Hello,
I have recently started to test my map publicly and want opinions on how to better the map. It is available on US servers.
The map is a survival based action game with the following features:
-Day to Night transitions with increasingly stronger enemies every night until the end boss.
-Limited resources requiring strategic decisions on how to expand and defend your territory based on space and time.
-Control strategic points on the map for cash flow and supply.
-You have soldiers ordered by the dozens and delivered to you by dropships.
-Your Commander's experience level is saved every game you win and gets more powerful if you continue to win. Use ability points to improve your Commander and unlock special units specific to each Commander.
-Due to constraints of land space you must pick and choose your allies and enemies. Killing other players can be rewarding, but may not make you any friends.
-Lots of upgrades, you must choose what to upgrade strategically based on limited time and resources. A building system to create bases that must be created on established perimeter (similar to zerg buildings on creep).
-Full game lasts 1 hour.
-Multiple game modes change game play drastically.
Game was designed to pit you with a tough challenge of dealing with vision, time, cash, ammo, and space as valuable resources of survival against waves of infested aliens. You may have to make war on other Commanders in order to survive. Every decision may assure your survival or doom. The game mechanics are fairly unique and possibily confusing for beginners.
Please give me feedback, comments for additions, suggestions etc... Game is still in development based on what others think.
Any map that can be ruined by a disgruntled player is pretty awfully designed.
With a unit that can create 20 other units, and no limit on the number of that unit you may have, you can rapidly throw down 400 units in the middle of a battle and bring a grinding halt to the game with ungodly lag.
Funding Centers are pretty useless when the Command Beacon does the job better, and you can actually build those without worrying about capturing them and powering them.
As of right now, once your learn to play, the game is very easy and requires no teamwork to win. Maybe put in a difficulty setting?
Ammo needs to be tweaked, a version ago it was very difficult to have enough ammo and now it's way to easy to have just enough.
Also the timers on some of the upgrades need to be lowered, for example making perimeter markers attack enemies has an insane timer on it, and unit attack, only thirty second time or upgraded construction, still a large timer but upgraded turrets and upgraded bunker are all far superior to a perimeter attacking someone. All in all with the timers on the upgrades the game is generally over before I have time to play around with any of them.
I remember a version ago you spoke of an upgrade to the commander and being able to save him... it seems fun, I actually really want it since commander is only good for funding stations atm, but I wonder if it'll harm the pvp aspect.. Then again if the mode had a hard mode where everyone had to work together... :)
Just my two cents.. hopefully you can get something out of my rambling.
Thank you both for your critic. First of all: A52BcE your comments seem to be less constructive but thank you for your view, actually I feel the same with the Command Beacons, they weren't intended to replace funding centers and I will be adjusting the price point to hopefully a more appropriate one. Its hard to foresee what people will do in your map sometimes, I did alot from scratch and worked hard on alot of aspects.. so I imagined it would not be a perfect picture right away, which is why it is indeed beta.
As for not having a unit cap, it is untrue, or at least supposed to be. You are greatly capped when you max out the funding centers you own, but as you said the Command Beacons kind of screw that aspect since you just build lots of those. I hope to fix it and still make Command Beacons worth building.
To Wanderer8, thank you for these suggestions, I will be releasing another version tonight with some updates and fixes to bugs I have found. I hope to do some more balancing based on strategies I have seen from other players. I like your ideas with the research and will lower the armored perimeter pricepoint and time.
However, by design I try to make it so players have lots of choices they can make on how to play and win the game, and thus I hoped to not make it possible to research a majority of the upgrades in a single game, one can do the smaller, less expensive ones, or save up and buy the longer more expensive ones.
I will likely add in difficulty settings in the future once I hammer out all of the bugs and imbalances in the present! Also as for your Commander being saved, The Commander's experience should be saved if you live through to victory. It should be loaded next time you play. If you find a bug in this please let me know! I have tested it some and haven't found any problems yet.
I will also tweak the ammo a bit more and see how it fares. Thanks for playing and I appreciate the comments
I am not a professional developer and do this in my spare time. I worker hard on this map so I hope to make it enjoyable for others based on their suggestions.
