As an example, the heavy weapons tech tree (part of the weaponry category);
Assault Cannon (turret)
Ion Cannon (turret)
Ventorini Beam (targetted fire)
The ultimate weapons for each subtree are target fire weapons. This is for a reason. The system I used in Catalyst was silly complex and annoying to work with. I doubt I'll be returning to that system.
Incidentally, the mid tier weapons are more situational. In the above example, the assault cannon is your bread and butter weapon. The Ion Cannon is more niche but has it's advantages and will be one reason to choose that subtree over others. The ultimate is a slightly overtuned weapon that you may only have one of.
Alright thanks for the answers, well i dunno tech trees for turrets could be a good or bad thing cause it restricts the customization by quite a bit. Dunno one has to play it to see how it pans out.
So it would be pretty neat if you could actually release a beta so we can give actual feedback instead of guessing whats going on ^^
Argh the suspense is killingt me, there is atm no custom-map that i really fancy aside from star battle, thats kinda unique.
There's 3 main trees. As I mentioned, weaponry, support and production.
Each tree has subtrees. For weaponry these are;
Light Weapons - Short range with special properties
Heavy Weapons - Mid range, your hard hitters
Missile Weapons - Long range, good for clearing out lots of targets
But in addition there are "floating" weapons that aren't really in any tech tree. For example, say I go for a carrier build and pick up a load of drone producing structures from the production tab. I spend all my vespene in upgrading my drones while slowly teching up the drone tree. There are floating components in each tree to spice things up. Such as I could be heavy drone focused but pick the radar up from the support tree, or tech down the point defence tree from weaponry. These "floating" components don't have associated upgrades (mainly because they don't really need them), and are just there to really blow up customisation.
That said, everything is gated so that it shouldn't be overly confusing for new players. You shouldn't feel overwhelmed with choice from the moment you start. The vehicles are tiered to unlock new weapons as you upgrade, and all the subtrees are ordered into tech trees that unlock as you progress down them (while not making previous tech components useless as you tech down, it's more like more specialised components get unlocked).
Overall I'm happy with this new system. Very happy. Reinforced by that I've never had anyone even had to explain it to anyone for them to grasp it. I dragged a friend of mine who barely plays sc2 at all and he never had to ask.
Yeah i know already that there is loads of customization don't get me wrong but as i understand it the tech trees work like the ones in diablo2, where you have to get at least 1 first tier weapon to use the 2ndtier weapon.
Well maybe i don't want the 1st but only the 2nd tier thingie cause the 1st doesn't work well with the rest of my build you see thats what i meant with restrictions.
I think a gated approach coupled with your vehiclelevel is good enough without a actual tech tree but what do i know.
sounds amazing, when will you release a public version?
I don't want to make the same mistake I made with Cityscape. I want to get everything in there, functioning and polished before I release so I don't have to make such drastic changes. I hope to get a beta out in the next few days. The game is very playable as it is, I'm mostly just getting all the content in now.
Yeah i know already that there is loads of customization don't get me wrong but as i understand it the tech trees work like the ones in diablo2, where you have to get at least 1 first tier weapon to use the 2ndtier weapon.
Well maybe i don't want the 1st but only the 2nd tier thingie cause the 1st doesn't work well with the rest of my build you see thats what i meant with restrictions.
I think a gated approach coupled with your vehiclelevel is good enough without a actual tech tree but what do i know.
Well I would hope that you want the first tier weapon. If they aren't desirable, they'll be buffed. The general idea is that you build a lot of tier 1 weapons that are just generally good at handling everything, a few tier 2 weapons that make you excel in one area, and finally your tier 3 weapon which is more of a reward for finishing that tree anyway.
That said, it'll be much clearer when you see it in action!
I've uploaded it to EU servers. If you play this, please remember that it is basically fresh out of my head and nearly entirely untested. Everything should work fine (I'd appreciate feedback on anything that doesn't), but what I'm testing most is how intuitive and polished things are.
Catalyst: War Machines (BETA)
If you want to play, hit "create game" and search for "Catalyst".
This is a quiet beta test for people to see the map if they are interested. I will add AI shortly, though don't expect it to be great. It will only be there to make testing more enjoyable. Basically, if you have feedback over how to improve the intuitiveness of the map and the polish, I'd appreciate it. I want to release on the Tuesday night popularity reset so I have a shot of getting to the front few pages immediately, which is why I'd like to get that polish sorted now.
