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Okay, I got what you are saying there. I should probably state, that its entirely my opinion. So my bad on that.
and while I agree with you on the VICE angle he does bring up a good points however. He is also a senior reporter on gaming with having 10 years of experience in the field. So while the number might not mean much it is enough to put faith in his article on what he is saying is correct. And with those examples he said that they have to be the literal best in their field or else they fail. Which I agree on, if it was just mediocre or even if it was good but missed the market it'd fail.
, didn't mean to shred your opinion either. Yeah, he has some points but IMO jumps to the wrong conclusions there, furthermore in a very dramatical way.
. In the end I think it will be like with everything else - take as an example the super hero movies DC and Marvel put out over the last years - as long as the cow gives milk, they gonna milk it, until the customers get bored of the same old story being sold for the 54th time, so they've to invent a new thing to get our hard-earned cash 
. I believe Corey and I will be going through the planet lists at some point (for both ICW and FotR) to identify where additional maps would be useful - either specific planets which deserve bespoke maps or more generally planet types/biomes which need more variety.
One thing to bear in mind when working on your maps is things like civ spawns can restrict where a map can be re-used - not only in terms of species (Bothan, Mon Calamari, Ewoks etc) but also factional affiliation (some planets were very pro or anti- Empire even decades after Endor).
and fits into your overall concept. I hope that I can streamline the process in the future to approach mapping a bit more effectively, so I won't spend half a decade creating a single one... thank the force xD for Wookiepedia though, it actually helps a lot evaluating what could fit and what not.
Tom: I don't think the map editor is too bad for a dev tool. She's a pain, naturally- and every bloody autosave makes me drop a patch of soft rocky ground onto my clean and immaculate roads- but she gets the job done. I'd like more assets for it- a cafe fresco prop would be nice, a few normal houses, a few farm props to make crop fields, a bunch of knick-knack props... But as is she works. She even crashes rarely- about once per day is my standing average (and I am abusing the poor girl; every day of texturing seems to increase the time needed to save or load... I'm around the load time of Belsavis right now, which is bad). I dunno; it is a tool never meant for public release. I'm pleasantly surprised by it; I've seen far, far worse in my travels.
. Though it feels nice to do some stuff like that again, haven't touched these kind of tools in years. Only had it crash once yet, but I'm not sure what caused it, maybe some sort of overflow. Hopefully, and if I find some time the next days, I'll be able to finish my first map - I'm also curious what you came up with , happy mapping! Both of what you said is already included in 2.2 demo. You can now build only 3 mining facilities on a planet + there is an upkeep system present.
. TBH though, I was more referring to the original EAW with my statement, ICW has already improved so much on all the shortcomings and unexplored possibilities vanilla unfortunately had ;P.
. Though I'd cosign your idea everyday, since a lot of sweet ship types have been thrown under the bus due to these facts and implementing this planet-exclusive thingy is relatively easy (you just have to adjust their build values AFAIK), the next issue is the limited availability of modeling tools for EAW - only way to create the models is with an ancient version of 3dsmax, which even doesn't run properly on modern PC's. Though I wouldn't cramp all the new ships on planets which never had a big space station or yard available (would be weird to have a big variety of starships above Dagobah ), there's also the possibility to diversify the build queue over existing production planets, meaning that special ship types could be exclusive to sectors where the corresponding manufacturer had a big presence. Don't get me wrong, I'd also love to partake in creating such variety, though I have almost no prior modeling experience and thus would need to learn that first and also find someone with a working copy of 3dsmax 9, to at least convert the models into .alo's for me. You wouldn't even need to add any Imperial ships to the NR roster, since there's such a mass of different ships you can easily fill their roster without them.Oh Petroglyph...
I shall ignore the silly fantasy in my head of writing to them and getting them to help with this. If if I wasn't ignored, it would probably result in a cease and desist.
There's a lot you can criticize in EaW, but I really don't think map design is one of those things, especially aesthetically. I've not seen any maps, from any mods, which have ever really come close to being as good as the base game maps (especially in base EaW- I don't love some of the FoC maps, like Muunilinst, because they jumped on the bigger is better train that a lot of mods, including us, fell into). Ground battles are bad because of other reasons. Sure, there wasn't much extra prop variety for other people to create new maps with, but really, making extra assets so other people can make maps isn't really their problem, and people barely used what was there anyways.
The prop you're talking about was made by Petro the base game Utapau map (unless AotR has changed it from when I last saw it- it's definitely how the base game map worked)
Maybe meant Utapau?
. That's also why I was kinda sad that building custom props is so damn difficult nowadays, let alone all the missed opportunities with many of the planets, for which Petroglyph almost always used the same props. I think much of the dislike for ground battles stems from the maps usually being bland and almost carbon copies. they wasted a lot of potential there :\.
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. For the beginning, I'll stick to some 'simpler' concepts like Dagobah, but at one point I'd love to remake something like Coruscant, maybe using custom props to fill in some of the blanks... but before that I need to get a hold of 3dsmax9, which is nigh impossible nowadays, hehe. Fingers crossed that Petroglyph will have some mercy and re-release the ALO-tools for a more modern version or make it a standalone converter, one can dream ;>. The most impressive use of creating the illusion of multiple 'terrain levels' I've seen so far must've been on one of the maps coming with AotR, UTAP. How they've missed to make the engine capable of doing so in a game which literally plays in space still eludes me though . For the moment, I'll stick to study some of the maps and - hopefully soon - will be able to produce some nice looking results.This editor is just a little new to me (but surprisingly user-friendly. She even auto-saves, much to my aggravation) so I'm not exactly flush with all its tricks yet.
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