Two things:
1) Do you have anything to replace reactors with? I liked them.
2) Just letting you know that your loading screen is pre-bigupdate as of this weekend in case you forgot to change it.
@jaxter184: Go
I don't remember changing anything that would make part of the loading screen incorrect, I'll check again though.
About reactors... They were impossible to balance. Useless on cheap units, overpowered on expensive ones.
Use chrono runes instead, they make units spawn faster.
If anyone can suggest a way to make reactors balanced, please go ahead.
@lolzguy: Go
Well, I honestly don't see the need to, as SEA accounts have access to the NA servers, and in addition to that, it will only make things needlessly complicated for us. Zelda has an NA account, I have an EU account, so cross region publishing isn't a problem. If we were to publish on SEA, we'd need to ask someone else who is not part of our team, which will only make things needlessly complicated and delay updates on that server.
Of course, we might change our minds about this and see if we can get anyone to publish the map there, but Im pretty sure we won't bother until we're done with beta testing - we are making far too frequent changes to the map currently.
There are some points I think you could improve in your game. Here some suggestions:
As I told you ingame, income ruins Tug of War games. I remember when I played CastleFight in wc3, they removed the income option by default because of it. You may think about removing it.
I didn't like the UI at all. It's too big and very intrusive. You should also add a close buttons to all the dialogs.
The tutorial is anoying, it takes up all your screen, and don't allow you to play until you have completed it.
Units seem to be starcraft default ones, at least so were their tooltips. You should create your own units with their own spells. You may want to introduce some rock-paper-scisor like attributes.
I don't play melee maps, so I have no idea how to counter units. You should add some extended information in their tooltips.
The game seems very imbalanced.
I don't think synchronizing units is a good feature for a tug of war game. It brings more lag to the game, as there will be more units at once together in the map. If you synchro all your units, there won't be a constant and progressive battle in the lines, but the armies of both teams will just bounce from one base to the other one, until there are enough units to kill the stone zealot and come into the enemy base.
well not sure about the income thingy...it kinda seemed a bit out of place. I upgraded it twice and then decided its too expensive. And the first 2 upgrades were almost first buy since stone zelot could somewhat hold enemies off
Also not sure about the having different runes as their own building thingy. I mean cant one rune just morph to all? I build wrong rune for like 3 times, but perhaps thats just me. Atleast they are quite well organized.
And I dont like that clumping up. You have to use spells to erase units?! I feel anoyingly forced to choose spells if I jsut wanted to use purely units....
Well cant really tell that much what I would change. It just felt a bit off today.
About income:
I dont like how it works now. I liked my previous system more, but it had bad side effects which Im glad Im rid of. I added this instead of static because of Eiviyn's recommendation (He knows what he's talking about, so I generally tend to listen to him). Could replace it with a static income I guess.
Tutorial: Zelda is working on improving it. We're thinking about a skip button and having a "Next" button instead of the tutorial advancing on it's own, so that anyone who needs more time can take it, and anyone who can read faster doesnt have to wait.
The reason it takes up most of the screen and is so intrusive is because, I think Dogmai said this somewhere recently: A person can be smart, but people as a whole are stupid. On battle.net I find it impossible to tell someone something without making sure it's the only thing they can see. I always have people asking me how to start spawns in Gates of Darkness, even though its the only text on the loading screen and there are bloody text tags over the beacons in the map. In RuneCraft, no one asked me what those extra buttons on summoning runes did, no one asked me how to build units, towers, spells, how to unlock stuff, or in general any questions about how to play apart from the bits that fall under countering spells, which are explained under the "advanced" section in the loading screen, so I believe that the tutorial works as intended. Yes, it needs improvement, and we'll do that, but I just wanted to point out that it was made with absolute idiots as the target audience.
