Hey all. The long awaited and highly anticipated sequel to Stukov - Man or Monster is here! For those who don't know, these maps are like a mixture of tug of war, special forces elite, and story. One cool feature is the ability to interact with the nearby civilians and choose to subjugate them (infest/destroy/etc) or spare them. Unlike Man or Monster, each spared civilian area will yield different rewards. Also, depending on the hero you are using, you will only be able to choose certain options (so be sure to try all the heroes at some point :) ) While the game is in Beta, the majority of the gameplay is finished. A lot of what I want to add in the future is bonus stuff like more story (especially interactions between heroes), easter eggs, more heroes, and such. Also, testing for bugs and balancing is needed, especially for when three players (the max amount) are present. (Note: Because of uncertain balancing, there are a ton of difficulties you can choose from, as well as an option in the top right to start off with additional resources. The map does not balance for number of players, but fewer players will start with more resources)
Hopefully I'll have some time later to put together a video or something :)
The map has just been freshly published to the American and European servers: "Stukov and Pals"
Potential ideas for new stuff:
Easter eggs that I won't mention here :P
More unlockable wave units (currently there is one)
Heroes
Changeling - Able to morph into all of the heroes of similar size (so not the infested mothership :P), but can only use their lvl 1 abilities
Siege tank - Defensive hero. Able to spawn a spotter unit that can be upgraded to: 1. Farther vision 2. See up hills 3. deal some aoe damage upon death. Sentry shield ability (maybe). Faster attack for short period, but then a weapon cooldown (similar to tookus).
I enjoyed the first one, so I was pretty happy to give this one a go. Grabbed a friend and went at it.
Balance
The early-game is nicely balanced. The waves are just strong enough to make losing possible if you're careless. Some of the Zerg units seem to be pretty bad value. Basically anything that can't survive a siege tank or a hellbat/firebat (the AI has a LOT of these) seems useless. That pretty much meant brutalisks and ultralisks only. Anything else just got chewed up. Rather than having the other units buffed, I'd probably prefer to see the AI have fewer siege tanks. It gets pretty insane at times.
Lag
The lag becomes gamebreaking after a while. I mean, so bad that my client refused to even let me leave the game. The path that the AI units take is so long that the whole map gets filled with zerg units. There's some rocks which I can only assume are there to shorten the path, but we couldn't figure out how to destroy them. Infesting towns makes this problem 10x worse. The zombies are so slow that they tend to get stuck at certain waypoints and just clog up huge portions of the map, blocking your own units which adds even more issues. I'd strongly recommend giving a different bonus for infesting towns. Maybe a few aberrations that spawn periodically instead of zombies?
Heroes
Stukov seems fine as a hero. Fungal Growth seemed a bit weak compared to his other abilities, but then that's probably down to how many stationary siege tanks the AI relies on. Allies can't "push" past his infested terrans, meaning that you can bodyblock an allied hero in, who will then probably die to siege tanks.
The Commando has a tiny vision range. Seems like he should have the best vision range.
The General is a really nice concept, but his mineral income method is so weird. You have to spawn units (which cost minerals) to destroy units (which grant maybe 1-2% of your unit's cost). I'd rather see the headquarters have energy, and calling in units costing energy. You'd then have the usual assortment of energy upgrades for him.
Infested Mothership isn't biological. I guess it makes sense, but it does kinda mean that you can't interact with basically all zerg healing. Prefer to see this unit be biological so that it can actually be healed!
Didn't try the rest!
Other
The Hero Assassins. Oh god why. They sit in your base, permanently cloaked, waiting to 2-shot you when you respawn. I'd really, strongly recommend putting these only on the harder difficulties. The effect they have on the game is "okay, I'll move my hero over here and- why is my hero dead? Oh..."
Late game vespene income is crazy-high.
Base defenses are so not value for money. Personally I think they should respawn like the nydus worms do.
I liked the map overall. Just a bit rough around the edges at the moment!
Note: Currently I have a slightly updated version on European server (Haven't been able to upload to American since last night... I don't know why). Mainly just price/income changes. Most notably, now for every 10 enemy units killed, each player gets 5 minerals (Lots of people had issues with getting enough minerals). Also been wondering if capturable mineral generating structures might be a good idea.
Lagging units is definitely an issue. The Updated European map has increased zerg prices, and decreased defenses. I have been wondering about buffing health/survivability of zerg units while either keeping the increased prices, or increasing them more. The only other things is then if minerals ever end up becoming too excessive, I may need another mineral sink (I'm thinking some sort of temporary hero buff shop, joined with the gas selling spot). As for siege tanks, I think it could make sense to get rid of the siege tanks that are in the unit waves themselves. But I think i'd like to keep the defensive stationary tanks. What do you think? Also in case you're unaware, there are a few secret type of units who can see up cliffs. (One of the spared civilians. Or if you destroy about 8 civilians (of the ten) you get a neat powerful unit :) )
I like your idea about doing aberrations instead of zombies. Perhaps I'll have each civ spot generate one tanked up abberation every minute or so.
Commando - Good point, probably just an oversight on my part and how much in initial testing I relied on having the entire map revealed :)
The general - I did do a bad job at mentioning how some income worked. For every 100 minerals the AI made, it distributes 5 to players (25 to the general). This probably was too small. With the addition of the above mentioned income addition, I'll probably wait to tweak this further, to see how it plays out. The energy for units does seem like a good idea. And since he already has a supply limit, it couldn't become too OP. I would probably just need to find what the best energy regen rate and max amount would be (as well as costs for units). Come to think of it, this seems like an even better idea since I've increased the wave unit costs, haha.
