Well then, I must say that single player vs multiplayer experience left vastly different impression on me.
SINGLE PLAYER
For singleplayer I played it through all 3 length settings till the end to check progression. All were played on easiest (normal) difficulty. And it left me troubled.
-There was this weird dissonance concerning unrestrained movement - why is it that I and my enemy are playing by different rulesets? It also felt unfair when the objective was to kill a structure and you could go into corner and make all enemies move toward you, then when they're on the other side of the map - go to objective and nuke it. Overall - an entire layer of depth thrown out with seemingly nothing to replace it.
-Enemies overkill like mad. It feels jarring to see enemy AI in a turn based game to just A-move and do this entirely unintelligent stuff.
-Scaling is annoying. Just as I upped my damage enough for sniper to 1-hit Infested I get to learn that they now have 3 more health. I appreciate reliability and consistency of data. Would rather prefer to have additional more deadlier monster type than this "oh you upgraded? Well enjoy your upgrades being meaningless cause everything just got scaled up because reasons..".
-Missions felt empty. Get your setup and do the usual monotone thing on indistinguishable featureless terrain. I would have loved to have a mini-campaign where you get to pick different mission types with different objectives to receive mission-unique rewards or face mission-unique challenges. Maybe if it had some cool stuff/setup I would have more desire to replay those unique missions with perhaps different approaches.
MULTIPLAYER
Then, feeling shallow and depressed I tried multiplayer (two 5-round games, 2nd and 3rd difficulties). Aaand it was a whole different experience.
-Unrestrained movement now made complete sense cause you were able to adapt and support your allies. There was no dead time. Everyone were moving and doing things and I was free to either do my own thing or help somebody across the map. It felt nice.
-Enemy predictability concerning overkill now felt justified cause I could much easily anticipate who would live and die by start of next turn.
-People were like "ooh this is fun!", chatting and giving each other instructions. Not having a coherent structure to missions didn't bother me at all at this time, tho it probably would have been even more fun to decide with everyone whether to do mission A for reward X or mission B for reward Y (if mission choosing was a thing).
I did hate 2 mechanics tho:
1) Sometimes you need to sacrifice your unit for allies to win. But by being a team player you put yourself in disadvantage by not getting minerals for surviving units (cause you sacrificed for greater good) :(
2) I stole all minerals that dropped from my ally kills. At the end of the round I had 18 spare minerals. I felt dirty. I bet if my allies knew what I did they'd be furious too.
Oh, and the dialog that shows turns progression after all your units have made their action was obnoxious because it was right in the center of screen blocking vision. Would prefer to have it on top of the screen instead.
I had no idea randomly deformed terrain was possible until you mentioned it which I'm now keen on learning how to implement. Do you mind sharing some tips on how I could do this, share keywords I could look up in the data/trigger editor, or point me to sc2mapster mapster threads that have done this?
Thanks.
I just wanted to link this map I instantly remembered - it generates random world purely through terrain deformers and it's open to check out: http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/populous/
Also, searching "terrain deformer" on mapster gives you a whole page of relevant topics including tutorial.
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Well then, I must say that single player vs multiplayer experience left vastly different impression on me.
SINGLE PLAYER
For singleplayer I played it through all 3 length settings till the end to check progression. All were played on easiest (normal) difficulty. And it left me troubled.
-There was this weird dissonance concerning unrestrained movement - why is it that I and my enemy are playing by different rulesets? It also felt unfair when the objective was to kill a structure and you could go into corner and make all enemies move toward you, then when they're on the other side of the map - go to objective and nuke it. Overall - an entire layer of depth thrown out with seemingly nothing to replace it.
-Enemies overkill like mad. It feels jarring to see enemy AI in a turn based game to just A-move and do this entirely unintelligent stuff.
-Scaling is annoying. Just as I upped my damage enough for sniper to 1-hit Infested I get to learn that they now have 3 more health. I appreciate reliability and consistency of data. Would rather prefer to have additional more deadlier monster type than this "oh you upgraded? Well enjoy your upgrades being meaningless cause everything just got scaled up because reasons..".
-Missions felt empty. Get your setup and do the usual monotone thing on indistinguishable featureless terrain. I would have loved to have a mini-campaign where you get to pick different mission types with different objectives to receive mission-unique rewards or face mission-unique challenges. Maybe if it had some cool stuff/setup I would have more desire to replay those unique missions with perhaps different approaches.
MULTIPLAYER
Then, feeling shallow and depressed I tried multiplayer (two 5-round games, 2nd and 3rd difficulties). Aaand it was a whole different experience.
-Unrestrained movement now made complete sense cause you were able to adapt and support your allies. There was no dead time. Everyone were moving and doing things and I was free to either do my own thing or help somebody across the map. It felt nice.
-Enemy predictability concerning overkill now felt justified cause I could much easily anticipate who would live and die by start of next turn.
-People were like "ooh this is fun!", chatting and giving each other instructions. Not having a coherent structure to missions didn't bother me at all at this time, tho it probably would have been even more fun to decide with everyone whether to do mission A for reward X or mission B for reward Y (if mission choosing was a thing).
I did hate 2 mechanics tho:
1) Sometimes you need to sacrifice your unit for allies to win. But by being a team player you put yourself in disadvantage by not getting minerals for surviving units (cause you sacrificed for greater good) :(
2) I stole all minerals that dropped from my ally kills. At the end of the round I had 18 spare minerals. I felt dirty. I bet if my allies knew what I did they'd be furious too.
Oh, and the dialog that shows turns progression after all your units have made their action was obnoxious because it was right in the center of screen blocking vision. Would prefer to have it on top of the screen instead.
I just wanted to link this map I instantly remembered - it generates random world purely through terrain deformers and it's open to check out: http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/populous/
Also, searching "terrain deformer" on mapster gives you a whole page of relevant topics including tutorial.