It’s difficult to generalise, but here’s at least some effortposts on the subject.
Things that come to mind in a rambling stream of consciousness:
- Make sure reinforcements don’t become a fucking whack-a-mole. It sucks if your advance stalls out because 2-3 guys drop on you and it just takes too much of your action economy to handle them AND meaningfully advance. In general, I would rather a frontloaded map and fairly limited reinforcements.
- Vary up objectives and layouts. When I was making the skeleton of DoW, if I saw a pattern of like 2-3 similar maps in a row, I’d try to break it up.
- Make sure it’s not going to take a bunch of extra turns to grab chests and such. They’re side objectives, not… not fuck around for ages after the map’s already finished objectives. Yeah.
- If anyone joins on the map, unless they’re some sort of Est, make sure there are units they trade well against. If they are some sort of Est / trainee, make sure there are units they can safely chip away at.
- Fog is fine, but make sure your player has torches. Realistically, with vanilla fog relationships, the way to handle fog is to fucking bombard the screen in light so that you’re never actually walking into uncertainty. Similarly, cavalry enemies should be in strict moderation (if at all) on fog maps.
- Rear cavalry reinforcements are good if you want them to catch up and put pressure on the player; they are bad if you expect them to kill the player and serve as a soft anti-turtle, as the buffer the player thinks they have will erode and they may have effectively already lost.
- If enemies will escape, make it clear what the escape point will be. Don’t keep them guessing over if it’ll be these stairs or those other further stairs.
- You want to make sure the player can actually use all the units they bring. Encourage splits through side objectives, try and make sure that they’ll swarm over a large section of the battlefield rather than just cram into a two-deep corridor.
- Make sure the player has something to do on Turn 1. There’s nothing more depressing than a PP1 where nobody dies. Let the player jump on 3-4 helpless goons and then set up to receive the EP1 charge on favourable terms.
- Be very careful about mixing types of reinforcement timer. I mean, these days I pretty much don’t anymore. For awhile in DoW’s midgame some of the reinforcements were zone-based and others were death-flag-based and still others were turn-based, and when you went at precisely Dev’s First Run speed this worked great, but when I got better / the maps got easier and I was suddenly two turns quicker to those milestones, a bunch of reinforcements started hitting at the same time and thunderfucked me.
- Enemy variety is necessary, but don’t go overboard – that leads to unnecessary overhead. Honestly, the inbuilt limiter of faction palettes helps a lot by at least making it more annoying to use the whole set of classes on a map.
- That said, make sure most of your enemy classes do get some chance to shine, at some point. If you basically never actually end up fighting enemy anima mages, that kind of sucks for your shaman who rocks up with exclusive Luna use, right?