ctf_ivoryspire by Lonelyfoxx
Apologies in advance for all the text. It’s late, and when it gets late, I get verbose and picky. I tried my best to edit it down to as least as I could. Excuse the weird categorization in my attempt to organize my review instead of just being a stream of paragraphs.
I find the concept of a neutral intelligence interesting. It's more competitive than most CTF maps, but I still wish that camping out a team's spawndoors would be a little less possible. I like the concept for the spawns, with the objective being open, but not far from the spawn, but I feel like this opens up teams to spawncamping like no tomorrow, not to mention easy wins with rocket jumping. You have multiple doors to avoid this, yes, but all it takes is two/three combos to counter anyone who tries to leave. Especially with the objective and the spawndoors being on the same level, the dominant team is gonna have a field day with camping. Although, I like being able to change levels through the spawn doors, I just wish that the objective was further away from it all. I also noticed that the system is actually broken. You can only return the intel to the blue side as either team. If you had both intels lined up side-by-side, then it'd work. I think you just switched the model that the intel uses instead of its properties. Good ambition though. I like it. :3 One last thing is that the resupply lockers are kinda hard to find at first, I'd just move it to the back of the spawnroom if possible.
This map reminds me of maps like trade_plaza or the first de_dust, but I know plenty of people who live for choke points like these, and I don't imagine seeing them complaining any time soon. If I were you, I would try to increase the pressure between these points by closing off more entrances. Such as, the bottom floor of mid's entrance to the top floor, cutting off the clear view between mid from both sides underneath the bridge. Usually for sections like under mid's bridge there's a twist in the route to prevent clear-cut shooting like snipers, or everyone getting mowed down by sentries. Mid is a big part of this map, and making it more difficult to navigate and gain control over through strategic placement (instead of having 3 sightlines at the same-time to deal with) is something to think about. I don't really like those corners, they open up too many possibilities for camping, overwhelming sentry nests, and ambush classes, as opposed to more obvious ambush spots like ontop of the bridge.
Although, I still like how you can enter through the side to have a clear view of mid (and get the intel) while the enemy team can still attack you from their base.That looks like an interesting choke-point to me. Also, I would close up the bottom route from the side-route, since jumping classes will take advantage of it to nab the intel without even having to see the enemy once, given that no jumper class takes the bottom floor route. In fact, rocket jumping around this map is overpowered in this map in my opinion. If you could find some way to put believable low ceilings around this map (grainary roofs, barns with bridges between them, maybe the mid building extends outwards to have a roof with no walls to cover players who enter through the side roof) then that would solve things without a problem.
I worry that there's not enough medipacks and ammo boxes on this map. Sure, it's small, but they're way down in your team's area, where if anything, the enemy team will use them more often than your team will if they're camping. I feel like a medium medipack or two could be placed around mid somewhere, rewarding players who getaway successfully, but not to the point where it's a matter of positioning as to who gets the medipack first.
This is where the map falters a bit. I don't mind being able to see players all the time, to better plan my attacks as various classes, but I'm afraid of snipers taking over the map. As soon as you exit spawn, you have both sides of mid, the bridge, and the enemy tower to worry about. Plenty of spots for snipers to make their picks. Increasing the wall height on the bridge would solve this, as well as limiting the opening that snipers have in their barn areas. I would open up the doors to mid a bit more so players can battle under the intel at slightly closer ranges, taking further advantage of the cover that each team's bridges provide when you reach the top. Right now they feel a little redundant I would make it so that you could only get ontop of the bridge by one ramp which gives you no cover, and replace the other ramp with soley cover, giving the bridge a layout concept like the mid of viaduct. This map seems to be about tough choke points, I'd like to see them tightened up a bit.
Also with rocket jumping, I like how the barrels and all the open routes put a lot of jump skills into proper practice. Not once have I ever needed to pogo or chainjump in a real map, but this map is proving me otherwise, with wide open spaces that encourage me to take these routes. Soldier may be overpowered in this map, but it sure as hell is fun to play as for it.
I'm really loving those soundscapes, the skybox especially. There's plenty of eyecandy in the skybox to make this map feel alive. Although I do wish that the skybox buildings were part of the map, instead of the skybox, so you could shoot rockets and stickies outside of the map. It kinda breaks the immersion to see it disapear when you try to shoot them there, although it makes sense to me as a player that I'm not allowed to go there.
Unlike many maps that I see, this map isn't dull or void of character. The bridges are really cool and is probably the selling points of this map. The barns certainly don't feel out of place. It's just that giant mid building which feels weird. If you made it a bit bigger, spruced it up with some windowsills, megaphones, maybe some roof decor like chimneys and vent systems, it wouldn't stick out so much. The rest of the map looks solid aside from the odd low-poly model of a cow or a set of barrels in the corners of the map. I'd love to see something serious done with that mid building, both gameplay-wise and aesthetic-wise.
I love how you differentiated each team with their own style of barn and buildings. You even changed the truck model. That's something I can get behind. In general, for a map with not too many details in it compared to most maps, they all fill the space pretty nicely for the majority of the map.
There's a bit of a visual bug in the red spawnroom with the roof and the vent. The inverted rooftiles going inwards look weird anyways, don't be afraid to make it a regular ceiling. They're allowed. Not only that, but after discovering that I could jump on top of the spawn rooms, I was dissapointed to find that there was no skybox to accompany the new view. I'd personally try to get rid of this for engie/demo/soldier exploits. The playerclip texture is a powerful tool.
You can walk on the fences that box in the map. This feels far more cheap to me than it should be. Add some skinny playerclip ramps or something to keep players off.
Please check that all your models have collision models attached to them. If they don't and you pass right through them, considering making a playerclip block that represents each non-colliding model.
Overall, I like this map for how it looks and the ideas. It looks finished, minus the middle building. If you extended the distance between each side and the mid building, whilst also increasing the mid building's size and making both floors totally separate from each other, I think you'd have yourself a fine map for pubs. I still wish the objective wasn't so close to the spawns, and that you couldn't rocket/sticky jump so easily to them, but maybe people will come to like it. Your problems right now are clipping, preventing soldiers from rocket jumping across the map, and some minor aesthetic details. Also, don't make breakable props. They're really weird in TF2, they're better suited for CSGO.
Not bad, needs some work, nothing stunning, but playable and sharp-looking. Above average when it comes to a mapper with little recognition. Keep it up. :3
