Shame I have no clue on how to embed images in this new setup (and it won't allow me to upload anything :D)
So yea, super useful, thanks again!
EDIT: This said, looks like I can't convert hybrid nemesis death model from xml back to m3. :/
"File "F:\m3\xmlToM3.py", line 218, in <module> convertFile(filePath, outputDirectory) File "F:\m3\xmlToM3.py", line 166, in convertFile doc = xml.dom.minidom.parse(inputFilePath) File "C:\Users\PC\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\xml\dom\minidom.py", line 1958, in parse return expatbuilder.parse(file) File "C:\Users\PC\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\xml\dom\expatbuilder.py", line 911, in parse result = builder.parseFile(fp) File "C:\Users\PC\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\xml\dom\expatbuilder.py", line 207, in parseFile parser.Parse(buffer, 0) xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 156336, column 31"
Played it on normal, lost when reached 1st base because I ordered all units to storm it and there was a reaver. On 2nd playtrough every time I saw a structure I'd send out DTs to stasis detection (cannons) -> stasis pylon powering detection and kill everything.
One possibility of mitigating reaver deadliness on easy and normal difficulties is giving players vision of outposts when they approach them. That way they know that there are such and such units there and can have easy time to plan accordingly.
Overall difficulty seemed okay, nothing relevant stood out in a bad way.
Probably my favorite RTC map so far. I enjoy protecting escorts and this does exactly what I'd expect from escorts while being different enough from Mists.
It's got good pace, but when playing on hard I wished there were 1 - 2 more waves (wished it didn't end so soon, it's as if you suddenly didn't have last two waves on void launch. A buildup without a climax.).
When playing on brutal it felt like brutal+ with wave after wave pummeling you into submission, but then again I suck, it was against swarm zerg (as tempest protoss) and I was carried hard that game.
Idk how to feel about bonus objective giving you actual advantage however small that is, since then it kinda ceases to be "optional" and becomes "optimal" instead.
Second bonus objective I loved.
The weather storm came off as mapmakers "I need to add more mechanics to the map!", especially because unlike rising lava map, it comes up only once and doesn't repeat itself (no way to apply the experience of the event further down the game). The sudden objective stop also somewhat breaks the pace (it left us with not much to do on hard, on brutal it was a welcome breather). ..And I love the idea of storm disruption, it throws me back to C&C series, just in here it feels to me slightly underworked.
Guys and girls, looks like the technology is finally there! Someone at blizz does think that naming arcade lobbies is a good idea after all (that took a while ~_~)
Oh man, it's the type of game on the opposite spectrum of those that I play/specialize in, meaning I won't even have points of reference to compare it to other maps..
I'll try to squeeze in a game a day and see if after two weeks I'll have anything meaningful to say.
So, some further points I noticed immediately after starting to play:
- Why can't I zoom in. There are all these pretty HotS models but I can't get my camera close enough to actually appreciate all the details they come with.
- Why can't I select my ally units? I'd like to know what stats they have.
- Why can't I select enemy units. I'd like to know what stats they have to formulate strategy.
- Why do some of my skills say things "moderate damage" while some talent upgrades specify exact damage numbers. I'd like to know exactly how much dmg. my skills do.
- Initially, every time I healed from a well it appeared as if I didn't heal at all. The second time I played I payed close attention and noticed that it was healing me over time instead of instantly as I had expected (I don’t play HotS, only remember healing wells from WC3 where they were instant). I suggest displaying text tags over heroes displaying healed amount every time they are healed by any source (wells/spells/talents).
- Some heroes have no weapon icon.
- It appears that hero weapons have 0 scanrange, heroes weren’t auto-attacking enemies unless ordered to. Somewhat confusing.
-Raynors penetrating shot does not knockback, at least what it does isn’t what one would expect when reading “knockback”.
Now for more indepth talk.
Part 1 – Enemies
How much do you scale enemy life per player? I played 7 times with fullhouse and 1 time solo. And when I played solo – I actually did the damage I’d expected to do, killing enemy minions in 3-4 autoattack shots. When I played fullhouse however, it was taking seemingly around 15-20 shots to kill a single minion with game mostly revolving around:
1) Running around enemies trying to separate the wave into a smaller groups
2) Running around enemies waiting for cooldowns to wear off so that you can damage them.
It feels like you’re scaling +50-100% life for each player. Please don’t. At max a 15% increase otherwise enemies seem improportionally bulletspongy unless players spam their cooldowns in synch. And bulletspongy every now and then is fine. But when it’s all you get at all times it becomes boring, pretty much throwing away weapon attack micro and making heroes rely solely on cooldowns.
How about increasing the amounts spawned? You don’t have to spawn them all at the same time, each wave can have miniwaves, and you balance the amount of players by tweaking enemy quality and quantity in those waves.