Infested Mothership - Good point. From a gameplay standpoint, perhaps I should do this. I forget if I made him regen his health when he recalled, but the zerg healing couldn't hurt, especially since half his "health" is shields anyways. On the concept of zerg healing, I've been wondering if I should add either, a purchasable healing defense structure, or something at home base (besides the queen already there). But I wonder if this would take away from more support healing type heroes such as Esmerelda (Standard queen heal but more powerful) or the Omega Captain (can lay down a tower that increases regeneration).
Hero assassin's, I meant for the purchasable spine crawlers to be the main defense against these, as they have detection. The Lair should have detection to see them, but I guess they must make their way past even that. When I have time, I'm thinking about attaching spine crawlers to the Lair. In the meantime perhaps I'll just add some pro spine crawlers from the beginning close to the minerals. Also I could dramatically decrease the attack power of the hero assassins on lower difficulties. say somewhere around 50-100 on low difficulties. They still do that debuff of making your hero walk slower which can be detrimental if your heroes are too out of position with enemies, but they wouldn't really be able to single handedly kill you :)
Vespene - Yea, that'd be the spawning trigger for it that I made very generous on the easy difficulties. I didn't think the easy difficulties would be so prominently played. Little did I know the waves would be so crazy on the hard difficulties, haha. In the testing of the game I was basically using a super unit to defend while I tested other stuff, so the exact power of the waves was never really felt.
Base Defenses - I definitely want these to be worth more for you money than attack waves. Since I did halve all the prices, maybe this will work. I'll let it play out for now, but in the future I may do buffs. Such as giving strong armor/health buffs to units that spawn from them.
Finally, Thank you for the feedback, it is much appreciated. Kind of hard to know what to improve at times. I have night class in a few hours, but afterwards I'll likely implement some of these changes (Likely I'll probably only be able to implement then to the European server tho :/ )
So I kind of caved and did end up removing several siege tanks throughout the map. Tho I kind of had to because I also decreased spawning times, and it would have taken forever or been impossible to break through certain areas. Hopefully this will all go towards greatly reducing lag.
A new unit that I'm thinking of having as a secret mini-boss. Defeating him on a hard enough difficulty and winning the match would then let you play as a similar version (with abilities).
So I updated the mineral sharing stuff. I got rid of the old things, and made your typical everyone gets the bounty when the unit dies sort of thing. Though I made a % slider in the difficulty menu so you can adjust it so that allies get less of a % of that full bounty amount. I played a game with 100% shared bounty, and I think overall it was a better experience (game went much faster too, on easy). However, I ended up with a ton of extra minerals at the end (and didn't want to buy tons of extra units cuz of lag). I think I'll increase the price of zerg units, but also give them survivable buffs. Also I think I'll change up the swarmling into a bigger unit with stats somewhere between a zergling and ultralisk (and you only purchase one instead of 4 upon buying). I have also been wanting to implement a shop for temporary hero buffs for awhile. This could be a good mineral sink as well. I think I'll have the prices change depending upon how many minerals are shared.
I would suggest replacing swarmling with pygalisk, as well as adding air units for the zerg to purchase. (Mutalisk, scourge, devourer, corruptor, guardian, brood lord). With costs balanced.
Also can you fix the death model for the gatekeeper?
Be sure to check out the extension mod: Hots Custom Map support on NA and EU, Despite the name it greatly expands the roster of options for the default 3 races and is updated all the way to NCO.
TBH, I've never really been that sure why the death model just balloons like that, though it looks kind of funny. I might look into it more sometime, but it's not really a priority. Pygalisk could def be a good substitute. I'll think about it.
Sadly I still can't publish to NA, but I can publish to EU.
I started work on the temporary buff shop, as a mineral sink (particularly those using 100% shared minerals :P). Though it was something I wanted to do before I even needed a mineral sink haha. There's currently one cool buff that activates upon death of your hero. It's called friendly parasite. Your hero is injected with a parasite and when you die, it consumes your body and forms an egg. That egg hatches shortly afterwards and a powerful unit spawns (this unit is very powerful but currently has a timed life of only a minute). The price of this buff currently ranges between 2k-5k depending on how many minerals you're sharing.
I will add more temporary buffs in the future that last until either some time passes, or your hero dies. I hope to think up some more cool ones like the parasite, but for the moment I'm only thinking of boring ones like +5 armor for 10 gametime minutes/til death xP.
Been a while since I worked on the map. A lot of people complained about the "click me" not working though for the longest idea I had no idea why it wouldn't work. Finally realized that there's a player option to not be able to select neutral and enemy units. So I've forced that particular player option to the way I want it. Should fix that problem. And hopefully there's nothing crazy that's been added since I last uploaded... lol
Changeling Hero is finally done and ready for in game testing, both balance-wise and for any bugs. He can morph into several of the other heroes and take on most of their abilities (there's a few tier 4 ones he doesn't get). Because of his versatility, this could make him one of the best heroes, but he does cost a lot more gas to fully upgrade than other heroes, so keep that in mind.
Just played the map on the Arcade and unfortunately I have to say it is pretty much a huge disaster at the time of posting. The core gameplay has the potential to be fun and addictive but the way it currently is implemented makes one want to rage quit and never play again.