There seems to be a bug with the commander experience I think. I won a game and my commander started as level 3 for the next game. I also won that game, but after starting a new one, my commander was back at level 1 with no experience. Not sure why that happened.
I think I found a bug where if you died but stayed to watch the game win (IE your commander is dead) then it will force a save with no commander (making you have 0 experience). I fixed this, but is this the scenario you encountered?
Bugs: well there were a lot, but the one that ticked me off the most is that people can force you to show your location and vision. All they have to do is build a communications building and if they share their vision with you, it automatically shares yours right back with them, even if you don't want to. I tried going into mine and turning it off, but then they just went back into theirs and turned it back on.
@Grimshad: Go
Doh, I was working on this late last night, that was something i threw in to help me test if everything was working.. guess I forgot to take it out! Fixing it now! Not sure about the Ally chat, I thought neutral players are considered allies but perhaps I was wrong, I cant force the allied chat at the start and hopefully that will fix the allied chat issue.
Ammo was much better this time around. I actually had to buy the ammo upgrade to deal with an ammo shortage I never expected.
Funny I just beat this game for the third time and noticed at the bottom right that I could get upgrades with my commando lol, I guess I didn't notice the commando exp saving because he must have been reset somehow for me, since I've gotten him to level three and seen him level one a game after.
Anyways, I'll keep playing and see if anything else comes to mind.
Er nevermind on what I said before about ammo... I just found out that command beacons are very op. I built about ten of them, very quickly I might add and never had a shortage of cash or ammo. Maybe have them scale in price? First one 80, next one 160, next one 240 or 320, etc.
Thank you for your suggestion Wanderer, I noticed people have been massing Command Beacons, it wasn't my intention for them to be used this way but I had to find a way to nerf the ability to build them without throwing off other mechanics or making them useless (in other words crowding your base around just 1 instead of expanding). I was throwing around the idea to limiting the number you can build based off of how many funding centers you own, but I liked your idea better as it preserves what I hoped to accomplish a bit better. I did nerf their resource rate slightly, its more of a crutch than a main way tog et resources. It is there incase someone lose most or all of their funding centers, they can still muster enough to keep kicking rather than come back with a gigantic army in your face.
In the newest version I updated it with more bug fixes.. hopefully its closer to being bug free now. Still needs much more testing though. Also some more balance changes! Hopefully its closer to being right on for difficulty.. it may be a tad too difficult though. Let me know!
The alliance and attacking seems a little buggy. I had a guy start attacking me, as in he hit my commander then later hit my units and then my buildings and my units just stood around. This wasn't with snipers or anything, he marched into my base with heavy weapons and an assortment of other units and started attacking. Wasn't until I went into my alliance menu and broke the alliance that I was able to defend myself, which if the other guy had better units might have been the end of me.
Ended up being a pretty amusing game. I was helping this one guy out from start, sending units his way to help him defend. So had about about a third of my force in his base. Suddenly a second player starts attacking me and I use all resources to defend and attack him, meanwhile the guy who i'm defending starts yelling at me to ally with him and I tell him that I have no minerals. So he breaks the alliance and kills all the troops I have defending him, which I should have been able to handle if the alliance broke properly instead of my troops just standing there. Then after my final battle with the initial aggressor the soul collector attacks my base, I kill him, and the game ends.
I made a big update with lots of bug fixes and minor tweaks, still trying to get command beacons to be more conservatively used and the difficulty to be appropriate. I need lots of feedback on difficulty, too easy, too hard? I will update some more tomorrow, I have to go do the Christmas thing.
Also, I am going to make a big change, soon natives won't bother to attack players right away. they will all move to center of map and attack anything in their way. There will be a city core there, if destroyed, natives aim for players and there will be new natives spawning from within the city. So now this introduces a little bit of teamwork needed to prevent the core from being destroyed. Also give the inner players something to do. I would like this core to be destroyed eventually.. so it is inevitable, but the game will be much easier the longer players hold it.
As far as fighting natives go thus far it's way to easy. Still not having any problems with any type of resources. Then again I'm usually not playing full house games and manage to grab around 3 funding stations each game. However, when I do play larger games, depending on map position, I barely see any natives, if I do see them at all.
