wow.. worst game ever. 2 of my team left at start -> 2 hellions, 1 of enemy left. i managed to kill both landing towers = no more infantrie for them.. they camped their base, i got the map. 20 minutes later there where 3 fully upgraded thors on the field. 2 of them camped on the healing pad, which made an assault on their hq impossibe. then i began to cloak\warp my way in and slowly chipped away their hq... really really annoying right now.
wow.. worst game ever. 2 of my team left at start -> 2 hellions, 1 of enemy left. i managed to kill both landing towers = no more infantrie for them.. they camped their base, i got the map. 20 minutes later there where 3 fully upgraded thors on the field. 2 of them camped on the healing pad, which made an assault on their hq impossibe. then i began to cloak\warp my way in and slowly chipped away their hq... really really annoying right now.
Yeah it's an issue. I planned to simply switch the location of the healing pad and hq.
Once vespene is useful again (it should be cruicial to winning the game, but not win the game by itself) I imagine games will be shorter anyway. Right now they can drag on for quite some time. Time-wise the 5,000 objective wasn't bad at all, it just felt too forced. Currently holding the points is meaningless as you can hold the entire map and the enemy team can sit back, defend and upgrade 'til they feel like pushing out.
I liked the Bio Upgrades that you had before, would be nice to see that revisited and expanded so you could maybe see weapon/armour upgrades and even new unit types.
Once vespene is useful again (it should be cruicial to winning the game, but not win the game by itself) I imagine games will be shorter anyway. Right now they can drag on for quite some time. Time-wise the 5,000 objective wasn't bad at all, it just felt too forced. Currently holding the points is meaningless as you can hold the entire map and the enemy team can sit back, defend and upgrade 'til they feel like pushing out.
I liked the Bio Upgrades that you had before, would be nice to see that revisited and expanded so you could maybe see weapon/armour upgrades and even new unit types.
I'm probably going to take a leaf out of LAPD Cops and make Vespane used for purchasing AI controlled tanks that just blindly rove towards the enemy fort. They're a 1-time investment. You pay once, you get 1 tank. Alternatively you can purchase aircraft. Same style, but rather than attack the enemy fort, they defend your base. Again, 1-time purchase. Once destroyed, gone forever and the investment is lost. LAPD also had super tanks and super aircraft. They were basically super strong versions that could tank a lot of damage.
We'll see. Right now I'm working on adding air vehicles. These will have fewer slots than ground, but more specialised. One will be a surgical strike craft. All guns, no drones. The other will be more of a mini carrier. Few guns, all drones, weak defences.
I'm also going to let the Probe Launcher's Probe drop mines and turrets. Mines dropped from the probe will arm rapidly. The probe will also benefit from Cloak if the player vehicle is using it.
I'm hoping aircraft will solve the issue of impenetrable bases, simply by going around the repair pad. If it doesn't, I'll see.
@Libra350: Go
I'm also going to let the Probe Launcher's Probe drop mines and turrets. Mines dropped from the probe will arm rapidly. The probe will also benefit from Cloak if the player vehicle is using it.
the only problem with the probes ATM is that they aren't cloaked. I still use them to gain sight of highground but they die in about 2 seconds so it's not too useful. If they had cloak I would use them all the time since everyone loves abusing highground. If they could drop turrets and mines then it might be a bit too powerful but will have to see.
There is a bit of a bug BTW when using Turrets - you can't repair their shields and with just their armour HP they get alpha'd down pretty fast. IMO either allow their shields to be repaired or replace the shield HP with additional armour. I have been using them heavily regardless of this (Vulture w/ 3 armour arrays and 3 turrets to hold the forward points) but could be worth looking at.
The reason I've kept the turret hp low is because they are so easily replaced. If I buffed their staying power, I'd need to increase their cost. Either through cooldown or energy. I kept both their cost and staying power low so that they require some user maintainence while also being easy to pack up and move to a new area if needed. I feel increasing their staying power and cost together would just make them more unwieldy to use.
I thought about just changing mines altogether. They have their current effect when used by a ground vehicle, but when used by aircraft they become bombs. You just hit the mine button, they drop to the ground and explode.
Okay. I've added 2 new classes of vehicle. I call them Fighter and Carrier. They're pretty much what you'd expect. Fighters are fast, don't have any drones, rather weak defences and lots of guns. Carriers have a few guns, the most drones of any class, but are slow and with the weakest defences of any class.
Mines dropped from aircraft will work like bombs, detonating when they hit the ground. This does make having more than 1 mine item useless when using aircraft. I might look at this in the future, but for now, it seems fine. Mines that are being dropped can be shot down and will explode harmlessly if they are shot before they hit the ground. This is only a window of about 0.5 seconds, however.