About sc2 default units: We're sticking to those. People know them. I know you made custom units similar to sc2 units in CoreFight, and you did a good job at it, but we want to stick to what people know to avoid potential confusion. Yes, the map would be a lot more awesome with completely custom units, I'd love to have it be a completely fantasy based map, but unfortunately anything that takes more than 30 seconds to learn (or less) tends to fail on battle.net. This way people at least know that marines kill everything and that banelings blow up in people's faces.
There will definitely be more detailed tooltips, I just need to find the time to write them. I've been playing Assassins Creed a lot lately, but fortunately finished brotherhood today, so once Im done with Revelations that wont distract me anymore, and I've started playing 2v2 league again and am currently holding 8th spot in diamond with my friend, and we're trying to stay there. I'm thinking of adding detailed stats of the units (Health, damage, attack and move speed, armor and armor type, etc. just like in Core Fight) to their buttons.
The game definitely isnt balanced yet, which is what this testing is for. I think I'm gonna be nerfing flamestrike and the regeneration runes. Unfortunately, without very thorough testing, balancing will take a long time due to the ridiculous amounts of unit and buff combinations, let alone spell usage.
About synchronizing: It just makes units clump up in front of the ramp and sends them out every 15 seconds. In my experience, those big deathballs that appear in most tugs are formed because a large group of units stops to attack a single enemy unit, and repeats that process 1 second later, because all units are walking in a line. This doesnt only create the deathball, but makes all units immediately worthless as they cant deal damage before dying. With the synch that was implemented, you can at the very least have them die in 15 second intervals and actually deal some damage. Im pretty sure that the current synch we have reduces the chance of those deathballs appearing.
As I said, I need to test the map to be able to figure out balance. If both of you could point out exactly what you felt was imbalanced, that would save me a lot of time.
Im not entirely sure what you mean with "having different runes as their own building thingy". If you mean that summoning, spell, aura, tower, and trap are different structures... Well, first of all, we don't use morphs, ever rune is its own structure. I'm thinking of adding an ability to destroy the minor and possibly even major runes in the future so that you can swap them out. I never had the problem of building the wrong primary rune, mostly because I use hotkeys. (S = Summoning, E = Spell, A = Aura, T = Tower, R = Trap, if I remember right. Not sure about aura and trap. Just mouseover the buttons) I cant merge all those together because of command card space, and switching to morphs would now be a ridicolous amount of work that isn't really needed.
All tugs have the clumping problem, and their solution is waiting for the clump to reach your base, and then use your 1-time-kill-everything-spell to get rid of it. I believe RuneCraft has a better solution than that, even if not perfect. And I think there'll always be one guy on your team who has a few spells, so just send a chat message and see if anyone can blow up the clump thats causing you trouble. Also, Im pretty sure the clumps in RuneCraft are nowhere near the size of those in most other tugs.
Its just how tugs work. Units are spawned, and that tends to clump them up. I could further increase spawn times, but I don't think that's a good solution and could potentially increase the game time. Just build a ton of banelings.
About synchronizing: It just makes units clump up in front of the ramp and sends them out every 15 seconds. In my experience, those big deathballs that appear in most tugs are formed because a large group of units stops to attack a single enemy unit, and repeats that process 1 second later, because all units are walking in a line. This doesnt only create the deathball, but makes all units immediately worthless as they cant deal damage before dying. With the synch that was implemented, you can at the very least have them die in 15 second intervals and actually deal some damage. Im pretty sure that the current synch we have reduces the chance of those deathballs appearing.
There are some other ways of controlling deathballs from appearing, for instance giving units a life time. In your case, when you syncro your units, you are automaticaly creating a deathball. This shouldn't be a problem since your enemy will have another deathball aswell. The problem comes when one team has a slight advantage.
For example, lets think of two teams. Both teams has already built 10 balanced units. Then one team decides to build 1 zergling spawning building, while the other one decides to make 1 hellion spawning building. If you have a continous battle system, the hellion will win the first battle against the pair of zerglings, but will also be damaged. It will die soon since there are a constant flow of enemy units. The constant flow of enemy units is slowing down the battle. Hellions will end up beating zerlings and will make their path to the enemy team base, but first they will have to be fighting a constant column of enemy units. It will take hellions a time to reach the enemy base. During this time, your enemies will be able to easily react and counterattack your hellions.