I chose the Infested Mothership as it sounded cool and I like the Protoss. Instead of a flying doom ship I got a block of rusted metal. Forcefield is not a particularly useful ability in this sort of map as playing defensive is not helpeful in a map where you need to push to win. Cloak field is practically useless since most enemy bases have detectors and at the times you do not have detectors the enemies will focus you down in a second or two as you are the only visible target. Psionic storm was great however (cannot flaw it). It moved painfeully slowly, I must have spent half the game just moving back to where the action was. Its speed would not be an issue if it could regenerate energy to cast abilities, but until you buy upgrades you need to warp back to the main base every time you want energy and then crawl back at snail speed to combat just to quickly need to warp back again. Despite being a ground unit, it is the only unit that missile turrets could hit meaning that not only siege tanks hit you, but so did missile turrets even though you are not flying. Most cliffs it could not even go on top because the collision radius is larger than the ramp width and since there is no other way to get LoS of the tanks on top of there you just had to grind your teeth away in frustration while Siege Tanks blew up your army until some skinny hero comes and reveals them. It made creep nicely, but I am still unsure of the purpose of that. When the boss came I lasted 2 seconds despite being fully upgraded and at full health.
Hero balance is one thing, but what really got me was the spawn mechanics. By the time the boss spawned I had endured 15 minutes of playing at 1-2 FPS. No well made map should ever subject players to so many active moving units all the time as no computer can cope with it. It got to the stage that one player dropped and the rest of the team wished we could remove the weaker spawns just to have more FPS to play with. There really is no excuse for making the units walk across the entire map to get to the enemy base, the same gameplay could occur with them spawning much closer and with 1/4 as many moving units in each lane at any given time. Cheap spawns really are useless late game, instead Brutalisks, Ultralisks and powerful range units like Hunters are the way to go and I am pretty sure that at the moment people would pay minerals just to remove trash to improve the game performance.
Finally after enduring low frame rate for an overly long time we reached the boss. I found myself dead as good as instantly as I could not run because somehow I got stuck down a cliff. It then proceeded to slowly push forward and constantly randomly heal for no apparent reason. At least the frame rate was better for this section as we were getting anywhere from 4 to 15 FPS. Eventually nuking and infested siege tanks took it down and we won. Before then however I made my way to cast psionic storm on him (only useful ability I have) and died practically instantly twice. I think the both of us were glad the map was finally over not so much that we won.
I suggest heavily revising the spawn system for the lanes as currently it is just too resource intensive for players to run with good performance. As the map progresses you need to remove trash (zerglings, infested terrans etc) from the spawn pool and instead add bigger stronger units (Ultralisks, Brutalisks, Hunter Killers etc). This could be done by breaking the upgrades into 3 sections called Melee, Range and Special. Melee starts with Zerglings and moves into big stuff at higher levels like Ultralisks and Brutalisks. Ranged starts with locusts (Swarm Host units) and moves into Roaches and Hydralisks before maxing at Hunter Killers and new units like Lurkers. Special starts off with units like Banelings and goes into Queens and Infestors. As people invest more minerals the power of units spawned increases but the overall number does not really increase or hits a limit early on. This way of progression still provides players with choices how to spend minerals and also solves game progression problems by removing weak trash from the early game and replacing it with superior powerful units late game.
Much like your older map, you should move the Nydus worms forward as new bases are captured. By reducing the distance spawns have to travel to reach the front line you greatly decrease the number of moveing units at any given time. Moving units (especially in tight groups with a lot of inter-unit collision) are a big source of performance problems in SC2 maps so fewer will generally mean more frame rate. I strongly suspect by reducing the distance spawns travel late game to 1/4 of what it is currently I would have had 15 FPS or more all the time which is still playable as opposed to the 1-2 FPS I was getting and that is without reducing the number of units spawned.
Secret, side quest or infested factories should work in a similar fashion with their spawns. They should spawn from the closest source to the front line to minimize walking distance. If a lot are obtained they should merge into fewer stronger units to reduce spawn amounts without reducing efficiency. For example infested colonists could turn into infested marines and then into aberrations.
Siege tanks should deal greatly reduced damage to hero units. Armor does as good as nothing to stop them and many softer hero units seem to die in a few hits. If you get targeted by the permanent siege mode tanks by the final fortress area then your hero is as good as dead and there is nothing you can do.
Please make sure all heroes can reach all parts of the terrain, The Infested Mothership is currently too big to go up many ramps. This meant that I could not kill most of the siege tanks blasting away at the troops as without going up the ramps I cannot get vision and without vision I cannot attack them.
The boss stage needs more challenge to it rather than being just plain old rigged. For example make him deal insane damage and take no damage from minions only. That way the players have to use their heroes to kill him and they can kill him that way as he does fair damage in return. Also throw in more complex abilities that encourage micro skill rather than pure stats, for example maybe airstrikes in a line which the players have to dodge (HotS boss in mission 2, Archangel) or maybe sub objectives that need to be completed to make him vulnerable to damage.
Upgrades need to be given more meaning. +2 armor is great against marines, but seeing how you only fight siege tanks and thors end game it is practically useless. 100 health also does little to boost survivability when a siege tank removes 75 life per hit odd. Some upgrades are pretty much mandatory such as the speed boost. Due to the rarity of gas, the boost from gas upgrades could be more than the mineral ones. Maybe add levels to them, eg mineral health upgrade could be done 3 times each costing more. I would recommend replacing gas armor with damage reduction as that is more useful against hard hitting units like thors.
