Weather report:
Calm, visibility almost zero. Warning for sharks.

The readme promises You a nice dingy ride and a nasty BSP hole along with sharks and invisible
collisions. All this is true. This is Richard's second map and somehow that fact shows up.

Your task is to cripple the enemy boat to ensure Your voyage with the stolen documents. You start
in Your own boat from where You can either take the dingy ride or take a long and dangerous bath
with the sharks. I would prefer bathing with sharks as the defenders are watching that dingy for sure.
You can take two routes to enter the ship, the hole You make on the side of the boat or the factory
made entrance in the bottom of the ship. Almost like in AS-Frigate.
After entering the ship, You should stop it's engines by first opening the generator room and then
destroying the generator itself.
The next task is to disable the long range cannons by placing explosives into their control rooms.
Disabling the ship radio is important to keep our current position secret.
The last task is to escape the ship using their dingy.

The first impression was "this map is too dark". And that impression didn't fade away. Many of the
nice features in this map, especially the targets are poorly marked and You really must know what
You are doing. Reminds me of the night when I lost my virginity, would not like to do it again.

The map does not run smooth. The reason is the very high polygons, almost 400/800 at attacking
team ship facing to the enemy ship. Things will be a lot better when You arrive to the enemy ship
but still You have places with over 200 polygons to cope with. The map is definitely not for low
end gadgets. The player starts seemed to work allright. As the map is really dark, You may
have difficulties in finding all the targets. For example, I had to look into UED to find the
button that should be shot to start the first dingy ride.

The bots can't do all the targets and they are very predictable in doing those that they can.
Richard has used alternate paths for randomising the bot behaviour but these do not work in AS.
He should have used AssaultRandomizers propably with stochastic trigger instead. Many of the fort
standards have no nearest pathnode tag making the attacking bots unable to find them. After
finishing the engine department, the bots take a vacation. No sniping, not to talk about distance
view triggering. It is pretty safe to enter the ship.

There is no real flow problems in the map but the darkness makes navigation painful at times. The
rooms inside the enemy ship are very similar making the navigation hard. Missing decorations and
poor ambient sounds are not helping Your way either.

The weapons and ammo are littered across the level. More can be found near the incubation rooms
which is not the worst choise. The weapons are set up beautifully, not certainly just laying on the
ground. Some of the items are placed behind wooden boxes which You must shoot off to get grip
on them. The bots are not that good. They just stubboringly try to penetrate through the boxes.

Both the ships look authentic but somehow I would like to see more stuff around. Especially I miss
some sort of nice looking lights as the scene is boringly dark. The enemy ship would have had
a lot of chances and room (also in polycount vise) for additional decorations.

This map seems to be liberal with semisolids. Then, there are many brushes that could have benefited
on being semisolid. No BSP isolation techniques. All this has risen the node/poly ratio to 2.7 which
is a lot especially because the poly count is very high at times. I'm pretty sure the author has been
struggling with BSP errors more than the readme reveals. Sea scene is not easy to construct. Richard
didn't succeed very well with it. The sea is way too small and the borders are clearly visible.

The textures are well aligned but there are places where the job is half done. The radar dome serving
as an example of this. Some of the railing would have looked better with some other texture. I feel
the trim in this map is badly executed and that is one reason why it looks so plain. Richard should
practise more with choosing textures and how to design the geometry to support them.

The map is just too dark. It is dark both in and outside of the ships. Inside the enemy ship, some
of the light boxes are glowing too intensively (scale glow left to 1.0) and are slightly too big
for the light source. There are many cases where the colours of the light source and the produced
light do not match.

The sound setup is not good. There are many ambient sound actors but they are producing the same
sounds, wind23, machine and one sonar.... The ambience is not entertaining and You certainly can't
use the sound for navigational help. The music is Lock from the original UT CD.

To the author:

You should consult this manual
to learn more about pathing an assault game. Don't be afraid to put decorative items on sight if
the polycount is initially low. Learn how to isolate slant polygons using cubes. The lighting is
very important. If You are using software renderer, use brightness settings 1-3 (lowest) when building
Your map as the other renderers tend to level the lights down. If You have problems with BSP, ask
the friendly guys and gals at Nali City for advise. Semisolids are not the answer for BSP problems,
they should be used only when everything else fails.

You can do some nice effects, there's always
something to be learned even if You are an old fox like me. Thanks for the tips !