Also, even with it's scaling cost the beacon still seems overpowered. It gives ammo,cash, units, and lets you survive the game. Maybe, separate it into two buildings? Perhaps make the supply depot a building that scales in cost and gives ammo/cash while the beacon just lets you survive and summon units.
The exp saving after each game is still buggy I think. It likes to reset back to nothing after a couple or more wins. I didn't stay and watch the game after dying (thought never even crossed my mind).
It seems like the natives like to attack certain players more than others, and as players die you start to see more natives come after you. Maybe the spawn rate just increases later in game, but it appears like i never get attacked by anything until a few others have died.
The game has become much more challenging now that the command beacons are more expensive. I've encounter this bug where I put ghosts into my bunkers and they would all die before the bunker gets destroyed. It happened several times, and from what I've seen, only to the ghost units. Is this intended?
I do not know if this is a bug, it may have been intentional, but I understand that the Command Beacons now give 3/5+ cash per interval. I was under the assumption that constructing a Pylon next to one or having one placed where the Command Beacon is within the Pylon's radius would "power up" the Command Beacon so it would return to 5/5+ cash per interval.
I do not know if there is a required upgrade for it instead of requiring a Pylon since I have yet to obtain victory as of the current update.
I don't believe the problem I'm having with garrisoned units is against the Brood Lord. In day 1 during the very first wave against the regular infested units, my ghosts who are in the bunkers will all die and then the bunker gets destroyed afterwards. This game used to be playable solo but not anymore. During day 1, you get probably over 100 units that come attack you and they do I think 20-30 damage each? Yeah... once they get to your units everything just drops like flies cause they all die in 3-4 hits. Even when I spend all my money during the beginning getting just units and supply depots for ammo, I can't survive past day 2. This explains why so many people leave early on in the game. Also, I managed to win a game, miraculously, and the exp for the commander didn't save. The map is kind of fun, but with the amount of bugs in it right now it's just frustrating.
Thank you all for your feedback and Merry Christmas, I have been doing some updating and I think I hammered out most of the bugs mentioned here, including: the brood lord killing units inside bunkers (I have not been able to replicate units dying in bunkers otherwise @AlwaysImagine, if there is a specific case I am missing please let me know!), Command Beacons should be more fair, resources should be more clutch (hopefully), and then some!
I know there are bugs and balance issues, this is why it is labelled as a Beta right now, if you are tired of testing a partial product, please give me some time, once the map is complete I will remove the beta from it and I request you try it again then. Thank you!
copy and paste of updates from map:
-Native creatures will try to attack and destroy the 4 City Cores, once destroyed they will begin spawning extra within the city. The idea is to protect these.
-Units with detection for cloaked units has had radius reduced to not make cloaked units completely useless.
-Command Beacons now function more as intended. You can only build a limited number (3). You can be able to build more by researching the upgrade and by killing other player's command beacons.
-Slight health upgrade to skirmisher.
-Fix to Gargoyle (Brood Lord) that was damaging units inside bunkers.
I also believe I streamlined the bank saving code for Commander's exp from game to game, I tested it under the defeat and win conditions and it worked fine when I tested it solo, I can't replicate any errors as of the moment, if anyone suffers from exp reset issue since this last update please let me know and pay close attention to the possible circumstances that occurred. Otherwise, hopefully its done with, I hate dealing with the save banks, they are.. touchy.
I can't test it online today so if anyone finds further bugs with it let me know, I imagine how aggravating it is having your exp reset.
Fighting the natives is way too easy last time i played (2 days ago). As far as the alliances(as of 2 days ago) everyone should start out enemies, because I too had the problem of people attacking me and I couldn't attack back because I had no communications building to break the alliance I was never in in the first place.
Veterancy commander ability the word Experienced is misspelt.
EDIT: just played today, the difficulty was nice. had a couple weird things happen like peoples structures randomly blowing up during the day, i figured it was sabotage, then i realized that there was noone left except people who were allied.
The other thing is, when people stay and watch, they tend to be lame and constantly ping the map so u can't see anything and it lags the game to all hell. Need to make it so "spectators" cannot ping the map
Hello,
I have recently started to test my map publicly and want opinions on how to better the map. It is available on US servers.
The map is a survival based action game with the following features:
-Day to Night transitions with increasingly stronger enemies every night until the end boss.
