Author: Greybeard. Size 50 X 30, File Size 6.0mb (includes both maps), Minimum Ram 128Mb, Max Players 7.
This is a large map which does a more than decent job (if I do say so myself) of recreating the actual atoll. This map uses Cavedog Archipelago and Chinahook's archipelago completion (beta) tilesets. Land units can traverse the shallow areas, but many of the smaller ones will be almost completely submerged and their weapons will not work until they hit land. This leads to interesting tactics that change over time, as level one land units can easily be destroyed when mostly submerged, but the larger level2 and level3 units have both more armor and can tend to fire back as they are larger and their firepoints tend to be above the water level.
The map is graphically attractive, at least until the lovely archipelago forests start to burn
Version Differences
V1) The map is an attempt to recreate the actual atoll, including the massive damage done by U.S. nuclear testing after the second world war. Version One is closest to reality. Several of the blast sites are well created, including the massive Bravo crater at upper left which vaporized a few kilometers of reef. There is some submerged wreckage around the various blast sites. Land is at a premium, with comparatively little build space. Land units can migrate from the extreme right of the map all the way to the extreme left, as long as they use the top. The bottom of the map is broken up by multiple channels.
V2) Version Two is an alternate history version where nuclear testing was restarted and continued until recent times. There are more obvious blast sites, and much more wreckage from destroyed sea dna land units. There was an attempt to create a man-made island on the left side of the map, on the inner atoll, and much of the radioactive soil and wreckage was interred there under a massive dome. This is the hottest site on the island... even the ground is damaging to be on. The whole area is mildly radioactive and does slight continual damage to all units. Damage is slight enough that units with self-healing to any great degree (commanders for example) will survive unscathed. Light units will be able to traverse along the reef, but will suffer enough damage to only be useful over short hops (e.g. don't think your flash tank rush will make it from extreme right to left along the top of the map... it won't work). This slow damage, combined with the inability of level one units to fire in the shallow water, makes the need to tech up quickly much more important. In addition, there is explosive crates and barrels on the three largest natural islands and the man-made island as well. This makes the larger islands less attractive.
Thanks to Chinahook for much help and support in making additions to his on-going archipelago completion tileset project which specifically supported making a map like this. This tileset builds on the work of a few others (some fixed archi shores (Sphere) and shallow water tiles (Tangaroa)), and then added many other sections such as narrow shallow channels and corners which allowed for diagonal coast.
The map supports 7 start positions, with odd positions 1, 3, and 5 starting in in an arc beginning at the right side of the map and even postions 2, 4, and 6 occupying the lower map and extreme upper left nearest test-site Bravo. Position seven also occupies the extreme upper left with the possiblity of using odds and evens as teams for the first 6 positions, and position 7 also being available for as a last team member for the evens.
Tamec2004 and tak2004 are required as feature sets for both maps
