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# Inventory Item Placement

## Placing Inventory Items

The placement of inventory items around your map can either aid or hinder gameplay. Item positioning is as crucial to the map flow as Weapon Placement. Too much health and combat becomes a slow tortuous affair. Too little and players will not be able to recover sufficiently from each fight to avoid getting killed in the next.

### Health and Armour

Generally its better to have players just below full health and looking for more than it is fully topped up with over 100 health from vials. As is usual with these things the game type your map is aimed at will influence the positioning of your items.

#### Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch

If your map is aimed at a low number of players having one or two large health packs on the level is better than having many smaller ones. This adds points of control to the map that will concentrate combat and add tension to a map that otherwise wouldn't be there. For fewer players high amounts of armour should also be avoided - place a small amount of armour away from the health. By moving the armour away players will be forced to travel the level in its entirety allowing suprise attacks and a bit of hope for a player whose just been killed.

On larger deathmatch levels look for the rooms that can be easily held and then distribute health and armour away from those places. Having a very small amount of health in this type of room is a good thing, but too much and you'll unbalance Team Deathmatch play.

#### Capture the Flag

The placement of health and armour around a CTF map is critical to achieving a good balance of attack and defense. Too little health in and around the flag room and defenders will have a hard time keeping the flag inside the base. Too much health and even the most co-ordinated attack will struggle. As a general rule of thumb a single health pack per defending player should be sufficient.

Placing a small amount of health along the main routes between the two flags is a good idea. However, ensure that it will cost the flag carrier some time to collect it. The way the flag carrier can trade safety (in terms of the likelihood of getting killed) against speed of escape. Any more than a tenth of a second is probably too much time wasted.

By the very nature of the game type, most of the health and armour will be located at either end of the map. Depending on the structure of your map it may be better to adopt a more even spread of health throughout the level.

Always place armour away from the flag base. It's generally better to favour attackers when placing armour but also ensure that it costs time to collect it. The armour placement in Coret is a fine example of this. Both the 100 armour and 50 armour require a player to slightly out of their way to obtain them, and neither of them are that close to the flag and the defenders.

### Ammunition

Although the placement of weapons is not covered here (see Weapon Placement) it's useful just to consider the placement of ammunition independantly of the actual positioning of the weapon.

## Related Topics

- Map Design

Big Cleanup – Weapon Placement should be merged into this page.

Tarquin: Any reason why? They're both good-sized pages, with content.

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Because it is a pain to go back and forth between pages for tips for inventory and weapon placement. It is far more confusion with two pages than one.

EntropicLqd: I split the pages out deliberately to avoid a single page having to cover everything. I figured it would get too large and unweildy.

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