Altho, such change alone would not be enough. Yes, a part of dullness when playing with full house comes from bulltetspongy nature of scaling, but that’s only like 15% of the issue.
When relating to enemies – a major problem is lack of variety in challenge. The 20 waves you fight are essentially allthesame, sprinkeld with affixes that do nothing but amplify boring parts of the design over time (enemy + life and + damage aren’t very interesting affixes when enemies already take forever to kill).
This can be addressed by adding more interesting enemies (enemy offensive/support mages? magic/melee hybrids?). However, I think there is an opportunity in here to really spice things up. How about adding buffed up HotS heroes as bosses every 5 waves. This way wave 1-4 will be a warm-up period and wave 5 will be a spike of excitement in a face of boss battle. If you decided to segment waves into miniwaves you can even spawn boss as 1st part of the wave with reinforcements spawning every X seconds from a portal behind them so that players need to formulate some sort of strategies.
Bonus Point: Make enemies more different aestethically. Right now enemies are mostly this small, thin mass of gray. Scaling them up and giving them more colors could be a good start. Look at usual sc2 units – they are all buff with distinct silhouette and a nice spread of teamcolor. Try to find a way to add color to enemies, either buy retexturing or by adding colorful in-game effects to them.
Part 2 - Heroes
So, uh, lack of variety in challenge really amplifies the obvious absence of depth in hero management.
As it stands right now – you always fight the same enemies and your skills see very little change (except for few OP things like infinite mana Jaina). There is nothing to look forward to as the game goes on, no strategizing by increasing your stats, no making a fallback plans by purchasing potions and whatnot. It’s a very dry hero management that is all about using those 4 skills you’re given from the start.
The talents you have are nice, but they’re not enough.
Do you want to stay 100% faithful to HotS?
If yes then your best bet is to polish everything else so much that the game plays great in spite of restrictions you decided to impose on yourself.
You still can have some other form of resource control. Like money for kills which can buy boons for temp hero buffs or hire mercenaries to be stationed at certain points in the map.
If you however are willing to mix things then here are other options that instantly come to mind:
1) Give cash for kills and for reaching certain waves. Add shop, in shop sell consumables (life/mana pots, scrolls of 1-time use spells) and items. For starters items can give you things like life, attack damage, spell damage and maybe some passive. WC3 hero items could be nice starting point of reference.
2) Skillpoints and perks. If you don’t want a shop, you can expand skill system. Every level grants a skillpoint and each skillpoint can be used to either increase skills aspect/level or grant a passive boost (life/mana/armor/regen). Talens can be reworked into here to to unlock additional spell upgrade aspects.
Part 3 – Closing Thoughts
Initially I played around 4 fullhouse games on normal. We won all games by spamming abilities, but it didn’t feel satisfying. Game just showed us victory screen while background displayed “wave 21/20”. No closure, no outro, just the “you won, now go away” cut =/
So for now, this feels like 3/5, mostly because of all the HotS importing work and that it functions properly. It’s dozen times better than previous version, but then again, previous version mostly had obvious technical grievances that had to be addressed before any design feedback.
So anyway, I’ll be keeping an eye on this. Hope the feedback was of use. It’s a shame there aren’t more people posting their view so that you don’t get your feedback from just me, but oh well..
Ah, I remembered about this tread and played map today. Hotkeys, a-move and objective ping made it even more enjoyable.
Some new notes from my playtrough.
- Combine bnet lobby teams into one team;
- Change color/transparency of 0 damage tags to be less distracting (gray them out with 40-50% fade?) In the start of the game we were quite spammed with those, it felt weird;
- Announce and display somewhere the chosen difficulty, I had no idea what difficulty we played on in 6 player game, I chose "very easy", but we started with level 30 enemies and 10 min into game we ran into a bunch of swordsmen that pretty much wiped out our party.
- So many abilities are timed passive boosts, please make behavior icons and spell button icons the same so that I have easier time determining when what is active;
- I think sometime 20 min into the game music loop stopped. Made me sad, I enjoyed it quite a bit :/
- Localization is tough. Have you considered making something like a language toggle button, based on which language is toggled - UI would switch to that language (you'd need to make a trigger which rewrites button tooltips/names and some world speech/text to predefined english/german translations);
I came to really appreciate all the terrain work while running away from those swordsmen that took me from 12000 to 1000 life in a span of 10 seconds. Still feel like the first time I've played this that this is something special.
Concerning already published maps - if there is even 0.01 % that someone will take the map, mutate and publish it for others to play then it's worth it! Also some people learn better from directly dissecting maps inner workings, so it would help such folks too.
About unfinished projects - it's a tough choice, you'd need to showcase what it has, if you have time and mood for that then sure..
