Turbine is a great trolling map for engies. Make a sentry at spawn, get it down to the middle area and have it cover all the exits on the other side. They'll effectively be spawn-camped if you can keep it up. A teleporter and dispenser help.
Actually, that's the thing about 2Fort. I can't build a sentry anywhere on that map and have it guard all the entrances to the middle area by itself. I can do it on the other CTF maps though. Turbine has the spot in the middle, Doublecross has the roof of the opposing team (or the center of the bridge if you can't sentry jump), and Sawmill has the middle room. 2Fort though... it's the most frustrating ctf map to play engie on because there's so many routes into the base that you can't watch. And there's two spawns on that map as well, so eventually they'll get out though the other spawn.
edited 5th Nov '14 4:27:09 PM by ObsidianFire
I kinda like playing on those maps precisely because they tend to stalemate. It's fun just sneaking around as a Fat Spy.
Had a good time on Doublecross a few days ago, got a tremendous amount of "backstabs" making people Meet the Fat Spy.
Did wind up Meeting the New Zealander Spy, though. Got a tauntkill, and while Heavy was ending the animation a Sniper snuck up on me and stabstabstabbed me. Also found an enemy Fat Spy, but I out-Spied him at every opportunity.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!Funny thing. Was playing on Helltower, about to get the final point needed to get that "Send Redmond/Blutarch to hell" achievement. But then the gift appeared. Right near me. And there was two other guys making the cart ascend. So I had to choose either the gift or achievement.
I chose the gift and immediately regretted it when I found out it was a heavy transmogrifier.
edited 5th Nov '14 6:19:52 PM by Spirit
#IceBearForPresidentI like building minis in the water and normal ones in the sewers on 2fort. Really easy to lure people into them usually.
And yeah, turbine... just dropped out of one match that was essentially a 90 minute stalemate. Sentries on both sides and scouts/snipers ensuring that neither side could get an uber medic close enough.
I'd list Turbine as one of the better CtF maps in the game (along with Doublecross), but that's admittedly not a very high bar.
2Fort's main problem is that it's pretty much narrow corridors: the map, and the problem with this is that maneuverability is pretty much nonexistent in a narrow corridor, which for one thing takes away what is a major strong point of this game compared to say Counterstrike or Call of Duty and for another makes it very hard to avoid damage, which tips the scales strongly in the favor of Demoman especially and Soldier/Heavy to a lesser extent while spelling doom for Scouts and Spies. Furthermore, the design of the map on a larger scale loves to funnel people into bottlenecks, one of which is within spitting distance of the enemy's spawn. These bottlenecks that dominate the map mean that flanking is virtually impossible, and with flanking out of the picture and maneuvering out of the picture, the only way to win is to simply put out more raw damage than the opponent, and the way Heavy, Demoman, and Engineer are designed ensure that the defending team will always have much more raw damage at their disposal than the attacking team, not to mention they will have easy access to their resupply cabinet at any of the major bottlenecks (how nice of Valve to place another resupply down near the flag room), and will have to be fought at least twice by anyone wanting to get out with the flag, because even if you somehow break through the first bottleneck, by the time you get to the flag room, fight whoever's set up there, and get the flag, all the guys you killed before will have respawned and be back at that first bottleneck by the time you get back there on the way out. A lot of people swear by 2Fort as a "messing around" map, but honestly it just feels so cramped to me and your options are so limited no matter what you do. Even if I'm just fooling around, I much prefer Hightower or Harvest, or even Nucleus, to 2Fort.
If 2Fort has any strong point, it's that it's actually a very beautiful map. The texturing and artwork is top-notch, from the way the two bases look completely different from each other despite having identical layouts to the way the design transitions from mundane facade to spytech base as you get near the flag (it really looks like you've broken into somewhere you shouldn't be). Combine this with the fact that it is, for better or for worse, an iconic part of TF2, and you truly couldn't ask for a better setpiece when making SFM videos. It's just no good for actually playing a game on.
However, when I was lurking on the TF2maps.net forums, the most common answer for "worst map in TF2" was not 2Fort but Junction. I have never had the... honor of actually playing a game on Junction, so I couldn't give my own opinion one way or another, but that's what I've heard.
