How do you make a map hard without large groups of enemies?

[Havok]

Is it difficult to make a map without large groups of enemies because I assume experienced players can just easily kill them or run past them? Are there any WAD examples of hard WADs which don't have large groups of enemies? And by hard I don't mean by limiting the players weapons and ammo.

[Sonikkumania]

If you want to make a map that literally no one can beat, it's simple.

 

Spoiler

Don't make an exit.

 

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

Damaging floor sections, platforming, tight spaces, few heath and armour pickups... There's a bunch of ways. 

I remember some very nice small-scale encounters in Sunder MAP19 in particular. In the apartment complex close to the beginning, there's a couple tiny rooms with just a few monsters in them. Or stuff like Plutonia 2 doesn't use "hordes" of enemies. Good stuff. 

[baja blast rd.]

It's not that hard. Area-layout shape, resource placement (even if a map has a lot of resources), understanding of health/armor/ammo thresholds relative to the threats used (example: a map can have tons of medkits, but that won't stop you from being bonked by a cyb rocket or ganked by a small group of mid-tier heavy hitters, which means that a low-bodycount map doesn't really have to be stingy with resources as a whole to be dangerous), and static, persistent threats (example: a cyb sniper you have to let stay alive) go a long way. 

 

It's also worth keeping in mind that monster count (and whether a map uses "large groups of enemies" ever) is more of a maximum-based stat. If a map has 9 small-scale fights and 2 big-scale fights, its monster count might read as "high" even if most of its danger comes from the smaller-scale fights. If a map does a Plutonia "efficient monster use" thing but then also supplements that with imps/zombies for gibby fun and some infighting for enjoyable chaos, the monster count will read as "high" even if the threat profile is more concentrated in the "efficient, smart monster use." So I would try to understand the limits of monster count, and how it can be unreliable even if adjusted for map length! Imo reading too much into it is a common blunder. "Relies on high monster counts for danger" is a very spuriously used line in wad commentary. Avoiding using "large groups of monsters" in a map entirely requires not just a preference for lower bodycount fights, but more of a total commitment to the constraint, and many of the best authors at doing small-scale combat do not abide by that constraint. What that means is, maybe paradoxically, some of the best wads to learn how to do small-scale combat well include slaughtermaps. 

 

Anyway some examples: 

 

(lower overall monster counts in general:) Cydonia, Doom 2 in Spain Only (Tarnsman's stuff in general), Ozonia (Deadwing's stuff in general), Saturnine Chapel

 

(higher overall monster counts:) Sunlust....Ribbiks and Danne's stuff in general, Benjo's stuff
 

[Captain POLAND]

In addition to what has already been said, another way is to make difficult, complex puzzles and cryptic progression. Although many people don't like that kind of difficulty.

[Marisa the Magician]

The simplest way to increase difficulty with lower enemy counts is to have less space to fill.

[holaareola]

Don't give your player too much room to move. With only Doom's gently paced projectiles or unavoidable hitscan attacks at your disposal, and without relying on gimmicks, difficult+slaughterfree+fun is going to be a tricky combination to lock in for a large map.

 

Otherwise, withholding green armour does a lot for difficulty. Often seems to me that green armour is treated as a given and blue armour given as a treat. Even the fodder monsters can be quite a threat to a Doomguy in his muftis.

Edited October 13, 2022 by holaareola

[Stupid Bunny]

I find it's fun to try and map for high difficulty alongside minimal, hyper-efficient monster count.  Minimizing space is a big part of that, since being fast as hell is Doomguy's most valuable ability and taking away his capacity to circlestrafe makes every enemy a lot harder to deal with (100 barons in an open arena is a snoozy cheesefest; one in a confined space is a gritty fight for survival).  Like @baja blast rd. said, persistent threats are a great way to keep the player pinned as well, and this is easier to achieve when most of the gameplay occurs in a limited area.  I don't simply mean smaller rooms and narrower corridors; monsters can also be used more efficiently when most of the map is reused from beginning to end, even as bits open up.  If the player spends 80% of the play time in a central area and there's a cyberdemon or hard-to-hit turret archvile confined to that area, it will make the other hazards in the area much more difficult to deal with since there's a constant, persistent risk of being splattered.

