Complaints Department: YouTube and Heroscape

Heroscape has been around long enough that I would have thought there would be more YouTubers commenting on the game. And yet, when I get on The Tubes hoping to find someone's gorgeously oversized board with loads of scenery and innovative use of terrain and engaging scenarios, the best I can find is some guy who makes middling-size, but very boring maps. Yes, he's done good photography to make those boards look nice, but as a terrain designer, I'm disappointed by the sheer dullness of the look and feel of them. The next best is this pair of guys who only posted one video map, and that map is sort of interesting (since it uses a CTF and a race-style scenario), but not actually all that great. The rest are... well, disappointing. It makes me want to just scratchbuild a big map using all my parts again, do a combat report on it, post it to YouTube, and make a point of specifically saying how fail all of these other guys are. I mean, seriously, have any of them even read Heroscapers.com?

(Click below for pics of my largest map to date!)

My largest map design, at present, is the prototype for a ruleset I devised called The Long Road Home. The ruleset didn't work out quite as well as I'd hoped, simply because I overestimated the power of the small force, even with the extra health I gave them. The trouble was numbers. To compensate for the size of the map, I set the point value of the attacking army at an almost arbitrary number... this resulted in a catastrophe, specifically my test army getting stomped about a third of the way through. It obviously needs a great deal of adjustment, but I still like the concept. Yes, I did actually build this. Yes, it really is that big that you can't even see the full thing in these overview photos. Yes, it did really take up the entire living room of my house for a whole four days or so. And finally, yes, this right here is the single largest reason that I look down on YouTube users who think an especially unimaginative three-Master-Set map is the be-all-end-all of Heroscape terrain design.