If you syncro all your units, you will have a deathball of 10 balanced units + 1 hellion. Your deathball will easily defeat the one from your enemies. But it won't be killed until it reach the next enemy deathball. Until then, your troops will be moving on to the enemy base. You will advance much more quickly, and your enemies won't have as much time to react agains your deathballs.
I think synchronizing units speeds up battles and progress of your troops. That's what I noticed when playing this game. You didn't have enough time to counter your enemies. On the other hand, it seems like you have solved this problem by introducing spells.
Quote:
As I said, I need to test the map to be able to figure out balance. If both of you could point out exactly what you felt was imbalanced, that would save me a lot of time.
I'm not sure, since this was the first time a played the game. I was trying to make a spell only build, since my team mate was building units spawning runes. Everything worked fine until all my runes was destroyed by Feedback. I think Feedback ability is preventing spell only builds to be a worth strategy. It seemed to me like you can only choose to combine units+spells strategies if you want to win the game.
I'll be looking forward to play this game next week at EU Map Night. I still feel I'm very bad and a newbie at playing it. :)
Hey I just want to say that this map is awesome (its my favorite Tug of War map). But theres a bug when you use Fungal Growth that make the affected units to stop advancing for a lot of time.
I'll take this opportunity to give people an update. Work on the map is almost finished. The published version on the US is extremely outdated, and we've added features like a shop for pets and cool custom models, a rank-based unlock system, an AI to fight against, and more. We've temporarily stopped working on the map for a variety of reasons, but we plan on finishing the last pieces of the game once summer starts in a week or so.
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Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
Fungal Growth restricts unit movement, meaning it loses all it's orders. We have a trigger in place that regularly re-issues orders, and if any unit closeby is attacked units will usually run to help. Can take a look and see if making the periodic issue order trigger would cause lag if it runs faster, and if it doesn't, we will probably include that in our next update (Which might take a while, we're sorta busy and I have very limited internet access at the moment)
If you've got any other feedback, we would appreciate it - Even things like "I used rune X a lot cause of Y and rune W very little beacuse of Z" are helpful.
Well, Im playing Runecraft a lot and I tried a lot of different strategies. But looks like Towers aren't usable because when they die, you can't get your money back. Anyway I can't tell much cause I need to wait the new version (and play it) before comment about things like that.
And please keep the awesome work guys. This map is just... epic.
Hello guys.
Just watch the attached replay and have fun.
It's really broken. Towers are OP, really really OP. Runecraft is getting popular on EU, but you must repair it to keep it this way.
Bugs i found:
towers! you can build them on the same single place
banshee hotkey is the same as hellion, so it is unusable
there are many random actor errors
flame turrets got all shields back when they pop up
Suggestions:
game is too quick, I never even get the aura
there should be an alert when your main rune is getting damage
"kudos" option is not as visible as it should be
the probe is annoying! Make it unselectable, you can change it to dog or something too
Otherwise the game is really really fun! So much better than other tugs of war (like desert strike).
Keep it up and good luck!
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I'll fix as much as I can tomorrow. Tower footprints are causing me problems... I'll see what I can do to fix those. And the flame turrets are bloody annoying as well cause of their burrowing >.>
We're aiming for quick games. I honestly have problems with long games actually, last 10 ish matches I played took 40ish mins (Apart from the one where I was matched with noobs vs marine spammers, did not end well)
Will make pets unselectable. They can be disabled via the shop menu, will make their initial message say that.
