×Aesthetics

It's not often that I comment on a hold's aesthetics, but from looking at your previous hold, and also the fact that you've made a significant effort to make it look good in this one, I'd like to make it an exception this time.

I like the general design of the hold as an overall structure, but there are some ways in which I think it could be made to look much better.

First, you have many room transitions that do not match, such as between 5W and 6W. If you continue the border into the next room, rather than just having it stop at the end of a room, it will look more convincing, and give the hold a more coherent feel.

Your floor areas are also a bit too angular or geometric in places. In rooms like 3W, where you've broken off some of the central area's edges, but not others, it gives the room a feeling of incompletion. It's as if you've spent time trying to carve out half the outer edge carefully, but then left a large rectangular area of floor on the other side to be shaped later. I'd suggest a more uniform design for the entire room, where you make all the sides more rounded and less uniform, not just the south-east corner.

Incorporating more symmetry into rooms with more geometric shapes, such as 7W is also a good idea. Here, you could move the whole central area down one square, and so position it so there is a pit border of thickness 1 around the whole perimeter.

Rooms (Segment 1)

Entrance/1W/3W/4W - See your old thread on this hold for comments, since the rooms appear not to have changed at all.

2W - This still appears to incorporate the monster placement order idea, which as I said before, makes the room highly specific, since you need to get the queens in a particular order in order for them to move correctly. This is made particularly unpleasant because the player has no idea about what order the monsters were placed in, since they are not marked with this information, making it basically guesswork.

Remember that you can make up an arbitary sequence of movements quite easily. Getting the player to guess this particular solution out of 11^(3-5) move combinations with no help is pretty unfair.

5W - This still will not work in JtRH, since brained monsters will not go over force arrows even if you've stepped on them.

You can keep it if you want a 1.6 version of the hold, but with the impending release of 2.0 very soon, it may be a good idea to modify it to make it compatible with the newer version.

6W - Not completed this one yet, but it's certainly quite a (fun) challenge to work out in which order to tackle the queens to drop all the trapdoors.

7W - I guess you need to be in the orb area until all the serpents are dead, although I'm not sure of the exact way to finish them off (I'm always left with 2*1 serpents that refuse to die, as the brained baby moves away from the correct position whenever I toggle a door).

9W - This was mostly a very tedious slashfest. I can see the general idea involved, but I haven't the patience to deal with a few hundred brained goblins, eyes and tar babies right now. I think you should reduce the total number of monsters; I'm sure the puzzle could be easily replicated with many times fewer, as most don't serve any purpose.

10W - This room wasn't too difficult, but it was clever, for manipulating the queens to make sure they were still accessible at all times was quite tricky.

11W - This room is very difficult, for the sheer number of brained spawn to handle is very large indeed, and once the spawning begins, making much progress is very difficult. I guess it's solvable, but I'm not sure in which order to tackle the queens. I can get 4 at most before move 30-40, but the lack of checkpoints in convenient locations isn't allowing me to progress much further yet.

Rooms (Segment 3)

1S 14W/1S 15W - These rooms weren't much more than fillers. One is enough, really, although you may be better off putting more of a puzzle in these rooms, than just straightforward Tar Mother killing.

1S 16W - Have you played this room yourself? It's a bit tricky to stop unkillable tar from forming in narrow corridors, although not inherently hard, and killing so many mothers is a novel experience to begin with, but really, are so many mothers necessary? It got boring and tedious about half-way through, so I just stopped. I'd suggest removing a sizeable quantity of them, and perhaps placing more emphasis on the idea of not killing them in a certain way, or else uncuttable tar may form.

1N 1E - This is quite an interesting little room, but to be honest, I don't think it serves that much purpose, as far as I can see.