-Limited resources requiring strategic decisions on how to expand and defend your territory based on space and time.
-Control strategic points on the map for cash flow and supply.
-You have soldiers ordered by the dozens and delivered to you by dropships.
-Your Commander's experience level is saved every game you win and gets more powerful if you continue to win. Use ability points to improve your Commander and unlock special units specific to each Commander.
-Due to constraints of land space you must pick and choose your allies and enemies. Killing other players can be rewarding, but may not make you any friends.
-Lots of upgrades, you must choose what to upgrade strategically based on limited time and resources. A building system to create bases that must be created on established perimeter (similar to zerg buildings on creep).
-Full game lasts 1 hour.
-Multiple game modes change game play drastically.
Game was designed to pit you with a tough challenge of dealing with vision, time, cash, ammo, and space as valuable resources of survival against waves of infested aliens. You may have to make war on other Commanders in order to survive. Every decision may assure your survival or doom. The game mechanics are fairly unique and possibily confusing for beginners.
Please give me feedback, comments for additions, suggestions etc... Game is still in development based on what others think.
Any map that can be ruined by a disgruntled player is pretty awfully designed.
With a unit that can create 20 other units, and no limit on the number of that unit you may have, you can rapidly throw down 400 units in the middle of a battle and bring a grinding halt to the game with ungodly lag.
Funding Centers are pretty useless when the Command Beacon does the job better, and you can actually build those without worrying about capturing them and powering them.
@A52BcE: Go
As of right now, once your learn to play, the game is very easy and requires no teamwork to win. Maybe put in a difficulty setting? Ammo needs to be tweaked, a version ago it was very difficult to have enough ammo and now it's way to easy to have just enough. Also the timers on some of the upgrades need to be lowered, for example making perimeter markers attack enemies has an insane timer on it, and unit attack, only thirty second time or upgraded construction, still a large timer but upgraded turrets and upgraded bunker are all far superior to a perimeter attacking someone. All in all with the timers on the upgrades the game is generally over before I have time to play around with any of them.
I remember a version ago you spoke of an upgrade to the commander and being able to save him... it seems fun, I actually really want it since commander is only good for funding stations atm, but I wonder if it'll harm the pvp aspect.. Then again if the mode had a hard mode where everyone had to work together... :)
Just my two cents.. hopefully you can get something out of my rambling.
@A52BcE: Go
Thank you both for your critic. First of all: A52BcE your comments seem to be less constructive but thank you for your view, actually I feel the same with the Command Beacons, they weren't intended to replace funding centers and I will be adjusting the price point to hopefully a more appropriate one. Its hard to foresee what people will do in your map sometimes, I did alot from scratch and worked hard on alot of aspects.. so I imagined it would not be a perfect picture right away, which is why it is indeed beta.
As for not having a unit cap, it is untrue, or at least supposed to be. You are greatly capped when you max out the funding centers you own, but as you said the Command Beacons kind of screw that aspect since you just build lots of those. I hope to fix it and still make Command Beacons worth building.
To Wanderer8, thank you for these suggestions, I will be releasing another version tonight with some updates and fixes to bugs I have found. I hope to do some more balancing based on strategies I have seen from other players. I like your ideas with the research and will lower the armored perimeter pricepoint and time.
However, by design I try to make it so players have lots of choices they can make on how to play and win the game, and thus I hoped to not make it possible to research a majority of the upgrades in a single game, one can do the smaller, less expensive ones, or save up and buy the longer more expensive ones.
I will likely add in difficulty settings in the future once I hammer out all of the bugs and imbalances in the present! Also as for your Commander being saved, The Commander's experience should be saved if you live through to victory. It should be loaded next time you play. If you find a bug in this please let me know! I have tested it some and haven't found any problems yet.
I will also tweak the ammo a bit more and see how it fares. Thanks for playing and I appreciate the comments
I am not a professional developer and do this in my spare time. I worker hard on this map so I hope to make it enjoyable for others based on their suggestions.
Thanks!
There seems to be a bug with the commander experience I think. I won a game and my commander started as level 3 for the next game. I also won that game, but after starting a new one, my commander was back at level 1 with no experience. Not sure why that happened.