 

Of course, the archvile's special resurrection power is a good way to literally recycle dead enemies from an earlier phase in the map, especially if the archie emerges away from the player where it's harder or impossible to prevent some resurrection from happening.  I like taking specific advantage of this.  I suppose the lovely pain elemental is another good way to potentially add free enemies to the monster count.

 

I know you qualified "without limiting weapons and ammo", but obviously the weapons provided have to be somewhat commensurate with which enemies are ranged against you.  If the map is populated by imps and pinkies and formers then giving the player a glut of plasma ammo will make them a lot more nonthreatening than if the player is provided a shotgun and chainsaw.  Naturally a low-monster-count map should be harder when those imps and pinkies and formers are replaced by revenants and hell nobles and archviles, but it still depends in part on how the enemies are laid out.  Even in confined spaces, it's a lot easier to deal with a simple frontal assault than a sudden ambush from multiple directions, especially when some of the monsters involved are sitting a bit out of the way up high where they control more area and are harder to get at.

 

I don't use map-based hazards such as damaging floors often enough, they're great for restricting movement in a slightly more flexible way.  People hate inescapable death pits and I get why but in some sense I've realized they're not that far removed conceptually from getting instant death from a cyberdemon rocket: as long as there's reasonable space to deal with them then they're a fair challenge and the risk of immediate death is part of that.  Both involve watching where you step and paying attention to your surroundings.  (I used to be universally opposed to them on principle but I've come round a bit on this.)

 

I have barely ever used crushers and haven't given enough thought to how to use them intelligently.  To my mind they're generally pretty easily avoidable, outside of gimmicks like giant room-sized crushers forcing the player to reach safe points before getting smooshed, or things like setting off barrels and voodoo-doll chicanery as in the all-beloved Scythe MAP28.  I'm sure some bright cookie here has thought about this more than I have.

 

@holaareola this is a good one, too, connects with what rd. said about which resources specifically are provided and where--I think I'm sometimes too generous with armor, and while being instakilled is annoying sometimes it also detracts from both the tension and challenge of a low-monster-count map when the player is romping around taking only half-damage from everything.  

[enigma101]

Make a smaller map with enemies where people wouldn't expect them, also use health/ammo sparingly even with the lower enemy count. 

[Kyka]

How do you make a map hard without large groups of enemies?

 

 

 

 

 

#Malcolm Sailor has entered the chat.

[Jacek Bourne]

Here are some ways I know of. I don’t enjoy all of them but they are all ways to increase difficulty.

 

Reduce Ammo.

Reduce Space.

Reduce Health.

Reduce Armor.

Increase Hazards. (Damaging Floor, Death Pits, Crushers)

Reduce Room for Error (Design areas in such a way that players must make fewer mistakes if they want to survive.)

Force the player into difficult situations.

Make the player work to get weapons or just don’t give them all of the weapons.

Increase Platforming.

Place monsters effectively. (If a monster serves no purpose in an encounter, fight, or area, then it has no right to exist and should be deleted. Also, use the strengths of each monster to their advantage to make them deadlier in the situation you’ve put them in.)

Make the map layout incomprehensible or extremely complex or both.

Make the map nonlinear.
Reduce cover.

Give the player no respite between difficult encounters. 
Surprise the player with ambushes.

Make the fights themselves complex and difficult to pull off.

Compromise Visibility.

If you want examples then I suggest looking at Ribbiks maps, Death Destiny Maps, Dobu Gabu Maru Maps, and Certain Zzul Maps. Although even the maps which use many enemies put into place design choices that can be scaled down to low counts. If you want to learn more, then look through more.

 

 

[7Mahonin]

Smart enemy placement and the type of enemy used can make a map harder. It isn’t all about the quantity of monsters used so much as it’s how they’re used. 

[fai1025]

I'm those kind of people who hate tight spaces and tight ammo count

so I just put more monster, not just fill in the area but make it look more threatening

Edited October 13, 2022 by fai1025

[Herr Dethnout]

3 Cyberdemons and you done.

[Matthias]

Chaingunners... a lots of them.

[PKr]

Obscure level design + hidden switches + tough puzzles = hard map without large groups of enemies. Example: Eternal Doom.

[Arrowhead]

5 hours ago, holaareola said:

Don't give your player too much room to move.

This.