I dished out a series of nerfs to towers and even buffed feedback, hopefully that will make them easier to take out. If this still isn't enough, I'll remove their structure status so that you can just nuke them with spells (both figuratively and literally)
Sudden Death is capped at its third stage, which is enabled on the 24th minute of the match, pets are now unselectable. I dont know where the actor errors are from, I guess they are related to shields but I just can't figure out which models are causing them. I tested all unit models a long time ago and got no errors, and I tested some more things locally today as well, and can't get the errors to show up. I can't fix this until I can pinpoint its cause.
Also, I made a big change to the shield buff and spell. They will both now increase the amount of shields given based on unit life and also give 20% bonus of base shields (that part only works for toss obviously). The spell only has a 10% bonus, but it can now stack 5 times (which is 15 base shields +10 shields for each 40 health, 5 times) If anyone who has more time for sc2 than me and plays this map regularly can try and abuse the shield spell, please tell me how OP it is. Oh, each stack reduces spell damage taken by 20%. If anyone has problems dealing with this, just EMP the fuck out of them, its not a damage effect and therefore doesn't get reduced.
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Question:
With this be released in the SEA server?
@jaxter184: Go I don't remember changing anything that would make part of the loading screen incorrect, I'll check again though.
About reactors... They were impossible to balance. Useless on cheap units, overpowered on expensive ones.
Use chrono runes instead, they make units spawn faster.
If anyone can suggest a way to make reactors balanced, please go ahead.
@lolzguy: Go Well, I honestly don't see the need to, as SEA accounts have access to the NA servers, and in addition to that, it will only make things needlessly complicated for us. Zelda has an NA account, I have an EU account, so cross region publishing isn't a problem. If we were to publish on SEA, we'd need to ask someone else who is not part of our team, which will only make things needlessly complicated and delay updates on that server.
Of course, we might change our minds about this and see if we can get anyone to publish the map there, but Im pretty sure we won't bother until we're done with beta testing - we are making far too frequent changes to the map currently.
I posted a small review/rating for your map, as well as for some other maps we played at EU Map Nights, in this post: http://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/player-zone/map-review/31188-fun-or-not-ratings/
There are some points I think you could improve in your game. Here some suggestions:
Also not sure about the having different runes as their own building thingy. I mean cant one rune just morph to all? I build wrong rune for like 3 times, but perhaps thats just me. Atleast they are quite well organized.
And I dont like that clumping up. You have to use spells to erase units?! I feel anoyingly forced to choose spells if I jsut wanted to use purely units....
Well cant really tell that much what I would change. It just felt a bit off today.
@IliIilI: Go @zenx1: Go
Thanks for the feedback.
About income:
I dont like how it works now. I liked my previous system more, but it had bad side effects which Im glad Im rid of. I added this instead of static because of Eiviyn's recommendation (He knows what he's talking about, so I generally tend to listen to him). Could replace it with a static income I guess.
Tutorial: Zelda is working on improving it. We're thinking about a skip button and having a "Next" button instead of the tutorial advancing on it's own, so that anyone who needs more time can take it, and anyone who can read faster doesnt have to wait.
The reason it takes up most of the screen and is so intrusive is because, I think Dogmai said this somewhere recently: A person can be smart, but people as a whole are stupid. On battle.net I find it impossible to tell someone something without making sure it's the only thing they can see. I always have people asking me how to start spawns in Gates of Darkness, even though its the only text on the loading screen and there are bloody text tags over the beacons in the map. In RuneCraft, no one asked me what those extra buttons on summoning runes did, no one asked me how to build units, towers, spells, how to unlock stuff, or in general any questions about how to play apart from the bits that fall under countering spells, which are explained under the "advanced" section in the loading screen, so I believe that the tutorial works as intended. Yes, it needs improvement, and we'll do that, but I just wanted to point out that it was made with absolute idiots as the target audience.
About sc2 default units: We're sticking to those. People know them. I know you made custom units similar to sc2 units in CoreFight, and you did a good job at it, but we want to stick to what people know to avoid potential confusion. Yes, the map would be a lot more awesome with completely custom units, I'd love to have it be a completely fantasy based map, but unfortunately anything that takes more than 30 seconds to learn (or less) tends to fail on battle.net. This way people at least know that marines kill everything and that banelings blow up in people's faces.