MY unique idea, which anyone is free to use or modify or join me with: Opening the dark portal in wc3, combined with starcraft 2. "something something something protoss portal (giant beast from another dimension eating your souls)". every unit that dies goes to feed the portal (too many deaths early on, you lose) Portal can be destroyed by destroying base, or big boss spawns after certain time; strength based on souls fed to portal. Rescueable NPC units, who are killed if you dont save them in time; feeding the portal. Mini-bosses defending special enemy structures which can be destroyed, to remove (custom) upgrades from them, making the fight easier in specific ways; allowing each commander type to gain an advantage.
I just want to give you a heads up that there is a commander that specializes in making many weak disposable and suicide units (Zagara) and there is another commander for who one of available game-play styles is to sacrifice his own units to gain an advantage (Alarak).
And from what I've seen the new Stukov commander attacks by sending to their deaths hundreds of infested, which wold die either way if not used due to timed life.
And there is yet another commander that specializes in making super costly yet super strong units that likely never die when supported (Nova).
Just something to keep in mind.. tho none of these are the required 3 base commanders from the template that we'll be getting.
Okay, so I played it around 6-8 times, at first a bit in single player to get a grip of what's going on.
After being utterly murdered in singleplayer I decided that it would be better to try it with full house after all. After getting utterly murdered in public fullhouse games I made a private party including a guy who played previous versions before, so he knew more than I did. We beat it in 20-ish minutes on our second try.
So, first out the technical stuff:
- Loading screen is mean towards non-widescreen monitor users (https://snag.gy/hQbpzX.jpg). I think one of editors settings allows you to scale loading screen properly for any resolution;
- Patch notes are a mess. First thing the guy I brought in said was: "You sure it's the right version? It hasn't been updated since the middle of last year";
- No menu button. One of the games a guy had a panic attack because he had to leave the game and he couldn't. I tried telling him the hotkeys but he said he was on mac laptop and he didn't have them. We decided to kill everything and trigger defeat so that the guy could leave;
-The chat bar misplacement. This alongside with the above points makes map feel technically broken;
- Timer overflow, I've built a rescue beacon 40 seconds before time and this is the result https://snag.gy/goUsG7.jpg (needing to wait 291 hours for rescue)
- Tesla Coil build button's description said it can attack ground and air units - it attacked only air. I felt very cheated that the iconic Red Alert tesla coil couldn't zap ground units t_t
- Harvest minerals objective also counts minerals from kills. I know what you mean, but it still stood out in a weird way;
-My SC2 hanged on indefinitely when I left games as last remaining player?
New player experience improvement suggestions:
- Make supply pickups semi-shared, e.g. when one player picks a supply crate (+4) all others get +1. This way new players who stay in base to repair ship don't get screwed over as much when someone who knows what to do goes out and takes all nearby supplies.
-Make repair free. You can already heal buildings for energy which is free, as a new player it felt dirt-cheap that I had ran out of my very sparse resources by trying to be helpful and just automatically repairing stuff. You can turn down repair rate to compensate. If you wish to have a quicker emergency repair you can add extra ability that restores buildings/units life in bulk for a portion of it's cost (can be done trough dummy ability + triggers).
Now, for subjective feedback:
It's obvious that you love the map the way it is. These are just my observations after half a day of playing it.
I think the map is a great hybrid of gathering, exploration and defense, at least initially.
Once mules kick in, everything changes. With them in play you mine out entire screens worth of minerals within less than a day cycle. This boosts your economy to insane levels, pretty much surrendering the pace of the game to players. You're either so good it's boring, or you're a newbie and the game kills you cause you built barricades and didn't explore the map from day 0.
Maybe it's the kind of gameplay that Krydon players appreciate, I wouldn't know, wipe out screen from enemies, then under 30 seconds plunder all resources, and then repeat the cycle all the while fortifying your ever invincible fortress. It's an ok gameplay. But for an outsider like me the gap between early, middle and lategame and how quickly it occurred left me feeling somesort of dissonance.
It's as if at some point players were given powerful tools and then in return enemies got buffed, but because pacing is so dependent on player skill it's impossible to balance the game.
And it's not just gathering element being made redundant by mules, exploration also takes a hit from sensor towers. Where once you needed to scout, now you can just scan entire map with a few scan towers in a little under 5 minutes. This surrenders to players even more control and power.
So I imagine if one wanted to normalize the pace, one could do something like:
- Remove mule (or limit it to 1), instead add upgrades for survivor to increase gathering rate (some other upgrades like attack/defense could be neat too). Perhaps a tech research/unlock for a building that slowly mines nearby fields (to process minerals inside base while you explore). Can even be a drone/ability that is released from survivor. (This idea is probably unviable due to current balancing of the game as I imagine it takes into account that at some point players start to gain income in massive chunks).