The probe launcher has been re-worked a little. It now has no duration, but you may only have 1 probe at a time. It benefits from cloak, and detects cloaked units still. It doesn't drop mines or turrets.
This is the kind of patch I enjoy. I'm not done with this patch yet.
Uploaded. Contains the above and a few fixes (like radar exposing your position while cloaked/dead).
Income system is now an exponential curve. T2 items should be available at the 5min mark. T3 at around 12. T4 at 20-25. At around 35min you should be maxed out.
you still stop when upgrading an item... its NEEDS to be fixed
okay aircraft does not seem to fit in.. an carrier which produces ground based things which do not follow anyway? uhh.. there is something wrong.
bombs and tower are okay, but drones look silly right now
player get kills even when infantrie kills and there is not a single mech near it
when you upgrade towers from 3->4 you can place an additional one without the last beeing destroyed
you can do a cloak, bomber, tower build. but not a cloak, bomber, drone build. they stay cloaked which makes it a bit .. limited
you can not select tower and your vehicel with a selection box
enemy can shoot bombs midair (high priority). i would like to see that soldier shooting at a mk 82..
I think you are adding too much, too soon?. Players could possible not be able to really keep up with it.
Catalyst also dropped in the popularity. It used to be on page 1. I think the earlier builds were a lot more simple, and somewhere a long the line, maybe players miss something from that?. Im not sure.
I know a lot of mappers get disheartened when their maps take a knock in the popularity. But thats only temporary. They bounce back at unexpected times. And vice versa, where people suddenly lose interest in popular maps and those maps go down. So its an Ebb and Flow type thing.
Keep up the good work.
If I can give one piece of advice. That would be "simplification". That is the pinnacle to any success. Work on that. See it from a "player" point of view, which is hard, but get some close friends to offer whatever advice they can too. Simplification is the key.
I've run into a number of blocks in the editor. To name a few;
No transient flag on items. You're going to have that irritating movement stop per upgrade every time.
Faces for empty item spaces don't work. That's why every item has the silly "Goes in x row" tooltip.
Inventories of different sizes don't work. All inventories have to be x by y or the game breaks. This is why those ugly Cancel icon boxes are all over inventories.
And yeah, it hurts seeing the map drop like this. I've put hundreds of hours into Catalyst. I do feel like I'm running on fumes and every choice seems to turn out poorly. I'm hoping that there's only so many wrong choices I can make before things turn out well again.
Another possible solution to save a "sinking" map from complete oblivion is to remove it yourself.
Atleast temporarily anyway.
Then you can take a deep breath, relax, and work in private on getting it right, cutting unnecessary stuff, making improvements, running closed tests on new features etc. Sometimes its dangerous testing new things to the public, and I would always advise to do as much "in house" testing as possible before releasing anything major.
So, then after sometime you can release the new and complete version. It will be like a "comeback", new and improved and fresh and all that.
It can be a very effective tactic if things are spiraling down. It takes a lot of stress off the developer as well. So keep that in mind, if you ever feel that you are running out of options on what to do.
And yeah, it hurts seeing the map drop like this. I've put hundreds of hours into Catalyst. I do feel like I'm running on fumes and every choice seems to turn out poorly. I'm hoping that there's only so many wrong choices I can make before things turn out well again.
I'm not ready to hang up my hat yet though.
likely something to do with the longer games, so less games being played per hour. I think some people aren't playing it so much ATM as there's no gain from holding the points - the only way to actually gain an advantage is to kill enemy bio for more money/faster upgrades.
We really need those bio upgrades back in, at least temporarily til' you figure something better out :)
Another possible solution to save a "sinking" map from complete oblivion is to remove it yourself.
Atleast temporarily anyway.
Not sure I agree with this, considering how the popularity system works. It'd likely be very difficult to get your map on the radar again after something like that. but then I haven't made any maps so what would I know :)
That's depends wherever map's Popularity is reset after being removed or not. Otherwise, it's just required to transmute map into diferrent setting, expanding map size, changing landscape to something more natural and battlefield-like, and reloading all the features and triggers into that map. You can close-test all the way you want, you can reconsider Control Points arrays and Base schematics.
In a way the things are currently, you can make a single shop building with sub-categories of types. I recommend to rename Armor category into Hardware and Shield category into Systems.