Abilities fall under hero balancing so I do not expect them to be perfect. That said I was quite disappointed with the abilities my hero had and did not even bother maxing out any other than Psionic Storm. In a game about offense it is generally not a good idea to have defensive support abilities. For example the cloaking field could not make all units invisible and instead gives all units an evasion chance (chance to not take damage when receiving damage). Forcefield could be replaced with some form of healing ability, or maybe an area debuff that slows units.
The map has potential and I will try it again in a few versions time but really needs a lot of work to be less frustrating, especially with actual gameplay performance so that one can at least play it with a reasonable frame rate. Expecting players to manage their spawns to prevent poor performance is not good design.
You do have some pretty good points, as well as a few that I think just come from only playing once, and only trying one hero. I think sometimes I forget that much of the lag can come from units just walking, even if they aren't fighting. Though I was previously hesitant about adding some forward nydus's, I think I will make some. In the previous map it was easier since there was one centralized choke point that enemy units couldn't really slip past. I think these forward ones should be purchasable by heroes, and should they die, will have to be repurchased, rather than auto-respawned. That should help with big armies slipping too far past them, uncontested. I should also finally add a way of destroying those destructible rocks to shorten the right path, prior to building a second nydus worm. I think I'll set something up shortly after that middle base (the one slightly past the cave shortcut) is taken out.
While I do have a bias against protoss (The ditsy Ted zealot after all, lol), the mothership can be annoyingly slow. That said, what's annoying to me may not be to everyone, and I did want to make several heroes that play differently. Perhaps giving the mothership a short timed buff to move speed upon birth/revive and teleporting back to base could help with the problem. Or maybe giving the ship an ability to teleport to part of the map for minerals that an ally has vision of (regular sized heroes can currently use the spore cannons for this). As for its cloaking, there's really only missile turrets near fortified areas. The cloak can still help a lot in regular lanes since few mobile units have any sort of detection.
Heroes do have their own strengths and weaknesses, and the motherships certainly isn't the big powerful units. It's better against large groups of weaker units. The most elite siege tanks at the final base can be taken out fairly easily using the Generals ability to calldown units around the tanks to maintain vision, and using his drakken laser drill to focus them. Zeek can lock them down for a good amount of time. I believe infestor can even take control of them (and the final thors as well). The general is also good against the final boss, as are units with abilities that deal powerful one shot damage from afar (snipe, corrosive blast, etc).
The boss does not heal on his own, but rather leeches health off of nearby allies. You can see it whenever a red lightning bolt goes from the boss towards one of his surrounding minions. His minions however, can heal themselves, so it's a good idea to take them out. Perhaps some of these sorts of things should be more documented, but I find people don't really bother reading tooltips and such.
Perhaps sometime I'll also do something like when 10 zerglings are purchased it switches to 1 super zergling with increased stats, but I'm still toying with the idea. I think I'll first try the forward nydus worms and destroyable rocks idea, then see how the lag is from there.
While I do have a bias against protoss (The ditsy Ted zealot after all, lol), the mothership can be annoyingly slow. That said, what's annoying to me may not be to everyone, and I did want to make several heroes that play differently. Perhaps giving the mothership a short timed buff to move speed upon birth/revive and teleporting back to base could help with the problem. Or maybe giving the ship an ability to teleport to part of the map for minerals that an ally has vision of (regular sized heroes can currently use the spore cannons for this). As for its cloaking, there's really only missile turrets near fortified areas. The cloak can still help a lot in regular lanes since few mobile units have any sort of detection.
Too bad as soon as you hit cloak all the enemy siege tanks (7 of them or more) start shooting at you with larger than one would expect range. Needless to say you are dead in 2-3 seconds from the heavy damage they do. If it cloaked yourself as well then that would really be an awesome move however.
Quote:
using the Generals ability to calldown units around the tanks to maintain vision
Who is the "Generals"? When I played the only human players were an Infestor (who dropped due to unplayable frame rate, or maybe he crashed from overheating I am unsure), A Ghost and A Mothership (me). We only won thanks to the Ghost ability to nuke up cliffs so stuff could see the tanks. Missing an important mechanic like the "Generals" would certainly explain why I struggled so much. If I could see the tanks on the cliff tops my DPS could have downed them in seconds but since I was too wide to climb up the ramps I was stuck there uselessly.
Quote:
The boss does not heal on his own, but rather leeches health off of nearby allies. You can see it whenever a red lightning bolt goes from the boss towards one of his surrounding minions.
The bolts were sub-frame due to the low frame rate I was experiencing so I did not notice any unfortunately (why I thought it was just randomly healing). This is why performance is very important to maps since when frame rate drops below 16 (20 for fast) FPS then subtle effects can be missed entirely.
Quote:
Perhaps sometime I'll also do something like when 10 zerglings are purchased it switches to 1 super zergling with increased stats, but I'm still toying with the idea. I think I'll first try the forward nydus worms and destroyable rocks idea, then see how the lag is from there.
You need some limit past which spawns simply turn off. Players would rather face restrictive limits than unplayable frame rate. An example could be no more than 300-400 active spawned units at any given time. This will encourage players to build forward worms and not leave due to very poor frame rate. From a designer perspective you want to try your best so that frame rate is high most of the time even if users try and go out their way to do inherently performance intensive activities.