 

Checkout Congestion 384 sometime, OP - it's not a perfect WAD IMO, but is quite creative in it's use of very few monsters to make dangerous / creative combat situations.

[Endless]

I believe E4M1 to be a prime example of how to make a small map with very little enemies and still be challenging. That map teaches you that:

 

1. Tight space and little maneuverability take away one of the player most advantages: Speed.

2. Little ammo means that each shot counts.

3. And little HP items means that the player must think carefully every engagement, not just go all guns blazing.

4. The level itself is your enemy. Damage floors, monster closets, traps and dead ends can get you before the monsters.

 

And that's on Ultimate Doom, where there are no revenants, archviles, mancubi, etc. Even the standard former humans can be a challenge once they are synchronized to the structure of the level.

[xScavengerWolfx]

For some reason when i read this, the first thing to pop in my head was Plutonia. Plutonia has low enemy count but hard as hell.....yes even go 2 it (map32).

 

Now making a hard map with out large enemies i would say that if it's doom 1: Place low tier enemies in spots where they would not expect it, make rooms where it's like "oh look a weapon or a key" as soon they get it....bam! a dm move.

 

Now if we're talking doom 2 well excluding plutonia for me it's more of "how bad do i want to make the player feel if there under powered when fighting barons, screaming boners, fatsos' and baby spiders" or "Make the player sweat bullets by fighting large imps with rockets and a health bar".

 

Overall for me at least large enemy count does not equal great fights, small enemy count with starving ammo/health and think on your feet equals good fights.

[dobu gabu maru]

On 10/12/2022 at 6:56 AM, Havok said:

And by hard I don't mean by limiting the players weapons and ammo.

 

But resource allotment is basically king in this domain. It's a lot harder for players to blaze through your maps when they aren't packed to the gills with rockets, cell, shells, armor, etc. I always recommend looking at how much ammo and health are left after a playtest session, and then see if you can make cuts anywhere. Always consider the reverse too—if a fight feels too punishing or gameplay starts to drag because you have to play so cautiously, toss some more items at the player to keep combat flowing. Resources have just as much impact on the game as monster placement does—the two are inextricably tied IMO.

 

Besides that, you don't have to work too hard to make encounters & traps difficult. The tricky part is to make it exhilarating without coming across as annoying. If you warp in two chaingunners in front of and behind the player every 5 steps, I doubt that anyone would call that map easy—but even less would call it "fun".

 

A good rule of thumb to have if you want gameplay to feel tense and/or interesting, is to try and make sure the player has to keep track of more than what's directly in front of them. Corner/door camping is effective a lot of the time because the threats are only in the next room; the more you pressure the player from all sides, the more they have to move around and think on their feet. Play any of the wads in a recommendation thread or the cacoward winners and you'll find endless examples. Return to Hadron is the first example off the top of my head (cannonball is king in making fights hard in large spaces), but there's literally hundreds of authors that do this well.

Edited October 13, 2022 by dobu gabu maru

[Noiser]

As other people said, monster placement and ambushes are far more effective than quantity by itself. The most notorious example is Plutonia and anything derived by it. Arch-Viles on an elevated floor, enemies coming from all directions, area denials, turrets, there's a lot you can do without relying to a large group of enemies.

Edited October 13, 2022 by Noiser

[Toastd]

Unironically, a good place to look for this is Sunlust's first episode.

 

There are plenty of fights in those maps that involve large amounts of monsters, but also plenty of challenging ones that don't. The ones that pose a challenge with a limited number of monsters often limit the player's movement with obstacles or simply just with small arenas. Take, for example, the fight where you get the BFG in 08. The total number of enemies the player faces in this fight is: 4 Barons, 4 Hell Knights, 2 Revenants, 1 Cyberdemon. 11 demons. The HKs and Revs are on platforms, so the only enemies on your level are the Barons and Cyberdemon. But it's still a fairly tough fight because you're trapped in a small room with an instakill splash damage machine and beefy Barons blocking your movement, with turret enemies preventing you from retreating to places that seem safe.

 

Basically, if you're making a tough fight with limited enemies, you just need to make those enemies count. Each enemy should be making the fight more difficult in some way or countering some instinct of the player. Make sure the player has to carve out a safe space proactively rather than giving them somewhere to run to from the get-go.

