Designing a 2v2 map around two chokepoints
I’ve been playing a lot of Beyond All Reason, so I started planning my own map for it.
Size first. 16x16 is the usual size for 2v2, but I went with 14x14. A slightly tighter map means earlier contact between players and less time sitting back and expanding. In BAR the heightmap size comes from the map size (64 × size + 1), so 14x14 needs an 897×897 heightmap.
Layout. I started from a reference minimap and went through a few sketches before I was happy:
- Each team gets two corner starts on its own side (west vs east).
- Four mountain masses sit around the middle with a big central peak among them.
- Only two open routes cross the map: a north pass and a south pass.
One early version had two rivers crossing in an X through the centre. It looked interesting, but it muddied which side was which and didn’t give me the clean chokepoints I wanted, so I went back to the four-mountain layout.
Why two passes? With only two ways across, holding a pass matters, and a team can fake pressure on one side while committing to the other. Flanking becomes a decision instead of something that just happens.
What’s left. A playable BAR map is more than a heightmap. It also needs metal and grass maps, textures, a mapinfo.lua config, and everything packed into an .sd7 archive. I got as far as the layout and the heightmap plan, and the project is shelved for now. If I pick it back up, the next step is generating the heightmap and placing metal spots.