Most of the performance problems likely come from all the unit on unit collisions during movement. This is why some maps can have far more moving units without such performance difficulties.
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Hey all. The long awaited and highly anticipated sequel to Stukov - Man or Monster is here! For those who don't know, these maps are like a mixture of tug of war, special forces elite, and story. One cool feature is the ability to interact with the nearby civilians and choose to subjugate them (infest/destroy/etc) or spare them. Unlike Man or Monster, each spared civilian area will yield different rewards. Also, depending on the hero you are using, you will only be able to choose certain options (so be sure to try all the heroes at some point :) ) While the game is in Beta, the majority of the gameplay is finished. A lot of what I want to add in the future is bonus stuff like more story (especially interactions between heroes), easter eggs, more heroes, and such. Also, testing for bugs and balancing is needed, especially for when three players (the max amount) are present. (Note: Because of uncertain balancing, there are a ton of difficulties you can choose from, as well as an option in the top right to start off with additional resources. The map does not balance for number of players, but fewer players will start with more resources)
Hopefully I'll have some time later to put together a video or something :)
The map has just been freshly published to the American and European servers: "Stukov and Pals"
Potential ideas for new stuff:
Easter eggs that I won't mention here :P
More unlockable wave units (currently there is one)
Heroes
Changeling - Able to morph into all of the heroes of similar size (so not the infested mothership :P), but can only use their lvl 1 abilities
Siege tank - Defensive hero. Able to spawn a spotter unit that can be upgraded to: 1. Farther vision 2. See up hills 3. deal some aoe damage upon death. Sentry shield ability (maybe). Faster attack for short period, but then a weapon cooldown (similar to tookus).
I enjoyed the first one, so I was pretty happy to give this one a go. Grabbed a friend and went at it.
Balance
The early-game is nicely balanced. The waves are just strong enough to make losing possible if you're careless. Some of the Zerg units seem to be pretty bad value. Basically anything that can't survive a siege tank or a hellbat/firebat (the AI has a LOT of these) seems useless. That pretty much meant brutalisks and ultralisks only. Anything else just got chewed up. Rather than having the other units buffed, I'd probably prefer to see the AI have fewer siege tanks. It gets pretty insane at times.
Lag
The lag becomes gamebreaking after a while. I mean, so bad that my client refused to even let me leave the game. The path that the AI units take is so long that the whole map gets filled with zerg units. There's some rocks which I can only assume are there to shorten the path, but we couldn't figure out how to destroy them. Infesting towns makes this problem 10x worse. The zombies are so slow that they tend to get stuck at certain waypoints and just clog up huge portions of the map, blocking your own units which adds even more issues. I'd strongly recommend giving a different bonus for infesting towns. Maybe a few aberrations that spawn periodically instead of zombies?
Heroes
Stukov seems fine as a hero. Fungal Growth seemed a bit weak compared to his other abilities, but then that's probably down to how many stationary siege tanks the AI relies on. Allies can't "push" past his infested terrans, meaning that you can bodyblock an allied hero in, who will then probably die to siege tanks.
The Commando has a tiny vision range. Seems like he should have the best vision range.
The General is a really nice concept, but his mineral income method is so weird. You have to spawn units (which cost minerals) to destroy units (which grant maybe 1-2% of your unit's cost). I'd rather see the headquarters have energy, and calling in units costing energy. You'd then have the usual assortment of energy upgrades for him.
Infested Mothership isn't biological. I guess it makes sense, but it does kinda mean that you can't interact with basically all zerg healing. Prefer to see this unit be biological so that it can actually be healed!
Didn't try the rest!
Other
The Hero Assassins. Oh god why. They sit in your base, permanently cloaked, waiting to 2-shot you when you respawn. I'd really, strongly recommend putting these only on the harder difficulties. The effect they have on the game is "okay, I'll move my hero over here and
- why is my hero dead? Oh..."Late game vespene income is crazy-high.
Base defenses are so not value for money. Personally I think they should respawn like the nydus worms do.
I liked the map overall. Just a bit rough around the edges at the moment!
Note: Currently I have a slightly updated version on European server (Haven't been able to upload to American since last night... I don't know why). Mainly just price/income changes. Most notably, now for every 10 enemy units killed, each player gets 5 minerals (Lots of people had issues with getting enough minerals). Also been wondering if capturable mineral generating structures might be a good idea.
Lagging units is definitely an issue. The Updated European map has increased zerg prices, and decreased defenses. I have been wondering about buffing health/survivability of zerg units while either keeping the increased prices, or increasing them more. The only other things is then if minerals ever end up becoming too excessive, I may need another mineral sink (I'm thinking some sort of temporary hero buff shop, joined with the gas selling spot). As for siege tanks, I think it could make sense to get rid of the siege tanks that are in the unit waves themselves. But I think i'd like to keep the defensive stationary tanks. What do you think? Also in case you're unaware, there are a few secret type of units who can see up cliffs. (One of the spared civilians. Or if you destroy about 8 civilians (of the ten) you get a neat powerful unit :) )
I like your idea about doing aberrations instead of zombies. Perhaps I'll have each civ spot generate one tanked up abberation every minute or so.