@AlwaysImagine: Go
I think I found a bug where if you died but stayed to watch the game win (IE your commander is dead) then it will force a save with no commander (making you have 0 experience). I fixed this, but is this the scenario you encountered?
Bugs: well there were a lot, but the one that ticked me off the most is that people can force you to show your location and vision. All they have to do is build a communications building and if they share their vision with you, it automatically shares yours right back with them, even if you don't want to. I tried going into mine and turning it off, but then they just went back into theirs and turned it back on.
Also: You can't ally chat with your allies...
@Grimshad: Go Doh, I was working on this late last night, that was something i threw in to help me test if everything was working.. guess I forgot to take it out! Fixing it now! Not sure about the Ally chat, I thought neutral players are considered allies but perhaps I was wrong, I cant force the allied chat at the start and hopefully that will fix the allied chat issue.
Ammo was much better this time around. I actually had to buy the ammo upgrade to deal with an ammo shortage I never expected.
Funny I just beat this game for the third time and noticed at the bottom right that I could get upgrades with my commando lol, I guess I didn't notice the commando exp saving because he must have been reset somehow for me, since I've gotten him to level three and seen him level one a game after. Anyways, I'll keep playing and see if anything else comes to mind.
Er nevermind on what I said before about ammo... I just found out that command beacons are very op. I built about ten of them, very quickly I might add and never had a shortage of cash or ammo. Maybe have them scale in price? First one 80, next one 160, next one 240 or 320, etc.
@Wanderer8: Go
Thank you for your suggestion Wanderer, I noticed people have been massing Command Beacons, it wasn't my intention for them to be used this way but I had to find a way to nerf the ability to build them without throwing off other mechanics or making them useless (in other words crowding your base around just 1 instead of expanding). I was throwing around the idea to limiting the number you can build based off of how many funding centers you own, but I liked your idea better as it preserves what I hoped to accomplish a bit better. I did nerf their resource rate slightly, its more of a crutch than a main way tog et resources. It is there incase someone lose most or all of their funding centers, they can still muster enough to keep kicking rather than come back with a gigantic army in your face.
In the newest version I updated it with more bug fixes.. hopefully its closer to being bug free now. Still needs much more testing though. Also some more balance changes! Hopefully its closer to being right on for difficulty.. it may be a tad too difficult though. Let me know!
@Abacus142: Go
The alliance and attacking seems a little buggy. I had a guy start attacking me, as in he hit my commander then later hit my units and then my buildings and my units just stood around. This wasn't with snipers or anything, he marched into my base with heavy weapons and an assortment of other units and started attacking. Wasn't until I went into my alliance menu and broke the alliance that I was able to defend myself, which if the other guy had better units might have been the end of me.
Ended up being a pretty amusing game. I was helping this one guy out from start, sending units his way to help him defend. So had about about a third of my force in his base. Suddenly a second player starts attacking me and I use all resources to defend and attack him, meanwhile the guy who i'm defending starts yelling at me to ally with him and I tell him that I have no minerals. So he breaks the alliance and kills all the troops I have defending him, which I should have been able to handle if the alliance broke properly instead of my troops just standing there. Then after my final battle with the initial aggressor the soul collector attacks my base, I kill him, and the game ends.
@Wanderer8: Go
I made a big update with lots of bug fixes and minor tweaks, still trying to get command beacons to be more conservatively used and the difficulty to be appropriate. I need lots of feedback on difficulty, too easy, too hard? I will update some more tomorrow, I have to go do the Christmas thing.
Also, I am going to make a big change, soon natives won't bother to attack players right away. they will all move to center of map and attack anything in their way. There will be a city core there, if destroyed, natives aim for players and there will be new natives spawning from within the city. So now this introduces a little bit of teamwork needed to prevent the core from being destroyed. Also give the inner players something to do. I would like this core to be destroyed eventually.. so it is inevitable, but the game will be much easier the longer players hold it.
@Abacus142: Go
As far as fighting natives go thus far it's way to easy. Still not having any problems with any type of resources. Then again I'm usually not playing full house games and manage to grab around 3 funding stations each game. However, when I do play larger games, depending on map position, I barely see any natives, if I do see them at all. Also, even with it's scaling cost the beacon still seems overpowered. It gives ammo,cash, units, and lets you survive the game. Maybe, separate it into two buildings? Perhaps make the supply depot a building that scales in cost and gives ammo/cash while the beacon just lets you survive and summon units.