About the latest features added:
- Air vehicles have turned Missiles into uberpowered weapon. Last game i've played turned out with enemies having 3 Dusk Wings with 6x 4th Lvl Missiles against 2 Ares and 1 Battlecruiser, having Missile/Cannon/Gun hybrid build, unable to do anything until theres 10k of Money nowhere to spend on. Then one of these missile-lover are came straignt to our HQ and killing it singlehandely with no one able to be there in time. It's very hard to Snare them without area-tageting (you have to aim for enemy model, butt also to figure this out first).
That way, I Demand to nerf missiles somehow ASAP, otherwise there's gonna be only two type of players in this game - missile-lovers and losers.
- Scanner's bonus damage no paying off for the fact of beign exposed.
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wow.. worst game ever. 2 of my team left at start -> 2 hellions, 1 of enemy left. i managed to kill both landing towers = no more infantrie for them.. they camped their base, i got the map. 20 minutes later there where 3 fully upgraded thors on the field. 2 of them camped on the healing pad, which made an assault on their hq impossibe. then i began to cloak\warp my way in and slowly chipped away their hq... really really annoying right now.
Yeah it's an issue. I planned to simply switch the location of the healing pad and hq.
-when upgrading you should not stop
-radar item is cool but enemy sees you.. i dont know if i dislike this yet
-healing pad <-> hq would be too vulnerable.
-contradictory to the tooltip blink does not remove snare
Once vespene is useful again (it should be cruicial to winning the game, but not win the game by itself) I imagine games will be shorter anyway. Right now they can drag on for quite some time. Time-wise the 5,000 objective wasn't bad at all, it just felt too forced. Currently holding the points is meaningless as you can hold the entire map and the enemy team can sit back, defend and upgrade 'til they feel like pushing out.
I liked the Bio Upgrades that you had before, would be nice to see that revisited and expanded so you could maybe see weapon/armour upgrades and even new unit types.
I'm probably going to take a leaf out of LAPD Cops and make Vespane used for purchasing AI controlled tanks that just blindly rove towards the enemy fort. They're a 1-time investment. You pay once, you get 1 tank. Alternatively you can purchase aircraft. Same style, but rather than attack the enemy fort, they defend your base. Again, 1-time purchase. Once destroyed, gone forever and the investment is lost. LAPD also had super tanks and super aircraft. They were basically super strong versions that could tank a lot of damage.
We'll see. Right now I'm working on adding air vehicles. These will have fewer slots than ground, but more specialised. One will be a surgical strike craft. All guns, no drones. The other will be more of a mini carrier. Few guns, all drones, weak defences.
I'm also going to let the Probe Launcher's Probe drop mines and turrets. Mines dropped from the probe will arm rapidly. The probe will also benefit from Cloak if the player vehicle is using it.
I'm hoping aircraft will solve the issue of impenetrable bases, simply by going around the repair pad. If it doesn't, I'll see.
the only problem with the probes ATM is that they aren't cloaked. I still use them to gain sight of highground but they die in about 2 seconds so it's not too useful. If they had cloak I would use them all the time since everyone loves abusing highground. If they could drop turrets and mines then it might be a bit too powerful but will have to see.
There is a bit of a bug BTW when using Turrets - you can't repair their shields and with just their armour HP they get alpha'd down pretty fast. IMO either allow their shields to be repaired or replace the shield HP with additional armour. I have been using them heavily regardless of this (Vulture w/ 3 armour arrays and 3 turrets to hold the forward points) but could be worth looking at.
The reason I've kept the turret hp low is because they are so easily replaced. If I buffed their staying power, I'd need to increase their cost. Either through cooldown or energy. I kept both their cost and staying power low so that they require some user maintainence while also being easy to pack up and move to a new area if needed. I feel increasing their staying power and cost together would just make them more unwieldy to use.
I thought about just changing mines altogether. They have their current effect when used by a ground vehicle, but when used by aircraft they become bombs. You just hit the mine button, they drop to the ground and explode.
Okay. I've added 2 new classes of vehicle. I call them Fighter and Carrier. They're pretty much what you'd expect. Fighters are fast, don't have any drones, rather weak defences and lots of guns. Carriers have a few guns, the most drones of any class, but are slow and with the weakest defences of any class.
Mines dropped from aircraft will work like bombs, detonating when they hit the ground. This does make having more than 1 mine item useless when using aircraft. I might look at this in the future, but for now, it seems fine. Mines that are being dropped can be shot down and will explode harmlessly if they are shot before they hit the ground. This is only a window of about 0.5 seconds, however.
The probe launcher has been re-worked a little. It now has no duration, but you may only have 1 probe at a time. It benefits from cloak, and detects cloaked units still. It doesn't drop mines or turrets.
This is the kind of patch I enjoy. I'm not done with this patch yet.
