious infantry (Tanya and friends) may appear to get in and out of the water while rounding cliff corners when swimming. This appears to be a bug with urban water cliff corners... try as I might I can't see anything wrong with the map. ===7. Other RA2 Maps by the Author=== [Multiplayer/Skirmish] City Under Siege Switchback Ravine Switchback Ridge Collision Course ROCK YOU! Freeze-Out OverExtended Gem Pit Jungle Warfare Inversion Moonlit Bay ===8. MapEditing Notes=== The item of greatest interest here, to a map maker, are the randomizing triggers which work behind the scenes to generate the random attacks. What you're seeing here are true random actions. This system can be applied to virtually anything in RA2, in both multiplayer maps and singleplayer missions. Theoretically one could even make missions which offer random goals... talk about replayability! The way they work is this: A group of triggers which have identical random delays are enabled at the same time. Each of these triggers, if sprung, will disable all of its brethren. So the trigger which is assigned the smallest delay by the game will fire first, and disable the others before they can fire too. The randomized delays are therefore translated into randomized actions. You may ask what happens if 2 or more of these triggers happen to have identical delay values assigned to them by the game. If these delay values are the smallest of this group of enabled triggers, then you might think these 2 or more triggers would fire simultaneously. This doesn't happen, since the game will NEVER fire 2 triggers in the SAME GAME FRAME. If 2 triggers are set to fire at the same time, what actually happens is that they will fire sequentially - 1 game frame apart. So which will fire first? The answer: the first trigger found in the map. Therefore there is a statistically greater tendency for earlier triggers to fire more often using this randomizing system. The smaller the value of the random delay the triggers use, the greater the odds that they will be assigned identical delays. This means they aren't *truly* random... so the bigger the delay value used, the more closely the results will mirror true randomness. In testing, I discovered that true randomness equals luck, and luck is seldom fair. If the same base is hit by the first 3 Civilian attacks of the game, this is still random but is in no way fair. So I decided to filter the randomized results with 2 sets of local variables, which determine whether or not an attack on a given base is allowed. The result is that all bases should be attacked an equal number of times, and no base should be a victim of back-to-back attacks. The order of the attacks can still vary, and which attack used is still completely random and unfiltered. Keep in mind all the above assumes that all 4 base areas are occupied by units and/or structures that the Civilian units will consider enemies. If the Civ units don't find anyone to attack where they're sent, well then they're going to go looking elsewhere :) INI changes affect the Mirage Tank, Allied & Soviet Amphibious Transports, Bunkers, Tech Oil Derricks, and the McBurger Kong civilian structure. If you open the MPR file in Wordpad to see the INI entries, you'll note that I'm also specifying the weapons and troop capacity of many civilian structures. These last are not mods! All I'm doing here is reaffirming the defaults for these buildings. This is because the structure properties must be compatible with what I'm doing to get Civ GIs to garrison them... if some crazy mod somewhere alters these structures then this effect would not work properly. All INI changes (with the exception of the default garrison properties that are being reaffirmed) are documented below. ; Bunker [CABUNK01] SpySat=yes ; acts as spysat uplink RadarInvisible=no ; shows up on radar screen ; Bunker [CABUNK02] SpySat=yes ; acts as spysat uplink RadarInvisible=no ; shows up on radar screen ; McBurger Kong [CAMSC10] RadarInvisible=yes ; don't show it on radar screen ; Tech Oil Derrick [CAOILD] ProduceCashDelay=100 ; interval between ProduceCashAmount events, this is default ProduceCashAmount=35 ; cash every ProduceCashDelay interval, was 20 ProduceCashStartup=5000 ; cash when first captured, was 1000 [General] DefaultMirageDisguises=TREE05,TREE06,TREE08,TREE11,TREE12,TREE15 ; disguise as more and different trees ; Allied Amphibious Transport [LCRF] RadarInvisible=yes ; won't show on the radar screen ; Soviet Amphibious Transport [SAPC] RadarInvisible=yes ; won't show on the radar screen ===9. Credits=== -The crew from the WW FA2 boards who playtested the beta version of 'City Fights Back'. I'd like to thank them all individually but I'm very afraid I'll leave someone out. The amount of quality feedback (and encouragement when I really needed it!) that I so quickly received there was wonderful. -Silverfox for a quick and dirty way to get red dots marking the player start positions on the map preview. -CBWhiz for helping me get my BE's to face the right direction. -Westwood for a great game. -Matze for a great editor - Final Alert 2. -RADEN (http://www.cncgames.com) for hosting my maps. ===10. Legal=== This Red Alert 2 map 'City Fights Back' is (c) 2001 by Tony Ferrara. You MAY NOT include this map as part of any sort of commercial or promotional product without my permission. You MAY distribute this map through any other means, provided it is offered free of charge. If offered from a WWW or FTP site or similar, this .txt file (unaltered) must be included. Please do not use this map as a base for other maps. I hope you like the map! -Cannis Rabidus 7/22/2001 http://www.cannis.net/cannis/ This readme file altered 1/7/2002 to update the above website URL.
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