I make video games! Or plan to, anyway.Oh, Junction? You know the problems with too many chokepoints or chokepoints that are just hard to get through on maps? Now make those the entire map, and add in low ceilings to it. Everywhere. There's no open sky boxes. That's Junction and it's beyond terrible.
You got some dirt on you. Here's some more!![]()
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All of the reasons that you listed above is why I consider 2fort to be a map that demands the highest outputs of teamwork - piecemeal attacks by individual players rarely make it through concentrated defenses, so typically it's a matter of which team can put more players in an single offensive that makes the difference.
Plus, 2fort is to Team Fortress as de_Dust is to Counter-Strike, as in the spiritual "home" setting of each game.
edited 5th Nov '14 8:32:20 PM by FluffyMcChicken
I forgot to mention two ubering medics kinda destroy any 2Fort engie nests. Never have been able to fend off two uber medics-
regular Medics, not ubermedics. No idea what new guns came out after Vaccinator.
Warning: This poster is known to the state of California to cause cancer. Cancer may not be available in your country.For sure. There's a reason that they made turbine_pro. Viaduct also suffered from a lot of the same problems, which is why viaduct_pro exists. The way the maps are constructed just makes them miserable for any sort of comp play.
Hell, they make it miserable if one team is even slightly stacked.
Yeah, there's a reason why competitive only goes with a few maps, or some people make maps specifically designed for comp (cp_process). Some maps are just fun to mess around on, but trying to play them seriously and work through the bad design makes for an absolutely miserable experience.
You got some dirt on you. Here's some more!From what I've seen, Highlander games often run a large variety of maps. And most of the stuff 6v6 swears by (Granary, to a lesser extent Badlands) aren't maps I'm a big fan of either.
As I touched upon earlier, the classes in TF 2 are generally designed in a way that defense has a lot more raw power at their disposal than offense does. In a way, this makes sense; after all, Offense only has to win once, while Defense has to hold the line for however long the round lasts before they win, so they stack the odds for a direct fight in Defense's favor and compensate Offense with faster respawns, an advantage that lets them easily secure what victories they manage to get. When one team is dedicated to defending and one is dedicated to attacking, this works out well enough. But in 5CP, when both teams have to both push into enemy territory and defend their own, the defender's advantage makes committing to a push a very risky proposition. If you push, and that push fails, the other team can counter-push with much less resistance, so the stakes are the same no matter where you fight the enemy team, and it's simply better for you if your enemy comes to you rather than the other way around. And that's not even taking into account backcapping, which only adds to the risk of pushing forward instead of defending. All of this put together means that it's simply the smarter decision to park on your point and wait for the other team to screw up. When combined with a small player count so that a single player's mistake can spell disaster for his whole team, and you have a very tense environment that demands maximum skill from every individual in the game, which is exactly what 6v6 is aiming for. But these qualities also make 5CP maps prone to stalemating, which no one wants. The end result is that for 6v6 to function at all, it has to bottleneck itself into a very specific style of play, one very distant from the way everyone else plays TF2. This unnatural balance that makes 6v6 work is stupidly delicate; most changes to the formula result in the meta tipping over and reverting to TF2's natural state of stalemating on 5CP maps, so over the 7 years marked by a dynamic and ever-evolving base game, the environment of 6v6 has remained rigid, virtually unchanging, not to mention the enormous strain put on people who make maps for 6v6.
I make video games! Or plan to, anyway.I hate 2fort, it really does boil down to everyone doing their own thing and not really ever working together. You have Snipers sitting on the battlements doing sniper battles, you have Scouts trying to run across the roof of the bridge, Soldiers trying to rocket jump somewhere, Demomen spamming down corners, Spies picking a different server, and everyone else nesting it up in the control room.
I'm pretty sure the concept of Law having limits was a translation error. -WanderlustwarriorI don't play on official maps that often. I mainly play on Neon Heights' servers, where I usually stand around as a bystander and activate doomsday devices every half-hour. The Death Machine is a great source of fun.
edited 6th Nov '14 8:05:37 AM by EDFHemlock
Super Happy Fun Time with Monokuma, Lucifer and YHVH

Is 2Fort still memetically stalemate worthy?
Warning: This poster is known to the state of California to cause cancer. Cancer may not be available in your country.