After you've played, I'd appreciate going down this list and seeing if anything highlights anything for you;
Switch to build view when selecting the SCV and switch to normal view when selecting the tank. This enables an easy switch between the modes, without having to use the abilities on the units (just press f1 wherever you are and you are in build mode at your SCV, press F2 and you are in fight mode at your hero)
Its counter-intuitive when you are used to select your hero with f2 and cannot do that in build mode, because you need to use the switch ability on the SCV first.
Add a projectile to the attack of the planetary fortress. It has a huge range and I saw marines and marauders burn in flames for no obvious reason, because the fortress was not on my screen. Confused me a little.
The unit waves form kinda huge pushes right from the beginning. Maybe, this is intended, but they kicked half of those lasers around the fortress within like 5 minutes with almost no assistance from me.
When you are dead, you have no access to your build view. Maybe this is intended, I do not like it. #1 would fix this in a nice way, though.
Friendly fire is possible (even for some abilities, for example the seeker volley), at least for units. If this is possible for allied heroes as well, I suggest disabling it.
The waves kill you extremely fast, even with a tier 3 vehicle and some armor upgrades a medium sized push could one-shot me.
make the ability to switch to the builder transient, it bugs me that it interrupts for example warp drive casts.
I did not find anything that uses energy, but still the tanks got it?
€ ah, barracks seem to cost energy. Ghosts and Marauders cost minerals, but no energy, Everything correct with this?
my Marauder spawn building seems to produce ghosts? There is a marauder icon on autocast and a marauder in the queue, but 2 ghosts are spawned.
Your infantry runs straight in the enemy main base (€ actually
to the front 2 refineries and stay there, if no enemy is nearby) and gets terribly obliberated by the normal waves of units, even after some upgrades.
Minor Stuff:
The respawn bar you have selected when dying and the hp of your portrait filling up do not match, the portrait is at about 3/4 hp but you already revive
Some weapons launch at strange points (for example the cannon turret projectile seems to launch at some random point in front of you)
its called "Artillery", not "Artillary" ;)
Build at your hero has no tooltip yet
Note that everything here is tested without an enemy or ai and represents only my own, subjective point of view ;)
Thanks for the feedback. They're pretty good points. I'll get a fixed version with AI up for tomorrow.
Oh and infantry AI is changing. I actually dislike the whole infantry system right now, but I'll see before I do anything drastic.
Edit: Did a little tonight. You can now change to deck view by selecting your worker/hitting F1, and field view by selecting your mech/hitting F2.
Fixed the errant marauder, the artillery typo and the friendly fire thing.
You can view your deck while dead now by hitting F1, but you can't really go back. You also can't build while dead. I'll change this tomorrow as it requires more effort than the above changes and it's 2am.
Okay, I shortly tested the map this morning. Major bug: I died once and didn't respawn. I was in construction mode and just got myself a Fighter's Bay (the fighter drone building) when my tank got killed by infantry. I didn't get any kind of respawn timer and waited for 5 real-time minutes. No dice.
Apart from that, gameplay itself felt really fluent and intuitive though. I love the new capture system. Also the building options appear well organized, good tooltips as well.
I have to agree with Kueken though that infantry mobs are now more dangerous than ever. This might be intended and subject to personal preference, but I don't really like it all that much. Perhaps start out small and simply increase infantry spawns gradually over time, i.e. initiate additional Marine and Marauder spawns every 5 / 7.5 / 10 minutes.
Also, I feel like I've already made myself known for being extremely demanding in regard to turret support. Making turrets placable is a huge step forward in my opinion, but what I absolutely dislike about the new implementation is that now, there's no way at all to get rid of a misplaced tower. I really would've wished for a system that lets you build a turret at any time and simply destroys your 'oldest' turret on the field in case you exceed your maximum count. But now, instead, you cannot even manually detonate a placed turret nor destroy it with your own weapons due to friendly fire restrictions. I hope this will undergo some change in the near future.
Other than that, I can't really contribute much so far since my game barely lasted 10 minutes due to the aforementioned bug. I'll be sure to check it out again, though, but that'll probably have to wait until this evening.
Yeah, I noticed the new respawn bug today. It's really odd, there's no reason it should happen. I've not touched the respawn trigger in a long while.
Fixed it anyway. Will upload immediately.
The turret destroy thing, I want a good method of handling that. For now I'll add a suicide function to the turrets and barracks.
The NPCs, well, I don't know. Playing alone means you aren't going to get mineral rewards from killing players, which is huge. I'll wait with changing the NPC forces for now.
Fixed the respawn bug (seems me altering some of the terrain was causing it, weirdly enough), added a projectile to the planetary fortress and added the "Recycle" button to any building that can be placed in the field. Also fixed a few tooltips. Going to work on a simplistic AI now.
