SC2Mapster

@ImperialGood: Go

The General is one of the choosable heroes, and is very unique form the others. Rather than being a traditional hero, he has the ability to directly take control of the zerg spawns (they gain a timed life when this happens so as not to make too many zerg on the map). He can also call down some terran units via drop pods. He is also the only one who can upgrade the zerg spawns armor/attack values (the traditional melee armor/attack upgrades).

There are also some special units in the game which can see up cliffs. For instance if you spare a certain civilian village, you gain access to a dog unit with this ability. Also if you destroy all but like 2 of the villages, you gain an uberlisk which can see up cliffs :) and is very tanky. I'm also thinking about creating a siege tank hero which can spawn a spotter unit which if fully upgraded, could see up cliffs.

There is currently a spawn limit for the terran units, but not for the zerg units. Feels kinda mean to deny players their units, but perhaps if I had it so it denied the small units first (or only), then maybe it wouldn't be as bad. This will be something to try if the shorter routes don't accomplish enough lag reduction. Which units would you want to be spawned the most if others couldn't be (due to a spawn limit)? Currently I'm thinking brutalisk, ultralisk, hunter killer, and maybe queen. Banelings are great vs groups of enemies, but bad vs siege tanks on high ground, so not sure where I'd put them on the pecking order. Zerglings would obviously be the last unit allowed.

Also another random teamwork thought, I haven't actually played all the way to the end with him, but tookus has a "nearly invulnerable" buff which makes all damage to him take no more than 1 point while activated. So he should be a great tanker vs tanks and the boss. Have all the demons waste their shots on him.

Anyways, I appreciate the feedback, and got some good ideas for additional lag reduction now. I got a big test on the 20th, so won't be making too many changes for awhile. Hopefully these types of problems won't be as prevalent in 20 years when starcraft 3 comes out, lol.

@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.

A test for a future ability for the baneling wrangler hero. He's gonna make it raaaaaaaiiiiiiiin!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

@abvdzh: Go

Yea, but I'm not that advanced yet xP

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).

@Supernova134: Go

Starcraft is full of cheese!

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.

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 :/ )

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).