The exp saving after each game is still buggy I think. It likes to reset back to nothing after a couple or more wins. I didn't stay and watch the game after dying (thought never even crossed my mind). It seems like the natives like to attack certain players more than others, and as players die you start to see more natives come after you. Maybe the spawn rate just increases later in game, but it appears like i never get attacked by anything until a few others have died. The game has become much more challenging now that the command beacons are more expensive. I've encounter this bug where I put ghosts into my bunkers and they would all die before the bunker gets destroyed. It happened several times, and from what I've seen, only to the ghost units. Is this intended?
@AlwaysImagine: Go
I believe the problem you are having with the garrisoned units is the Brood Lord. He damages units inside bunkers, unfortunately.
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I do not know if this is a bug, it may have been intentional, but I understand that the Command Beacons now give 3/5+ cash per interval. I was under the assumption that constructing a Pylon next to one or having one placed where the Command Beacon is within the Pylon's radius would "power up" the Command Beacon so it would return to 5/5+ cash per interval.
I do not know if there is a required upgrade for it instead of requiring a Pylon since I have yet to obtain victory as of the current update.
I don't believe the problem I'm having with garrisoned units is against the Brood Lord. In day 1 during the very first wave against the regular infested units, my ghosts who are in the bunkers will all die and then the bunker gets destroyed afterwards. This game used to be playable solo but not anymore. During day 1, you get probably over 100 units that come attack you and they do I think 20-30 damage each? Yeah... once they get to your units everything just drops like flies cause they all die in 3-4 hits. Even when I spend all my money during the beginning getting just units and supply depots for ammo, I can't survive past day 2. This explains why so many people leave early on in the game. Also, I managed to win a game, miraculously, and the exp for the commander didn't save. The map is kind of fun, but with the amount of bugs in it right now it's just frustrating.
@AlwaysImagine: Go
Thank you all for your feedback and Merry Christmas, I have been doing some updating and I think I hammered out most of the bugs mentioned here, including: the brood lord killing units inside bunkers (I have not been able to replicate units dying in bunkers otherwise @AlwaysImagine, if there is a specific case I am missing please let me know!), Command Beacons should be more fair, resources should be more clutch (hopefully), and then some!
I know there are bugs and balance issues, this is why it is labelled as a Beta right now, if you are tired of testing a partial product, please give me some time, once the map is complete I will remove the beta from it and I request you try it again then. Thank you!
copy and paste of updates from map:
-Native creatures will try to attack and destroy the 4 City Cores, once destroyed they will begin spawning extra within the city. The idea is to protect these.
-Units with detection for cloaked units has had radius reduced to not make cloaked units completely useless.
-Command Beacons now function more as intended. You can only build a limited number (3). You can be able to build more by researching the upgrade and by killing other player's command beacons.
-Slight health upgrade to skirmisher.
-Fix to Gargoyle (Brood Lord) that was damaging units inside bunkers.
@Abacus142: Go
I also believe I streamlined the bank saving code for Commander's exp from game to game, I tested it under the defeat and win conditions and it worked fine when I tested it solo, I can't replicate any errors as of the moment, if anyone suffers from exp reset issue since this last update please let me know and pay close attention to the possible circumstances that occurred. Otherwise, hopefully its done with, I hate dealing with the save banks, they are.. touchy.
I can't test it online today so if anyone finds further bugs with it let me know, I imagine how aggravating it is having your exp reset.
Fighting the natives is way too easy last time i played (2 days ago). As far as the alliances(as of 2 days ago) everyone should start out enemies, because I too had the problem of people attacking me and I couldn't attack back because I had no communications building to break the alliance I was never in in the first place.
Veterancy commander ability the word Experienced is misspelt.
EDIT: just played today, the difficulty was nice. had a couple weird things happen like peoples structures randomly blowing up during the day, i figured it was sabotage, then i realized that there was noone left except people who were allied.
The other thing is, when people stay and watch, they tend to be lame and constantly ping the map so u can't see anything and it lags the game to all hell. Need to make it so "spectators" cannot ping the map