Commando - Good point, probably just an oversight on my part and how much in initial testing I relied on having the entire map revealed :)
The general - I did do a bad job at mentioning how some income worked. For every 100 minerals the AI made, it distributes 5 to players (25 to the general). This probably was too small. With the addition of the above mentioned income addition, I'll probably wait to tweak this further, to see how it plays out. The energy for units does seem like a good idea. And since he already has a supply limit, it couldn't become too OP. I would probably just need to find what the best energy regen rate and max amount would be (as well as costs for units). Come to think of it, this seems like an even better idea since I've increased the wave unit costs, haha.
Infested Mothership - Good point. From a gameplay standpoint, perhaps I should do this. I forget if I made him regen his health when he recalled, but the zerg healing couldn't hurt, especially since half his "health" is shields anyways. On the concept of zerg healing, I've been wondering if I should add either, a purchasable healing defense structure, or something at home base (besides the queen already there). But I wonder if this would take away from more support healing type heroes such as Esmerelda (Standard queen heal but more powerful) or the Omega Captain (can lay down a tower that increases regeneration).
Hero assassin's, I meant for the purchasable spine crawlers to be the main defense against these, as they have detection. The Lair should have detection to see them, but I guess they must make their way past even that. When I have time, I'm thinking about attaching spine crawlers to the Lair. In the meantime perhaps I'll just add some pro spine crawlers from the beginning close to the minerals. Also I could dramatically decrease the attack power of the hero assassins on lower difficulties. say somewhere around 50-100 on low difficulties. They still do that debuff of making your hero walk slower which can be detrimental if your heroes are too out of position with enemies, but they wouldn't really be able to single handedly kill you :)
Vespene - Yea, that'd be the spawning trigger for it that I made very generous on the easy difficulties. I didn't think the easy difficulties would be so prominently played. Little did I know the waves would be so crazy on the hard difficulties, haha. In the testing of the game I was basically using a super unit to defend while I tested other stuff, so the exact power of the waves was never really felt.
Base Defenses - I definitely want these to be worth more for you money than attack waves. Since I did halve all the prices, maybe this will work. I'll let it play out for now, but in the future I may do buffs. Such as giving strong armor/health buffs to units that spawn from them.
Finally, Thank you for the feedback, it is much appreciated. Kind of hard to know what to improve at times. I have night class in a few hours, but afterwards I'll likely implement some of these changes (Likely I'll probably only be able to implement then to the European server tho :/ )
So I kind of caved and did end up removing several siege tanks throughout the map. Tho I kind of had to because I also decreased spawning times, and it would have taken forever or been impossible to break through certain areas. Hopefully this will all go towards greatly reducing lag.
Stukov and Pals just sounds cheesy to me.
Looking for feedback on my custom races extension mod called "Scion Custom Races (Mod)"
@Supernova134: Go
Starcraft is full of cheese!
Now you do have a point.
Looking for feedback on my custom races extension mod called "Scion Custom Races (Mod)"
A new unit that I'm thinking of having as a secret mini-boss. Defeating him on a hard enough difficulty and winning the match would then let you play as a similar version (with abilities).
You can launch those floating banelings on attack, will look much better
@abvdzh: Go
Yea, but I'm not that advanced yet xP
So I updated the mineral sharing stuff. I got rid of the old things, and made your typical everyone gets the bounty when the unit dies sort of thing. Though I made a % slider in the difficulty menu so you can adjust it so that allies get less of a % of that full bounty amount. I played a game with 100% shared bounty, and I think overall it was a better experience (game went much faster too, on easy). However, I ended up with a ton of extra minerals at the end (and didn't want to buy tons of extra units cuz of lag). I think I'll increase the price of zerg units, but also give them survivable buffs. Also I think I'll change up the swarmling into a bigger unit with stats somewhere between a zergling and ultralisk (and you only purchase one instead of 4 upon buying). I have also been wanting to implement a shop for temporary hero buffs for awhile. This could be a good mineral sink as well. I think I'll have the prices change depending upon how many minerals are shared.
@MaskedImposter: Go
I would suggest replacing swarmling with pygalisk, as well as adding air units for the zerg to purchase. (Mutalisk, scourge, devourer, corruptor, guardian, brood lord). With costs balanced.
Also can you fix the death model for the gatekeeper?
http://www.sc2mapster.com/assets/nolanstars-textures/
Be sure to check out the extension mod: Hots Custom Map support on NA and EU, Despite the name it greatly expands the roster of options for the default 3 races and is updated all the way to NCO.
TBH, I've never really been that sure why the death model just balloons like that, though it looks kind of funny. I might look into it more sometime, but it's not really a priority. Pygalisk could def be a good substitute. I'll think about it.
Sadly I still can't publish to NA, but I can publish to EU.
I started work on the temporary buff shop, as a mineral sink (particularly those using 100% shared minerals :P). Though it was something I wanted to do before I even needed a mineral sink haha. There's currently one cool buff that activates upon death of your hero. It's called friendly parasite. Your hero is injected with a parasite and when you die, it consumes your body and forms an egg. That egg hatches shortly afterwards and a powerful unit spawns (this unit is very powerful but currently has a timed life of only a minute). The price of this buff currently ranges between 2k-5k depending on how many minerals you're sharing.
I will add more temporary buffs in the future that last until either some time passes, or your hero dies. I hope to think up some more cool ones like the parasite, but for the moment I'm only thinking of boring ones like +5 armor for 10 gametime minutes/til death xP.
I'm definitely open to ideas for cool temp buffs.
