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Retix maps

Six maps: five arenas that share a footprint and differ entirely in what fills it, plus one battle-royale map that is fifty-seven times the size of any of them.

Every map is built on an 80-pixel tile grid, so an arena is 45 tiles across and 36 down and Frontier is 340 by 340. Warehouse is the default and the one a first match lands on.

Wall count is the map's real signature

The five arenas share the same footprint down to the pixel, so the only thing separating them is what is standing in it. The spread there is wide: Warehouse packs 108 wall pieces into the same space Canal fills with 80, a 35% difference in cover density on an identical floor plan.

It reads directly as engagement range. Canal's sparse geometry leaves long uninterrupted sightlines and the flanking routes around them, and that is where a Bolt Sniper's 1,200-pixel range and a Railgun's 1,500 are actually reachable. An arena is only 3,600 pixels wide, so a Railgun can cover almost half of it in a straight line.

Warehouse's dense stacking means most fights start well inside a Compact SMG's 380-pixel range, where a shotgun stops being a gimmick.

Foundry is the compact one despite its middling 94 walls, because the pieces break the space into rooms instead of lining it with cover. Crossroads inverts that and leaves the middle open, so the centre is a place you cross and not a place you hold. Courtyard is built in rings around its point, so taking the objective means working inwards through each layer.

The five arenas, one at a time

Warehouse is the default map and the densest, at 108 wall pieces. Its pickups are named for what they sit behind, the docks and the shelving, with one health pack at the dead centre of the floor. The control point sits 430 pixels north of centre: close enough to the middle that no side owns the approach, far enough that the room it is in has a front and a back.

Foundry is the close-quarters map. Its 94 walls cut the floor into rooms, so sightlines end at doorways instead of at the far wall. The point is pushed 400 pixels south of centre, into the pit, so taking it means going down into somewhere instead of crossing to it.

Courtyard is built in rings, and its control point is the only one in the game at the exact centre of the map, in the fountain, with the cloisters wrapped around it in layers. Taking it means working inwards through each ring, and holding it means every approach is equally short for the other team. It is also the only arena carrying more ammunition points than health ones, at seven to six.

Crossroads leaves the middle open and puts its point 730 pixels north of centre, closer to the north wall than to the middle of the map. The combination is the whole design: the centre is a place you cross under fire, and the objective is off to one side of it, so the shortest route to the point and the most dangerous route are not the same route.

Canal is the sparse one at 80 walls, with the longest uninterrupted sightlines and the only 26-spawn layout in the set. Its point is 570 pixels south of centre, on the far side of the water from most of the cover. Canal is the map where a Bolt Sniper covering the approach is worth more than a Bulwark standing on the circle.

One point, and everybody knows where it is

Every arena carries one control point with a 140-pixel radius, and Domination is fought over that single circle for ten minutes. No rotation between points, no second objective to split attention. The mode is a sustained fight over one piece of ground and not a map-control puzzle.

All five points sit on the map's vertical centre line, a consequence of maps being authored as one half and mirrored.

Their height varies by 1,300 pixels across the set, nearly half the map, and that single number is what makes Domination feel different on each arena despite the identical footprint.

A 140-pixel radius is small. The Rocket Launcher's explosion radius is 110, so a single rocket covers most of the circle and anybody contesting the point is standing inside splash range of everybody else contesting it. Domination is the mode where the Demolisher's 40% self-damage becomes a real decision instead of a footnote.

Thirteen pickups, in the same places every match

Each arena carries thirteen fixed item spawns: seven health and six ammunition on four of the five maps, six health to seven ammunition on Courtyard. They do not move between matches and they are not random, so they are learnable, and learning them is worth as much as learning the sightlines.

A fight you disengage from towards a known pack is a fight you can re-enter.

They are also positional bait. On Warehouse one health pack sits in the open at the centre of the floor, in the same room as the control point, while the rest are pushed out towards the docks and the shelving. Taking the central one is a decision, not a pickup.

Frontier is a different kind of map

At 27,200 pixels square, Frontier has about fifty-seven times the area of an arena and carries 5,355 wall pieces to fill it, fifty times the geometry of Warehouse. Two hundred spawn points scatter fifty players across it, and 500 decor pieces break up the ground between them.

It has no health pickups and no control point. Everything you use comes out of 294 loot zones instead, and the ring is what compresses the map from something you can hide in to something you cannot.

Both halves are the same half

Maps are authored as a left half and mirrored, so the two sides of every arena are geometrically identical. Nobody spawns on the worse side of Canal, because there is no worse side.

An advantage you find on one half exists in mirror image on the other.

The server refuses to boot on a map whose halves do not match, which says something about how much that symmetry matters. A broken mirror is a broken build, not a balance issue to fix later.