Hi, can u pls explain the trigger wich u used for the drohnes movement? I try to do it since days but....AAAaaargh!
It's basically a periodic trigger that issues queued orders to your drones.
Uploaded. Contains the above and a few fixes (like radar exposing your position while cloaked/dead).
Income system is now an exponential curve. T2 items should be available at the 5min mark. T3 at around 12. T4 at 20-25. At around 35min you should be maxed out.
you still stop when upgrading an item... its NEEDS to be fixed
okay aircraft does not seem to fit in.. an carrier which produces ground based things which do not follow anyway? uhh.. there is something wrong. bombs and tower are okay, but drones look silly right now
player get kills even when infantrie kills and there is not a single mech near it
when you upgrade towers from 3->4 you can place an additional one without the last beeing destroyed
you can do a cloak, bomber, tower build. but not a cloak, bomber, drone build. they stay cloaked which makes it a bit .. limited
you can not select tower and your vehicel with a selection box
enemy can shoot bombs midair (high priority). i would like to see that soldier shooting at a mk 82..
I'm not sure this is fixable. The transient flag on items is broken.
@Eiviyn: Go
I think you are adding too much, too soon?. Players could possible not be able to really keep up with it.
Catalyst also dropped in the popularity. It used to be on page 1. I think the earlier builds were a lot more simple, and somewhere a long the line, maybe players miss something from that?. Im not sure.
Indeed. I almost regret publishing it in such an unfinished state. I'm going to stick to bug fixes/minor improvements for a while now.
@Eiviyn: Go
Whatever you do. Do not ever give up
I know a lot of mappers get disheartened when their maps take a knock in the popularity. But thats only temporary. They bounce back at unexpected times. And vice versa, where people suddenly lose interest in popular maps and those maps go down. So its an Ebb and Flow type thing.
Keep up the good work.
If I can give one piece of advice. That would be "simplification". That is the pinnacle to any success. Work on that. See it from a "player" point of view, which is hard, but get some close friends to offer whatever advice they can too. Simplification is the key.
I've run into a number of blocks in the editor. To name a few;
And yeah, it hurts seeing the map drop like this. I've put hundreds of hours into Catalyst. I do feel like I'm running on fumes and every choice seems to turn out poorly. I'm hoping that there's only so many wrong choices I can make before things turn out well again.
I'm not ready to hang up my hat yet though.
@Eiviyn: Go
Another possible solution to save a "sinking" map from complete oblivion is to remove it yourself.
Atleast temporarily anyway.
Then you can take a deep breath, relax, and work in private on getting it right, cutting unnecessary stuff, making improvements, running closed tests on new features etc. Sometimes its dangerous testing new things to the public, and I would always advise to do as much "in house" testing as possible before releasing anything major.
So, then after sometime you can release the new and complete version. It will be like a "comeback", new and improved and fresh and all that.
It can be a very effective tactic if things are spiraling down. It takes a lot of stress off the developer as well. So keep that in mind, if you ever feel that you are running out of options on what to do.
likely something to do with the longer games, so less games being played per hour. I think some people aren't playing it so much ATM as there's no gain from holding the points - the only way to actually gain an advantage is to kill enemy bio for more money/faster upgrades.
We really need those bio upgrades back in, at least temporarily til' you figure something better out :)
Not sure I agree with this, considering how the popularity system works. It'd likely be very difficult to get your map on the radar again after something like that. but then I haven't made any maps so what would I know :)
That's depends wherever map's Popularity is reset after being removed or not. Otherwise, it's just required to transmute map into diferrent setting, expanding map size, changing landscape to something more natural and battlefield-like, and reloading all the features and triggers into that map. You can close-test all the way you want, you can reconsider Control Points arrays and Base schematics.
In a way the things are currently, you can make a single shop building with sub-categories of types. I recommend to rename Armor category into Hardware and Shield category into Systems.
About the latest features added:
- Air vehicles have turned Missiles into uberpowered weapon. Last game i've played turned out with enemies having 3 Dusk Wings with 6x 4th Lvl Missiles against 2 Ares and 1 Battlecruiser, having Missile/Cannon/Gun hybrid build, unable to do anything until theres 10k of Money nowhere to spend on. Then one of these missile-lover are came straignt to our HQ and killing it singlehandely with no one able to be there in time. It's very hard to Snare them without area-tageting (you have to aim for enemy model, butt also to figure this out first).
That way, I Demand to nerf missiles somehow ASAP, otherwise there's gonna be only two type of players in this game - missile-lovers and losers.
- Scanner's bonus damage no paying off for the fact of beign exposed.