Been a while since I worked on the map. A lot of people complained about the "click me" not working though for the longest idea I had no idea why it wouldn't work. Finally realized that there's a player option to not be able to select neutral and enemy units. So I've forced that particular player option to the way I want it. Should fix that problem. And hopefully there's nothing crazy that's been added since I last uploaded... lol
Changeling Hero is finally done and ready for in game testing, both balance-wise and for any bugs. He can morph into several of the other heroes and take on most of their abilities (there's a few tier 4 ones he doesn't get). Because of his versatility, this could make him one of the best heroes, but he does cost a lot more gas to fully upgrade than other heroes, so keep that in mind.
A test for a future ability for the baneling wrangler hero. He's gonna make it raaaaaaaiiiiiiiin!
Just played the map on the Arcade and unfortunately I have to say it is pretty much a huge disaster at the time of posting. The core gameplay has the potential to be fun and addictive but the way it currently is implemented makes one want to rage quit and never play again.
I chose the Infested Mothership as it sounded cool and I like the Protoss. Instead of a flying doom ship I got a block of rusted metal. Forcefield is not a particularly useful ability in this sort of map as playing defensive is not helpeful in a map where you need to push to win. Cloak field is practically useless since most enemy bases have detectors and at the times you do not have detectors the enemies will focus you down in a second or two as you are the only visible target. Psionic storm was great however (cannot flaw it). It moved painfeully slowly, I must have spent half the game just moving back to where the action was. Its speed would not be an issue if it could regenerate energy to cast abilities, but until you buy upgrades you need to warp back to the main base every time you want energy and then crawl back at snail speed to combat just to quickly need to warp back again. Despite being a ground unit, it is the only unit that missile turrets could hit meaning that not only siege tanks hit you, but so did missile turrets even though you are not flying. Most cliffs it could not even go on top because the collision radius is larger than the ramp width and since there is no other way to get LoS of the tanks on top of there you just had to grind your teeth away in frustration while Siege Tanks blew up your army until some skinny hero comes and reveals them. It made creep nicely, but I am still unsure of the purpose of that. When the boss came I lasted 2 seconds despite being fully upgraded and at full health.
Hero balance is one thing, but what really got me was the spawn mechanics. By the time the boss spawned I had endured 15 minutes of playing at 1-2 FPS. No well made map should ever subject players to so many active moving units all the time as no computer can cope with it. It got to the stage that one player dropped and the rest of the team wished we could remove the weaker spawns just to have more FPS to play with. There really is no excuse for making the units walk across the entire map to get to the enemy base, the same gameplay could occur with them spawning much closer and with 1/4 as many moving units in each lane at any given time. Cheap spawns really are useless late game, instead Brutalisks, Ultralisks and powerful range units like Hunters are the way to go and I am pretty sure that at the moment people would pay minerals just to remove trash to improve the game performance.
Finally after enduring low frame rate for an overly long time we reached the boss. I found myself dead as good as instantly as I could not run because somehow I got stuck down a cliff. It then proceeded to slowly push forward and constantly randomly heal for no apparent reason. At least the frame rate was better for this section as we were getting anywhere from 4 to 15 FPS. Eventually nuking and infested siege tanks took it down and we won. Before then however I made my way to cast psionic storm on him (only useful ability I have) and died practically instantly twice. I think the both of us were glad the map was finally over not so much that we won.
I suggest heavily revising the spawn system for the lanes as currently it is just too resource intensive for players to run with good performance. As the map progresses you need to remove trash (zerglings, infested terrans etc) from the spawn pool and instead add bigger stronger units (Ultralisks, Brutalisks, Hunter Killers etc). This could be done by breaking the upgrades into 3 sections called Melee, Range and Special. Melee starts with Zerglings and moves into big stuff at higher levels like Ultralisks and Brutalisks. Ranged starts with locusts (Swarm Host units) and moves into Roaches and Hydralisks before maxing at Hunter Killers and new units like Lurkers. Special starts off with units like Banelings and goes into Queens and Infestors. As people invest more minerals the power of units spawned increases but the overall number does not really increase or hits a limit early on. This way of progression still provides players with choices how to spend minerals and also solves game progression problems by removing weak trash from the early game and replacing it with superior powerful units late game.
Much like your older map, you should move the Nydus worms forward as new bases are captured. By reducing the distance spawns have to travel to reach the front line you greatly decrease the number of moveing units at any given time. Moving units (especially in tight groups with a lot of inter-unit collision) are a big source of performance problems in SC2 maps so fewer will generally mean more frame rate. I strongly suspect by reducing the distance spawns travel late game to 1/4 of what it is currently I would have had 15 FPS or more all the time which is still playable as opposed to the 1-2 FPS I was getting and that is without reducing the number of units spawned.
Secret, side quest or infested factories should work in a similar fashion with their spawns. They should spawn from the closest source to the front line to minimize walking distance. If a lot are obtained they should merge into fewer stronger units to reduce spawn amounts without reducing efficiency. For example infested colonists could turn into infested marines and then into aberrations.
Siege tanks should deal greatly reduced damage to hero units. Armor does as good as nothing to stop them and many softer hero units seem to die in a few hits. If you get targeted by the permanent siege mode tanks by the final fortress area then your hero is as good as dead and there is nothing you can do.
Please make sure all heroes can reach all parts of the terrain, The Infested Mothership is currently too big to go up many ramps. This meant that I could not kill most of the siege tanks blasting away at the troops as without going up the ramps I cannot get vision and without vision I cannot attack them.