Will upload the version with AI soon. Has plenty of other fixes in too.
I've been secretly working on a player vs AI mode involving Kerrigan. She already puts up a pretty impressive fight, been working on her for some time. I'll upload the Kerrigan mode when it's done. It's basically only there for practice or solo/small team play though.
Well, I'm certainly looking forward to a cooperative beat-the-Kerrigan mode. Anyway, just played another test round with the Tank class. Here's some cents:
- Add the duration of the Juggernaut ability to the description. At first, I assumed it was toggleable. Grave mistake; got ran over by infantry while I was too slow to move away.
- Is it intended that you can't use Mules or the Juggernaut ability while in Siege mode? Seems a little inconsistent to me since all my other abilities remained usable.
- I've had a weird situation where I tried a warp jump but landed about 2 screens away from where I had clicked. I believe I tried to call down a Mule as soon as the option became available, when my vehicle was supposedly still in mid air (if that's even how warp jump works).
- Overall, I'm quite sceptical in regard to the Mules. It feels to me like they are just too readily available. At the very least, I suggest cutting down their life span to equal the cooldown of their calldown so you can't have 2 at the same time. Personally, I'd go even further than that and say make them only last 10-20 seconds.
- This one is pure personal preference, but I'd sort of prefer to have my main vehicle bound to F1 and the SCV to F2. I'd like to hear other people's opinions, though.
I'm sure I forgot at least one or two points that came to my mind when playing, but oh well. I'll play another round now.
- Is it intended that Mules are unable to repair turrets? If so, at least mention that in their repair ability's description since it's clearly misleading (turrets are buildings, after all).
couple of questions / opinions
1 why put limit on amount of items buildable
2 why empty base
3 when i played solo marauders 1 shot me
4 kerrigan idea isnt realy best cuz it will split popularity
- Overall, I'm quite sceptical in regard to the Mules. It feels to me like they are just too readily available. At the very least, I suggest cutting down their life span to equal the cooldown of their calldown so you can't have 2 at the same time. Personally, I'd go even further than that and say make them only last 10-20 seconds. - This one is pure personal preference, but I'd sort of prefer to have my main vehicle bound to F1 and the SCV to F2. I'd like to hear other people's opinions, though.
I'm sure I forgot at least one or two points that came to my mind when playing, but oh well. I'll play another round now.
The mule idea is ok i guess. I would like to see a 5v5 first though and see how it works out. Also, maybe gives mules just like 1 health...
Also, f1 and f2 are the preset in-game hero and worker hotkeys, i don't think they can be changed since i haven't seen anyone changing the warpgate hotkey up to now either...
couple of questions / opinions 1 why put limit on amount of items buildable 2 why empty base 3 when i played solo marauders 1 shot me 4 kerrigan idea isnt realy best cuz it will split popularity
1.) So that upgrading vehicles is more than just a health buff and so that there is some kind of limitation in the game
2.) What do you want in them? Items shops? Sorry, no items in this map last time i checked. There's just nothing to put in there. Altough it could maybe use some doodads or buildings just so that it doesnt feel so empty.
3.) Yea, troops are a bit too strong...
4.) Im pretty sure its still only 1bnet game mode and that kerrigan will be activateable only if team 2 is empty, so it wont be bad for popularity but actually the opposite. Last time i checked that was the whole idea behind it...
keep up the good work eiviyn! Hope to see this thing on top of the list soon so that i can actually play it with enough people =D
Basically, it is ordered in a tech tree fashion.
As an example, the heavy weapons tech tree (part of the weaponry category);
Assault Cannon (turret)
Ion Cannon (turret)
Ventorini Beam (targetted fire)
The ultimate weapons for each subtree are target fire weapons. This is for a reason. The system I used in Catalyst was silly complex and annoying to work with. I doubt I'll be returning to that system.
Incidentally, the mid tier weapons are more situational. In the above example, the assault cannon is your bread and butter weapon. The Ion Cannon is more niche but has it's advantages and will be one reason to choose that subtree over others. The ultimate is a slightly overtuned weapon that you may only have one of.
Alright thanks for the answers, well i dunno tech trees for turrets could be a good or bad thing cause it restricts the customization by quite a bit. Dunno one has to play it to see how it pans out.
So it would be pretty neat if you could actually release a beta so we can give actual feedback instead of guessing whats going on ^^
Argh the suspense is killingt me, there is atm no custom-map that i really fancy aside from star battle, thats kinda unique.
So keep up the good work i can't wait :)
It's funny you mention customization.