There will definitely be more detailed tooltips, I just need to find the time to write them. I've been playing Assassins Creed a lot lately, but fortunately finished brotherhood today, so once Im done with Revelations that wont distract me anymore, and I've started playing 2v2 league again and am currently holding 8th spot in diamond with my friend, and we're trying to stay there. I'm thinking of adding detailed stats of the units (Health, damage, attack and move speed, armor and armor type, etc. just like in Core Fight) to their buttons.
The game definitely isnt balanced yet, which is what this testing is for. I think I'm gonna be nerfing flamestrike and the regeneration runes. Unfortunately, without very thorough testing, balancing will take a long time due to the ridiculous amounts of unit and buff combinations, let alone spell usage.
About synchronizing: It just makes units clump up in front of the ramp and sends them out every 15 seconds. In my experience, those big deathballs that appear in most tugs are formed because a large group of units stops to attack a single enemy unit, and repeats that process 1 second later, because all units are walking in a line. This doesnt only create the deathball, but makes all units immediately worthless as they cant deal damage before dying. With the synch that was implemented, you can at the very least have them die in 15 second intervals and actually deal some damage. Im pretty sure that the current synch we have reduces the chance of those deathballs appearing.
@zenx1: Go
As I said, I need to test the map to be able to figure out balance. If both of you could point out exactly what you felt was imbalanced, that would save me a lot of time.
Im not entirely sure what you mean with "having different runes as their own building thingy". If you mean that summoning, spell, aura, tower, and trap are different structures... Well, first of all, we don't use morphs, ever rune is its own structure. I'm thinking of adding an ability to destroy the minor and possibly even major runes in the future so that you can swap them out. I never had the problem of building the wrong primary rune, mostly because I use hotkeys. (S = Summoning, E = Spell, A = Aura, T = Tower, R = Trap, if I remember right. Not sure about aura and trap. Just mouseover the buttons) I cant merge all those together because of command card space, and switching to morphs would now be a ridicolous amount of work that isn't really needed.
All tugs have the clumping problem, and their solution is waiting for the clump to reach your base, and then use your 1-time-kill-everything-spell to get rid of it. I believe RuneCraft has a better solution than that, even if not perfect. And I think there'll always be one guy on your team who has a few spells, so just send a chat message and see if anyone can blow up the clump thats causing you trouble. Also, Im pretty sure the clumps in RuneCraft are nowhere near the size of those in most other tugs.
Its just how tugs work. Units are spawned, and that tends to clump them up. I could further increase spawn times, but I don't think that's a good solution and could potentially increase the game time. Just build a ton of banelings.
Again, thanks for the feedback guys :)
There are some other ways of controlling deathballs from appearing, for instance giving units a life time. In your case, when you syncro your units, you are automaticaly creating a deathball. This shouldn't be a problem since your enemy will have another deathball aswell. The problem comes when one team has a slight advantage.
For example, lets think of two teams. Both teams has already built 10 balanced units. Then one team decides to build 1 zergling spawning building, while the other one decides to make 1 hellion spawning building. If you have a continous battle system, the hellion will win the first battle against the pair of zerglings, but will also be damaged. It will die soon since there are a constant flow of enemy units. The constant flow of enemy units is slowing down the battle. Hellions will end up beating zerlings and will make their path to the enemy team base, but first they will have to be fighting a constant column of enemy units. It will take hellions a time to reach the enemy base. During this time, your enemies will be able to easily react and counterattack your hellions.
If you syncro all your units, you will have a deathball of 10 balanced units + 1 hellion. Your deathball will easily defeat the one from your enemies. But it won't be killed until it reach the next enemy deathball. Until then, your troops will be moving on to the enemy base. You will advance much more quickly, and your enemies won't have as much time to react agains your deathballs.