 

As far as the whole map goes, as others have said limiting the player's resources is king. You don't have to make an ammo famine map, but ammo for power weapons (rockets and cells) should definitely be limited, since they're the best weapons for clearing out large numbers of your demons quickly. 

Edited October 14, 2022 by Toastd

[THT]

If your design is such that the player has to backtrack, a fun thing to do is make more and more of the map open up with closets off of the main corridors triggered far away. Think about whether or not the baddies are going to be aggro: If they're deaf or otherwise not alerted, they'll behave like a classic monster closet ambush and the surprise is in the unexpected opening. If they start alerted, they'll try to head for your general direction and your map should funnel them accordingly to force an unpredictable confrontation.
Best advice I can think of: try to learn what mapping/gameplay attributes each monster has and use them appropriately. Pinkies, being wide and melee, are like linebackers or a pack of wolves and work best in tight areas and in groups to choke your movement. Hell Nobles will slowly and methodically stalk you like Jason Voorhees and hit hard, but being slow and slim means you can juke past or snipe them more easily. Hitscanners are great for starting in-fights and are quite effective in open spaces despite their low health, and also grant the player ammo. Archviles are always an immediate threat, circulate around a level quickly, and resurrect corpses. A revenant just out of reach that can see you from an open distance is great "background pressure" for when the player is otherwise engaged. Etc. Etc.

[TheSlipgateStudios]

Just a few good Archvile placements with no BFG will make the map challenging.

[benji]

I like health starvation not just for adding difficulty but also for making a map feel more like a unified journey and less a series of discrete encounters. There's a particular map in Doom 2 in Spain Only, I think MAP10, where there's barely any health pickups other than health bonuses for most of it. Really makes you feel like you've been through the wringer by the end and also really appreciate any chance to recover even 5 health.

[ImproversGaming]

I don't overly enjoy the experience of heavy resource starvation to make a map more difficult. There should be a balance somewhere which does not compromise fun.

Like @xScavengerWolfx I immediately thought of Plutonia, which was challenging despite relatively low enemy counts. For instance, I enjoyed the challenge of Map 11 Hunted, which only had < 20 enemies. Also Map 09 Abbatoire is interesting for the last room where you must keep moving and are somewhat confined to a narrow circular path.

Additionally Scythe managed similar difficulty in maps with low enemy counts. Map 22 Despair had 40 enemies and was pretty tricky and Map 28 Run from It was focused on a very different movement challenge.

Just some thoughts on maps I played through recently where difficulty was not related to enemy count.

[IcarusOfDaggers]

You don't have to limit player's health and ammo, to make a difficult map. Level architecture, level geometry, shadows, light, even texture and monster colors make quite a bit of difference already.

You make even more difference with correct monster usage. That's the hard part, especially with common monsters like imps, shotgunners, hell knights, or niche ones like demons/spectres, pain elementals and arch viles

[bofu]

• Close quarters fights with ambushing Hell Knights or Revenants.
• Arachnotron turrets that get resurrected by hidden Archviles.
• Combat areas with nowhere to hide; while there's cover, it should never protect the player from too many angles at once.
• Dark sectors with a brighter, strobing "border" sector around the edges and ambushing Spectres mixed with other enemies, especially in close quarters.
• Archvile cubbies with overlapping fields of view.
• Monsters attacking the player from tiered ledges above, with Imps occupying the lower tier and Revenants or Hell Knights occupying the upper tiers behind them.

[Lt.Gonflette]

I'm gonna chime in and say that mouldy's Going Down did that pretty well. The WAD is kinda slaughtery but I remember some levels which pitted the player against squads of hitscanners in close quarters (not even Chaingunners, just Pistol and Shotgunners) and proceeded to spawn an Arch-Vile nearby, while providing little cover. So yeah I'd say enemy placement and level design makes all the difference between a large but ineffective group of monsters VS a small posse that forces the player in an uncomfortable position.

[DoomPlayer00]

Starve player of ammo for at least 1 or 2 weapons.

 

Fill tight spaces with beefy or high-damage enemies like Barons or Revenants which demand quick reflexes. Or have player encounter hitscan enemies with little cover available.

 

Platforming and environmental hazards, force player to watch their step.

 

Make secrets really hard to find or have them NOT help the player much.