There's 3 main trees. As I mentioned, weaponry, support and production.
Each tree has subtrees. For weaponry these are;
Light Weapons - Short range with special properties
Heavy Weapons - Mid range, your hard hitters
Missile Weapons - Long range, good for clearing out lots of targets
But in addition there are "floating" weapons that aren't really in any tech tree. For example, say I go for a carrier build and pick up a load of drone producing structures from the production tab. I spend all my vespene in upgrading my drones while slowly teching up the drone tree. There are floating components in each tree to spice things up. Such as I could be heavy drone focused but pick the radar up from the support tree, or tech down the point defence tree from weaponry. These "floating" components don't have associated upgrades (mainly because they don't really need them), and are just there to really blow up customisation.
That said, everything is gated so that it shouldn't be overly confusing for new players. You shouldn't feel overwhelmed with choice from the moment you start. The vehicles are tiered to unlock new weapons as you upgrade, and all the subtrees are ordered into tech trees that unlock as you progress down them (while not making previous tech components useless as you tech down, it's more like more specialised components get unlocked).
Overall I'm happy with this new system. Very happy. Reinforced by that I've never had anyone even had to explain it to anyone for them to grasp it. I dragged a friend of mine who barely plays sc2 at all and he never had to ask.
Yeah i know already that there is loads of customization don't get me wrong but as i understand it the tech trees work like the ones in diablo2, where you have to get at least 1 first tier weapon to use the 2ndtier weapon.
Well maybe i don't want the 1st but only the 2nd tier thingie cause the 1st doesn't work well with the rest of my build you see thats what i meant with restrictions.
I think a gated approach coupled with your vehiclelevel is good enough without a actual tech tree but what do i know.
sounds amazing, when will you release a public version?
I don't want to make the same mistake I made with Cityscape. I want to get everything in there, functioning and polished before I release so I don't have to make such drastic changes. I hope to get a beta out in the next few days. The game is very playable as it is, I'm mostly just getting all the content in now.
Well I would hope that you want the first tier weapon. If they aren't desirable, they'll be buffed. The general idea is that you build a lot of tier 1 weapons that are just generally good at handling everything, a few tier 2 weapons that make you excel in one area, and finally your tier 3 weapon which is more of a reward for finishing that tree anyway.
That said, it'll be much clearer when you see it in action!
Any video updates? :D
I've uploaded it to EU servers. If you play this, please remember that it is basically fresh out of my head and nearly entirely untested. Everything should work fine (I'd appreciate feedback on anything that doesn't), but what I'm testing most is how intuitive and polished things are.
Catalyst: War Machines (BETA)
If you want to play, hit "create game" and search for "Catalyst".
This is a quiet beta test for people to see the map if they are interested. I will add AI shortly, though don't expect it to be great. It will only be there to make testing more enjoyable. Basically, if you have feedback over how to improve the intuitiveness of the map and the polish, I'd appreciate it. I want to release on the Tuesday night popularity reset so I have a shot of getting to the front few pages immediately, which is why I'd like to get that polish sorted now.
After you've played, I'd appreciate going down this list and seeing if anything highlights anything for you;
Just playing it, will edit some things in.
Suggestions:
Its counter-intuitive when you are used to select your hero with f2 and cannot do that in build mode, because you need to use the switch ability on the SCV first.
€ ah, barracks seem to cost energy. Ghosts and Marauders cost minerals, but no energy, Everything correct with this?
to the front 2 refineries and stay there, if no enemy is nearby) and gets terribly obliberated by the normal waves of units, even after some upgrades.
Minor Stuff:
Note that everything here is tested without an enemy or ai and represents only my own, subjective point of view ;)
Thanks for the feedback. They're pretty good points. I'll get a fixed version with AI up for tomorrow.
Oh and infantry AI is changing. I actually dislike the whole infantry system right now, but I'll see before I do anything drastic.
Edit: Did a little tonight. You can now change to deck view by selecting your worker/hitting F1, and field view by selecting your mech/hitting F2.
Fixed the errant marauder, the artillery typo and the friendly fire thing.
You can view your deck while dead now by hitting F1, but you can't really go back. You also can't build while dead. I'll change this tomorrow as it requires more effort than the above changes and it's 2am.
Any plans on getting this to US once its out of Beta Phase? I'd love to try it out.
Agreed...it'd be really nice to try out. ;)
Okay, I shortly tested the map this morning. Major bug: I died once and didn't respawn. I was in construction mode and just got myself a Fighter's Bay (the fighter drone building) when my tank got killed by infantry. I didn't get any kind of respawn timer and waited for 5 real-time minutes. No dice.
