and also multiple terrace terrarian, in which actually all terraces are accesible by single paths.
In games such as starcraft, the height of different areas of the map has a huge role to play in the tactics of the game, in warzone there is less of a role, but it can still be used effectively to alter play.
I wouldn't say that everywhere should be accessible and not always by single paths. When making maps, I tend to think about how difficult or easy it will be to defend a location or build a base there. For example, a narrow choke point can allow defences to pick units off one by one and cause problems for an army if the units are set to retreat, and multiple entrances to an area means more sides that the area can be attacked from. The bases in sk-rush for example are very tough due the high cliff surround the back of them and the single entrance to them at the front.
What is even more important, long ago the map must have ben harder to make and took much longer to be completed.
Well, aside from being really wierd and messing up some heightmaps while happily accepting others (and the fact that I had to convert all my heightmaps to .pcx just to use them) the heightmaps for the map originally was just me messing around with shapes and bluring and smudging, then finally reducing the number of colours in the image so that there were a few distinct levels. Originally it was probably easiest to make all of the slopes on the heightmap rather than make them in editworld, flaME changed that for the better and made it much easier. To make this map I basically took a map which was just a heightmap, used the cliff brush on the entire map and then smoothed paths in the cliffs where I wanted paths to be made. then it was just the matter of texturing and detailing. Incase you want to see the original map before editing in flaME went under way, I've decided to attach it.
I am not a great fan of natural terrarian, am I doomed becuse of that ??.. I am very often heading different direction.. but I use natural too..
I wouldn't have said that it necessarily has to be natural looking terrain.
Olrox's Arena #14 shows this very well. His type of terrain that he's used I class as man-made, it's obviously not natural, but has many details and shows that straight lines can be just as effective as natural looking terrain. I don't really have a name for all the NTW maps out there, but I supposed you could think of those types of maps as geometrically simple, they use a lot of basic shapes such as circles, squares and hexagons and often contain a lot of patterns in their terrain, a map of mine that I think falls into this category would be AiAssault. When really, all it is, is a bunch of circles (each corner, the middle and the ring around the outside) connected by some straight lines and gradients, then finally, a few areas are filled in with some random noise.
If you think about it, most maps are made this way, but that doesn't mean that they're all bad. 4c-UrbanChaos for example had an incredibly simple heightmap, but it worked very well and achieved the idea behind it. I think that 4c-Pyramidal has done a similar job.