GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR GAME

So you bought Last Front: Europe for your shiny new iPhone or iPod Touch and you’ve played through every level in every mode. What now?

We designed the game to have as long a life as possible, just for you! You can download user created maps from the phone by entering their Map Codes from www.lastfrontgame.com or scrolling through the map list. Try a few and get inspired to make your own maps!

To start building maps, all you need to do is join the online community by activating your account. When you enter Online Mode for the first time you can enter your email and have a password sent to you. If you have lost that email notification or can’t find it, simply go to the bottom of the Service Record by touching the “Advantages” button and find the “Rest Email” button. This will send a fresh email with your information so you can log in.

Really, once you have an active account on www.lastfrontgame.com, the game becomes yours. Try building a map! Look at other player’s maps and play them for inspiration on your iPhone or iPod Touch. When you find a map that you like, you can download more maps by that user by clicking on their Username and seeing all of their maps. You can also see how far along they are in the game and look at their medal case.

If you make a really great fun map, blog about it on the Community page. Get other users to download it, play it, give you feedback, and bring up the difficulty rating. You can also give feedback to other players on their maps. We want a strong online community and strong user driven content, so let yourself be heard!

STARTING A MAP

Here are some helpful hints when making maps for Last Front: Europe!

The first thing to keep in mind is that the size of the map really makes a difference in the difficulty. Smaller maps have less room to build and maze enemies through, so they provide a special challenge. Larger maps give the player more options and more room for error. It’s really hard to recover in a small map if the enemy punches through your defenses in one place! To make larger maps more difficult, you’ll need to have multiple spawn points and exit points and lots of enemies to make it harder for the player to funnel them into a kill zone.

The next thing to remember is that you don’t want to over clutter your battlefield. The player will have to build units someplace, so be careful to leave them enough room.

If you keep those two things in mind, you can create a map that will give other players a challenge!

BALANCING

Balancing can be tough. Here are some ideas for modifying your attacking waves to give the most consistent challenge to other players.

We have balanced out 75 default waves in order to create a baseline for a medium level difficulty game. If you simply want the map to be tougher without having to redo every wave, you can edit the waves and increase the difficulty of the enemies. If you play the map on a “Hard” setting as well, you should have all the challenge you need.

Making your own waves can be a little tricky. Remember that you want a build up in difficulty that will not outpace the player’s ability to kill enemies or leave the player with too much financial wiggle room. Start with “Easy” units to let players build up resources. Throw enough at them that they have to spend money to compensate, but they should be able to come out a little ahead at the end of each wave.

Don’t neglect the starting funds! If you have placed a bunch of defensive units on the board that the player gets at the start of the game you may want to give them less money. If you find that the 20 snipers you placed are doing all the work for the player, you may want to delete a few and re-test it.

The quality of the testing you do will be the difference between a playable map and a challenging map!

PLAYER RANK AND MAP DIFFICULTY

Another important factor to consider when making maps and testing them is the rank of the users playing them. Because you unlock certain defensive units as you rank up, the difficulty of a map can change dramatically based on player rank. A map that is difficult for a Rank 21 player may be nearly impossible for a Rank 1 player with only Machine Gun Nests and Pillboxes at their disposal. Tanks, Snipers, and especially Special Units can make a huge impact.

You don’t have to worry about this too much. The best advice is to build with a particular player Rank in mind. If you are building for someone in the Rank 1-6 range, you may not want to include too many “Hard” tanks or transports, as Machine Gun Nests do less and less damage to enemies as the game progresses. If you are building for Rank 6-10 range, you can throw in more difficult units because the player will have access to Medical Tents and Medium Tanks as well as most obstacles by then. Rank 11-16 can handle almost anything you can throw at them, because they’ll have most of the Advantages unlocked by then as well as Snipers and Howitzers. You’ll just have to adjust attacker difficulties. Rank 16-21 maps are tougher to make challenging. Increase the number of enemies and make it harder for the player to get money.

In the end, anyone should be able to play any map. High ranking players get less EXP for beating low rank maps than low ranking players get for losing at high rank maps. It all comes out in the wash. Just build and test until you have a map that you are happy with and try to make a few maps that cater to different players!

TWEAKING WAVES- SURPRISE ATTACKS

If you want to throw surprises at a player, it’s a good idea to do it at regular intervals. For example, we’ve included air units on every 10^th wave until about wave 50 in our default set up. Then they show up ever 5^th wave. Enemies that can put a serious hurt on a player include all air units (if they aren’t prepared), heavy tanks, and transports. Make them “Hard” difficulty and it really makes the player sweat.

So do your players a favor and space them out so they can prepare a bit.

REFINING/TESTING MAPS

If you want to refine or create your own waves, we recommend downloading the .pdf from the Map Editor page at www.lastfrontgame.com. As you play, you can take notes on waves that are too difficult or too easy. It’s then much simpler to go into the Map Editor and change the waves to meet your needs.

It is very important to keep in mind that you must re-download your map on your device in order to test the new version! A slight hassle, but it has to work that way to you to keep a map that you have previously downloaded and like as-is in the event that its creator modifies it AFTER you’ve already downloaded it.

Just repeat the process of editing, downloading, playing, and taking notes and you’re on your way to being a true level designer!

A WORD ON CALCULATING DIFFICULTY

Why is it that there are so many Difficulty 1 user created maps? Well, each map requires 10 play-throughs with a WiFi or 3G connection active to calculate a difficulty. Once a map has those 10 results, it looks at the Rank of the player, the percent of the game completed, and the number of enemies that get through their defenses. It then generates a number between 1 and 21 that indicates the recommended Rank for a player that wishes to play it. Higher ranking maps may require a player to have access to all Special Units and Advantages to be able to beat it while a low ranking map may be beatable by using just basic units.

Keep in mind that if you edit a map while testing it, it resets the difficulty, so once you have something you are reasonably happy with, you may want to wait until a difficulty is calculated before modifying it.

More coming from the developer...