Apart from that, gameplay itself felt really fluent and intuitive though. I love the new capture system. Also the building options appear well organized, good tooltips as well.
I have to agree with Kueken though that infantry mobs are now more dangerous than ever. This might be intended and subject to personal preference, but I don't really like it all that much. Perhaps start out small and simply increase infantry spawns gradually over time, i.e. initiate additional Marine and Marauder spawns every 5 / 7.5 / 10 minutes.
Also, I feel like I've already made myself known for being extremely demanding in regard to turret support. Making turrets placable is a huge step forward in my opinion, but what I absolutely dislike about the new implementation is that now, there's no way at all to get rid of a misplaced tower. I really would've wished for a system that lets you build a turret at any time and simply destroys your 'oldest' turret on the field in case you exceed your maximum count. But now, instead, you cannot even manually detonate a placed turret nor destroy it with your own weapons due to friendly fire restrictions. I hope this will undergo some change in the near future.
Other than that, I can't really contribute much so far since my game barely lasted 10 minutes due to the aforementioned bug. I'll be sure to check it out again, though, but that'll probably have to wait until this evening.
Yeah, I noticed the new respawn bug today. It's really odd, there's no reason it should happen. I've not touched the respawn trigger in a long while.
Fixed it anyway. Will upload immediately.
The turret destroy thing, I want a good method of handling that. For now I'll add a suicide function to the turrets and barracks.
The NPCs, well, I don't know. Playing alone means you aren't going to get mineral rewards from killing players, which is huge. I'll wait with changing the NPC forces for now.
Fixed the respawn bug (seems me altering some of the terrain was causing it, weirdly enough), added a projectile to the planetary fortress and added the "Recycle" button to any building that can be placed in the field. Also fixed a few tooltips. Going to work on a simplistic AI now.
Will upload the version with AI soon. Has plenty of other fixes in too.
I've been secretly working on a player vs AI mode involving Kerrigan. She already puts up a pretty impressive fight, been working on her for some time. I'll upload the Kerrigan mode when it's done. It's basically only there for practice or solo/small team play though.
When can we expect it to be on (US) servers?
Well, I'm certainly looking forward to a cooperative beat-the-Kerrigan mode. Anyway, just played another test round with the Tank class. Here's some cents:
- Add the duration of the Juggernaut ability to the description. At first, I assumed it was toggleable. Grave mistake; got ran over by infantry while I was too slow to move away.
- Is it intended that you can't use Mules or the Juggernaut ability while in Siege mode? Seems a little inconsistent to me since all my other abilities remained usable.
- I've had a weird situation where I tried a warp jump but landed about 2 screens away from where I had clicked. I believe I tried to call down a Mule as soon as the option became available, when my vehicle was supposedly still in mid air (if that's even how warp jump works).
- Overall, I'm quite sceptical in regard to the Mules. It feels to me like they are just too readily available. At the very least, I suggest cutting down their life span to equal the cooldown of their calldown so you can't have 2 at the same time. Personally, I'd go even further than that and say make them only last 10-20 seconds.
- This one is pure personal preference, but I'd sort of prefer to have my main vehicle bound to F1 and the SCV to F2. I'd like to hear other people's opinions, though.
I'm sure I forgot at least one or two points that came to my mind when playing, but oh well. I'll play another round now.
- Is it intended that Mules are unable to repair turrets? If so, at least mention that in their repair ability's description since it's clearly misleading (turrets are buildings, after all).
couple of questions / opinions 1 why put limit on amount of items buildable 2 why empty base 3 when i played solo marauders 1 shot me 4 kerrigan idea isnt realy best cuz it will split popularity
The mule idea is ok i guess. I would like to see a 5v5 first though and see how it works out. Also, maybe gives mules just like 1 health...
Also, f1 and f2 are the preset in-game hero and worker hotkeys, i don't think they can be changed since i haven't seen anyone changing the warpgate hotkey up to now either...
1.) So that upgrading vehicles is more than just a health buff and so that there is some kind of limitation in the game
2.) What do you want in them? Items shops? Sorry, no items in this map last time i checked. There's just nothing to put in there. Altough it could maybe use some doodads or buildings just so that it doesnt feel so empty.
3.) Yea, troops are a bit too strong...
4.) Im pretty sure its still only 1bnet game mode and that kerrigan will be activateable only if team 2 is empty, so it wont be bad for popularity but actually the opposite. Last time i checked that was the whole idea behind it...
keep up the good work eiviyn! Hope to see this thing on top of the list soon so that i can actually play it with enough people =D