I'm messing around in VHE, toying with the idea of a Combat map set in a small part of a city. This means roads, abandoned cars (which right now are just ugly jumbles of brushes), streetlights, garbage, multi-story buildings, the works.

However, I'm not good with layouts, and I haven't many ideas to my name.

So, suggestions? Ideas? Something?

my suggestion is to quit while your ahead. Unless you make it some sort of indoor complex (mallish thing)with maybe a walkway that looks outside to the city i think you'll run into more problems than you imagined. Outdoor environments are hard enough as it is in HL, in NS where the expectations for great visuals are higher it's even harder. I'm sure you can make a map more residentially based with homes and shops etc but in the end i think you'll end up with an awkward feel that will make your map seem strange with aliens in it.

If you're going to do this, please make it a cool futuristic-style city.

The easiest thing you can do is make most of the buildings just big props that you cannot enter and have the fighting go on in the streets, which doesn't fit ns gameplay very well. (There is a TS map set in a city which has a casino, some trees, a church etc. I can't recall what it's named but you might wan't to look at that for a general idea of how complex you might make your map without problems)

If your looking to do a nice looking little block where you can enter buildings then your probably looking at months of modeling and tweaking as well as keeping the players from seeing too much inside the buildings and playing with hint brushes until your eyes bleed. It sounds like a complete nightmare.

If you decide to do this you need to severely limit the w_poly usage because your going to run into problems 5 minutes into mapping unless you use models for details(chairs, cars, park benches, trees). You need to keep models simple, entity usage low and see to it that things are occluded very well.

Ah, I remember that map... ts_urban I believe it was...

Now that I think about it, their method would work.

If you don't know what they did, they made full scale buildings, but only made certain parts enterable.

Well you'll need all the luck you can have on this.
Just how would you make a city block not too open for aliens?

Lots of debris... overturned cars, et cetera.

And, it'll probably be kind of dark, that should be an advantage...

i would suggest a fully enclosed map to preserve gameplay, but with walkways and roads made in such a manner that you can see lots of building tops to give the illusion of a massive city, even if you do not have access to most of it.
bladerunner in a bubble, or something.
oh yes, and what are urban battles without some func_tanks ~:D j/k