The boss stage needs more challenge to it rather than being just plain old rigged. For example make him deal insane damage and take no damage from minions only. That way the players have to use their heroes to kill him and they can kill him that way as he does fair damage in return. Also throw in more complex abilities that encourage micro skill rather than pure stats, for example maybe airstrikes in a line which the players have to dodge (HotS boss in mission 2, Archangel) or maybe sub objectives that need to be completed to make him vulnerable to damage.
Upgrades need to be given more meaning. +2 armor is great against marines, but seeing how you only fight siege tanks and thors end game it is practically useless. 100 health also does little to boost survivability when a siege tank removes 75 life per hit odd. Some upgrades are pretty much mandatory such as the speed boost. Due to the rarity of gas, the boost from gas upgrades could be more than the mineral ones. Maybe add levels to them, eg mineral health upgrade could be done 3 times each costing more. I would recommend replacing gas armor with damage reduction as that is more useful against hard hitting units like thors.
Abilities fall under hero balancing so I do not expect them to be perfect. That said I was quite disappointed with the abilities my hero had and did not even bother maxing out any other than Psionic Storm. In a game about offense it is generally not a good idea to have defensive support abilities. For example the cloaking field could not make all units invisible and instead gives all units an evasion chance (chance to not take damage when receiving damage). Forcefield could be replaced with some form of healing ability, or maybe an area debuff that slows units.
The map has potential and I will try it again in a few versions time but really needs a lot of work to be less frustrating, especially with actual gameplay performance so that one can at least play it with a reasonable frame rate. Expecting players to manage their spawns to prevent poor performance is not good design.
@ImperialGood: Go
You do have some pretty good points, as well as a few that I think just come from only playing once, and only trying one hero. I think sometimes I forget that much of the lag can come from units just walking, even if they aren't fighting. Though I was previously hesitant about adding some forward nydus's, I think I will make some. In the previous map it was easier since there was one centralized choke point that enemy units couldn't really slip past. I think these forward ones should be purchasable by heroes, and should they die, will have to be repurchased, rather than auto-respawned. That should help with big armies slipping too far past them, uncontested. I should also finally add a way of destroying those destructible rocks to shorten the right path, prior to building a second nydus worm. I think I'll set something up shortly after that middle base (the one slightly past the cave shortcut) is taken out.
While I do have a bias against protoss (The ditsy Ted zealot after all, lol), the mothership can be annoyingly slow. That said, what's annoying to me may not be to everyone, and I did want to make several heroes that play differently. Perhaps giving the mothership a short timed buff to move speed upon birth/revive and teleporting back to base could help with the problem. Or maybe giving the ship an ability to teleport to part of the map for minerals that an ally has vision of (regular sized heroes can currently use the spore cannons for this). As for its cloaking, there's really only missile turrets near fortified areas. The cloak can still help a lot in regular lanes since few mobile units have any sort of detection.
Heroes do have their own strengths and weaknesses, and the motherships certainly isn't the big powerful units. It's better against large groups of weaker units. The most elite siege tanks at the final base can be taken out fairly easily using the Generals ability to calldown units around the tanks to maintain vision, and using his drakken laser drill to focus them. Zeek can lock them down for a good amount of time. I believe infestor can even take control of them (and the final thors as well). The general is also good against the final boss, as are units with abilities that deal powerful one shot damage from afar (snipe, corrosive blast, etc).
The boss does not heal on his own, but rather leeches health off of nearby allies. You can see it whenever a red lightning bolt goes from the boss towards one of his surrounding minions. His minions however, can heal themselves, so it's a good idea to take them out. Perhaps some of these sorts of things should be more documented, but I find people don't really bother reading tooltips and such.
Perhaps sometime I'll also do something like when 10 zerglings are purchased it switches to 1 super zergling with increased stats, but I'm still toying with the idea. I think I'll first try the forward nydus worms and destroyable rocks idea, then see how the lag is from there.
Too bad as soon as you hit cloak all the enemy siege tanks (7 of them or more) start shooting at you with larger than one would expect range. Needless to say you are dead in 2-3 seconds from the heavy damage they do. If it cloaked yourself as well then that would really be an awesome move however.
Who is the "Generals"? When I played the only human players were an Infestor (who dropped due to unplayable frame rate, or maybe he crashed from overheating I am unsure), A Ghost and A Mothership (me). We only won thanks to the Ghost ability to nuke up cliffs so stuff could see the tanks. Missing an important mechanic like the "Generals" would certainly explain why I struggled so much. If I could see the tanks on the cliff tops my DPS could have downed them in seconds but since I was too wide to climb up the ramps I was stuck there uselessly.
The bolts were sub-frame due to the low frame rate I was experiencing so I did not notice any unfortunately (why I thought it was just randomly healing). This is why performance is very important to maps since when frame rate drops below 16 (20 for fast) FPS then subtle effects can be missed entirely.
You need some limit past which spawns simply turn off. Players would rather face restrictive limits than unplayable frame rate. An example could be no more than 300-400 active spawned units at any given time. This will encourage players to build forward worms and not leave due to very poor frame rate. From a designer perspective you want to try your best so that frame rate is high most of the time even if users try and go out their way to do inherently performance intensive activities.
Most of the performance problems likely come from all the unit on unit collisions during movement. This is why some maps can have far more moving units without such performance difficulties.