I think synchronizing units speeds up battles and progress of your troops. That's what I noticed when playing this game. You didn't have enough time to counter your enemies. On the other hand, it seems like you have solved this problem by introducing spells.
I'm not sure, since this was the first time a played the game. I was trying to make a spell only build, since my team mate was building units spawning runes. Everything worked fine until all my runes was destroyed by Feedback. I think Feedback ability is preventing spell only builds to be a worth strategy. It seemed to me like you can only choose to combine units+spells strategies if you want to win the game.
I'll be looking forward to play this game next week at EU Map Night. I still feel I'm very bad and a newbie at playing it. :)
Hey I just want to say that this map is awesome (its my favorite Tug of War map). But theres a bug when you use Fungal Growth that make the affected units to stop advancing for a lot of time.
Thanks ;)
I'll take this opportunity to give people an update. Work on the map is almost finished. The published version on the US is extremely outdated, and we've added features like a shop for pets and cool custom models, a rank-based unlock system, an AI to fight against, and more. We've temporarily stopped working on the map for a variety of reasons, but we plan on finishing the last pieces of the game once summer starts in a week or so.
@LeeGall: Go
Thanks :)
Fungal Growth restricts unit movement, meaning it loses all it's orders. We have a trigger in place that regularly re-issues orders, and if any unit closeby is attacked units will usually run to help. Can take a look and see if making the periodic issue order trigger would cause lag if it runs faster, and if it doesn't, we will probably include that in our next update (Which might take a while, we're sorta busy and I have very limited internet access at the moment)
If you've got any other feedback, we would appreciate it - Even things like "I used rune X a lot cause of Y and rune W very little beacuse of Z" are helpful.
EDIT: Zelda beat me to posting >.>
@TheAlmaity: Go
Well, Im playing Runecraft a lot and I tried a lot of different strategies. But looks like Towers aren't usable because when they die, you can't get your money back. Anyway I can't tell much cause I need to wait the new version (and play it) before comment about things like that.
And please keep the awesome work guys. This map is just... epic.
@TheAlmaity: Go @zeldarules28: Go
Hello guys. Just watch the attached replay and have fun. It's really broken. Towers are OP, really really OP. Runecraft is getting popular on EU, but you must repair it to keep it this way.
Bugs i found:
Suggestions:
Otherwise the game is really really fun! So much better than other tugs of war (like desert strike). Keep it up and good luck!
@Frizi: Go
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I'll fix as much as I can tomorrow. Tower footprints are causing me problems... I'll see what I can do to fix those. And the flame turrets are bloody annoying as well cause of their burrowing >.>
We're aiming for quick games. I honestly have problems with long games actually, last 10 ish matches I played took 40ish mins (Apart from the one where I was matched with noobs vs marine spammers, did not end well)
Will make pets unselectable. They can be disabled via the shop menu, will make their initial message say that.
I dished out a series of nerfs to towers and even buffed feedback, hopefully that will make them easier to take out. If this still isn't enough, I'll remove their structure status so that you can just nuke them with spells (both figuratively and literally)
Sudden Death is capped at its third stage, which is enabled on the 24th minute of the match, pets are now unselectable. I dont know where the actor errors are from, I guess they are related to shields but I just can't figure out which models are causing them. I tested all unit models a long time ago and got no errors, and I tested some more things locally today as well, and can't get the errors to show up. I can't fix this until I can pinpoint its cause.
Also, I made a big change to the shield buff and spell. They will both now increase the amount of shields given based on unit life and also give 20% bonus of base shields (that part only works for toss obviously). The spell only has a 10% bonus, but it can now stack 5 times (which is 15 base shields +10 shields for each 40 health, 5 times) If anyone who has more time for sc2 than me and plays this map regularly can try and abuse the shield spell, please tell me how OP it is. Oh, each stack reduces spell damage taken by 20%. If anyone has problems dealing with this, just EMP the fuck out of them, its not a damage effect and therefore doesn't get reduced.