Hot Air Melting Roads addon - Total Annihilation

MAP NAME: Hot Air Melting Roads

AUTHOR: Greybeard

MAP SIZE: 51 X 51

AI: Metal

TILESETS USED: Volcano_Metal (Chinahook)

Number of Players: 9

Features required: none

NOTES: High metal map with damaging lava, intended for a good airbattle or land battle. Small outlying platforms and a grid of pathways are provided to give you some room for air defense in depth. Paths and platforms are not voided, so you'll need to pay attention to where climbing units, such as your commander, go. Lots of resources in terms of metal and geos.

One player to each of the nine platforms. Players 5, 6, 7, and 8 start on the large side platforms, with a straight shot at the center platform. Players 1, 2, 3, and 4 start on the corner platforms. Players 1, 3, and 5 are across the bottom, players 2, 4, and 6 are across the top. Players 7 and 8 are left and right center, players 9 is dead center.

There is a pair of included custom metal.txt files.

1. 1) One is an ai that is intended for use only for THE PACK. This ai uses differentiation between sides to give the human player, as player nine (dead center) a savage beating. To use this ai you must have THE PACK as a mod installed and have followed the instructions to install THE PACK’s cheating ai (removing THEPACK_C_Lan.ufo, creating ai, gamedata, and maps folder, copying files into those folders as instructed.

Throw this new metal.txt file into the ai folder in your TA install to overwrite any existing cheating metal.txt ai file. Start a skirmish game with anywhere from 2 to 9 players. Set the human player as player 9, set 1^st four positions (1, 2, 3, 4) as Arm, and next four positions (5, 6, 7, 8) as Core. Positions 2 thru 9 should be allied together The ai is a modified beserker (fully offensive cheating ai), and will build ONLY attacking units. The Arm ai’s (in corners if placed properly) will build only aircraft, while the Core ai’s (on the platforms with those nice fat straight roads to attack you) will build only (mostly) ground units. Scary stuff. On hard with 8 ai’s you will not survive long.

2) The second is an ai intended for users of standard TA. It works the same as the one listed above, but supports no additional units beyond standard TA

Throw this new metal.txt files into the ai folder in your TA install to overwrite the existing cheating metal.txt ai file. Start a skirmish game with anywhere from 2 to 9 players. Set the human player as player 9, set 1^st four positions (1, 2, 3, 4) as Arm, and next four positions (5, 6, 7, 8) as Core. The ai is a modified version of Quitch(y) v16 ai which combines the metal and airbattle ai’s so Core operates as combined land/air, and arm operates as air only.

If you don’t install either of these custom ai’s, you’ll get whatever the the standard metal.txt file will give you. The side positions will play quite well, as they have a straight shot at center, while the corner positions will struggle with ground units moving around.

If you use a mod with long range cannons, large platforms will be within range of some of the smaller outlying platforms.