User Guide

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BODIES OF WATER
✯ Use the default water polygon as much as possible. If you consider the water polygon as sea level in your
map, you can use it to build multiple lakes and even the border of the ocean.
✯ Never overlap water polygons. It drastically increases the number of control points. Instead, create a
single, more elaborate water polygon.
RESOURCE COUNTS
✯ There should be $40,000 – $60,000 of resources per player on the screen.
✯ Limit the number of units that generate resources on your map. Oil derricks are continual sources of
funds. Too many of them can turn each game played on your map into a slugfest.
WAYPOINT PATHS
✯ Avoid having S-turns in your waypoint paths. They should be straight lines, simple turns, or at most, arcs
to their target.
SCRIPT MANAGEMENT
✯ Use the Script Debugger to track your scripts during a mission. For more information, ➤ Script Debugger
on p. 77.
✯ Don’t activate a script and check its condition unless it is necessary. Enable scripts only when they are
needed. Scripts that check to see if units should take actions such as move, attack, or guard are
expensive to check. So are trigger areas. They can cause a reduction in frame rate.
✯ If you are giving out attack or move commands, don’t give them all out in a single frame. Dispense
orders over a sequence of frames.
✯ Similarly, spread out the spawning, destruction, and deletion of objects over time. When a unit is
spawned, its AI immediately begins working, which impacts the game. Space these events out.
SELECT OBJECTS
✯ A good checkup before you publish a map is to check each type of object to make sure that every
instance is accounted for and intended to be part of your map. Use the Select Similar tool to select
objects of the same type.
✯ Prior to release, use the Select Duplicate tool to check to see if you’ve accidentally placed objects on top
of each other, which is an artifact of the copy and paste functions.