| Watchtower
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| Basic Information
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Unknown
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| Map Photos
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| Map Overview
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An Arena map that plays unlike any of Valve’s Arena maps, with a heavy focus on vertical space and long, open sight lines. Control of the central building is a key decision that teams must wrestle over.
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Watchtower is a community-developed Arena map. It was included in the Scout Update as an official map due to its outstanding quality.
Your goal is to eliminate the entire enemy team or capture the central control point once it's available.
Introduction Video
Template:Map items
Locations
- Due to the wide and more vertical nature of this map, it is quite unlike any of the other Arena maps. Snipers do very well in Watchtower, both sniping from the sides or from the watchtower itself.
- Unlike most other Arena maps, keeping the middle point secured before it activates is very important. Try to coordinate with your team in the initial push through to the tower. If the enemies who push directly into the tower can be warded off, a Demoman can be key in securing the middle area with sticky bombs, blocking it off. A Heavy or a Pyro lingering in the main building can be tough to deal with as well.
- Skilled Engineers, with support from their team, could set up at the point after a push, making it nearly inaccessible to your enemies. This trick is hard to pull off twice, but it can often be a good surprise tactic. What also makes it difficult is the scarcity of metal in the map; the only metal is far away at the bottom of the map, and is picked up often. This means a Dispenser must usually be built before a Sentry Gun. If one is lucky, dropped weapons can be a good source of metal.
- The roof of the watchtower can be reached by a rocket jump or a sticky jump, and there is a hole which can be used to fire below. This is one of the more reliable ways to take out enemies in the watchtower itself, but it also makes one a sitting duck for Snipers.
Strategy
- Snipers can jump onto a thin wooden border on the outside of the gate facing the watchtower. This gives them an early chance to headshot a class with low health.
- Spies can jump onto the ascending stairs right when the round starts to uncloak and backstab those running straight for the point.
- When cloaked on the pipe, Spies can shift over slightly to avoid detection.
- On the ground, Snipers have a small slit of vision into the watchtower. This can be used for a sneaky kill as the Sniper dot will appear on the ceiling.
- In a unique twist, the windows on the titular watchtower can all be broken. Shooting these windows open can open it up to a lot of fire from outside, especially from the pipes on either side of the building. This is especially useful for Demoman, who can break the windows open with a sticky and then barrage the watchtower with explosives.
- The pools on the center valley can extinguish fire. For a Pyro, it is important to therefore put an emphasis on following up all attacks — burn and run is not an effective strategy here.
- Long open sight lines on the sides make short-range classes like the Pyro ineffective in these areas. Try indirectly assaulting through other areas of the map or from above, if possible.
Update history
February 3, 2010 Patch
- Fixed a case where players could open and get stuck on the starting gates before the round start.
- Improved clipping to prevent people from getting out of the map.
- Optimized the map for better performance.
Control Point Timing
| Capture point
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×1
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| ×2
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| ×3
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| ×4
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Gallery
A side path taken to the valley.
The valley below the cap area.
External links
