Macro and micro slaughter?

[Pegleg]

I have some general questions regarding the genre of slaughter maps. I'm going to wade into the slaughter pool and hope it doesn't become a swampy morass of slaughter hate. (I don't know why it would, but slaughter discussions often seem to devolve.)

 

Let me preface my questions by saying that, typically, I do not play slaughter maps. Personally, I don't usually find them enjoyable, but I recognize that a lot of people do. I have no problem with people that like slaughter maps of all kinds. In fact, I will watch demos of people playing various slaughter maps and I respect the skill that is generally required to complete them, particularly at the higher levels.

 

I say all of that because I want to ask what may be a very basic set of questions, but I do not have a lot of experience with this genre, so I don't them. I have seen the term "macro slaughter" flung around before, but I haven't been able to get a clear idea of what "macro slaughter" is.

 

So:

 

1. What is "macro slaughter?" How would you describe it?
2. Is "macro slaughter" different from "slaughter" or is one just a different turn of phrase from the other?
3. Is there such a thing as "micro slaughter?" If so, what is it?

[Nine Inch Heels]

19 minutes ago, Pegleg said:

What is "macro slaughter?" How would you describe it? 

It's "grande slaughter"... Instead of several dozen, or a few hundred monsters you are looking more at stuff that is leaning towards thousands of "normal monsters", roughly speaking.

 

Dimensions map 01 is macro slaughter, if you would like an example.

 

19 minutes ago, Pegleg said:

Is "macro slaughter" different from "slaughter" or is one just a different turn of phrase from the other?

It is essentially the same thing as "normal slaughter", but bigger, because (sorry) size does frikkin matter.

 

19 minutes ago, Pegleg said:

Is there such a thing as "micro slaughter?" If so, what is it?

The closest thing to micro slaughter would be challenge style combat. Some of the maps in SunLust or ribbik's Stardate series might serve as good examples, there's also Bemused's Cryogenics which has a good number of fights in it that I would say might suit the term "micro slaughter".

 

But good luck ever getting anybody to agree with what I think, or what anybody else thinks, slaughter just isn't clearly defined, so I'm thinking your best bet is to simply play some stuff, tell people what you like, and then ask for similar stuff.

[NuclearPotato]

On the topic of 3, I'd say MAP04 and 05 of New Gothic Movement 2 would make a fine definition of micro-slaughter. Both maps set up some slaughter situations using only a handful of enemies.

[galileo31dos01]

From my understanding, macro-slaughter refers to, in principle, giant number of enemies to kill in medium to large sized environments. Some examples I can think of are a lot of SlaughterMAX and Slaughterfest 2012/3 maps, those that can take 40 minutes or longer to complete. Micro-slaughter is not exactly the opposite, the number is smaller than in macro, not that huge rooms, the maps can be short and concise, something like maps 03 and 06 from Rush, or map 28 from Going Down. And being slaughter, the same style of combat can exist in both, numbers and length are the variables, but micro tends to have more tense tight quarters imo. 

[42PercentHealth]

What @Nine Inch Heels said is pretty spot-on. The difficult thing here is that there is no "official" definition of the slaughter genre. Most definitions would include "lots of monsters", but even 4 barons in a tight corridor can count as "micro slaughter" if the map forces you to make use of tactics such as crowd-shaping or bullet-herding. Since there's no agreed-upon definition of slaughter, there is certainly no consensus regarding its subgenres, but the slaughtermap crowd generally uses the terms "macroslaughter" and "microslaughter" to differentiate between slaughter fights with very high and very low monster counts.

[Dragonfly]

I'd say most of Archi's Rush.wad is microslaughter, until the last level, where I haven't actually played because I died during an ironman. :P

[Plusw]

Micro slaughter is when mappers make the monsters really small so they can fit more of them.