- Remove scan tower, if pinpointing tech location is an issue then perhaps make a sensor tower that only shows locations of buildings as red dots on minimap, so that players still need to head into unknown, just now they know in which direction to go.
But then again, this map has been around for quite a while, so I imagine that exploring such changes would be out of place.
Regardless, hope you manage to sort out all the technical issues bringing the map down so that more like-minded new and veteran players can appreciate the experience.
If it's a simpler game without much of customization go for evolutions, these are an easy way to keep game varied and interesting. And besides, if pokemon/dbz taught us anything is that changing forms is cool.
If you have complex systems (like equipment and/or some sort of enchantment/slots where it's possible to change units weapon type and add special effects) then idk.
Both systems can be amazing if you invest time in them.
0
Heya there. I just wanted to drop by and say that this is godsend. Time and time again I come back to use this method to retexture things.
This is my latest adventure -> https://ibb.co/hV6GkF
Shame I have no clue on how to embed images in this new setup (and it won't allow me to upload anything :D)
So yea, super useful, thanks again!
EDIT: This said, looks like I can't convert hybrid nemesis death model from xml back to m3. :/
"File "F:\m3\xmlToM3.py", line 218, in <module> convertFile(filePath, outputDirectory)
File "F:\m3\xmlToM3.py", line 166, in convertFile doc = xml.dom.minidom.parse(inputFilePath)
File "C:\Users\PC\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\xml\dom\minidom.py", line 1958, in parse
return expatbuilder.parse(file)
File "C:\Users\PC\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\xml\dom\expatbuilder.py", line 911, in parse
result = builder.parseFile(fp)
File "C:\Users\PC\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\xml\dom\expatbuilder.py", line 207, in parseFile
parser.Parse(buffer, 0)
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 156336, column 31"
0.963210702341137
Played it on normal, lost when reached 1st base because I ordered all units to storm it and there was a reaver. On 2nd playtrough every time I saw a structure I'd send out DTs to stasis detection (cannons) -> stasis pylon powering detection and kill everything.
One possibility of mitigating reaver deadliness on easy and normal difficulties is giving players vision of outposts when they approach them. That way they know that there are such and such units there and can have easy time to plan accordingly.
Overall difficulty seemed okay, nothing relevant stood out in a bad way.
0
Today is a good day!
https://esports.yahoo.com/blizzard-interview-000000355.html
0
Probably my favorite RTC map so far. I enjoy protecting escorts and this does exactly what I'd expect from escorts while being different enough from Mists.
It's got good pace, but when playing on hard I wished there were 1 - 2 more waves (wished it didn't end so soon, it's as if you suddenly didn't have last two waves on void launch. A buildup without a climax.).
When playing on brutal it felt like brutal+ with wave after wave pummeling you into submission, but then again I suck, it was against swarm zerg (as tempest protoss) and I was carried hard that game.
Idk how to feel about bonus objective giving you actual advantage however small that is, since then it kinda ceases to be "optional" and becomes "optimal" instead.
Second bonus objective I loved.
The weather storm came off as mapmakers "I need to add more mechanics to the map!", especially because unlike rising lava map, it comes up only once and doesn't repeat itself (no way to apply the experience of the event further down the game). The sudden objective stop also somewhat breaks the pace (it left us with not much to do on hard, on brutal it was a welcome breather). ..And I love the idea of storm disruption, it throws me back to C&C series, just in here it feels to me slightly underworked.
0
Guys and girls, looks like the technology is finally there! Someone at blizz does think that naming arcade lobbies is a good idea after all (that took a while ~_~)
Announcement!
Official preview in the spoilers
0
0
Oh man, it's the type of game on the opposite spectrum of those that I play/specialize in, meaning I won't even have points of reference to compare it to other maps..
I'll try to squeeze in a game a day and see if after two weeks I'll have anything meaningful to say.
0
So, some further points I noticed immediately after starting to play:
- Why can't I zoom in. There are all these pretty HotS models but I can't get my camera close enough to actually appreciate all the details they come with.
- Why can't I select my ally units? I'd like to know what stats they have.
- Why can't I select enemy units. I'd like to know what stats they have to formulate strategy.
- Why do some of my skills say things "moderate damage" while some talent upgrades specify exact damage numbers. I'd like to know exactly how much dmg. my skills do.
- Initially, every time I healed from a well it appeared as if I didn't heal at all. The second time I played I payed close attention and noticed that it was healing me over time instead of instantly as I had expected (I don’t play HotS, only remember healing wells from WC3 where they were instant). I suggest displaying text tags over heroes displaying healed amount every time they are healed by any source (wells/spells/talents).
- Some heroes have no weapon icon.
- It appears that hero weapons have 0 scanrange, heroes weren’t auto-attacking enemies unless ordered to. Somewhat confusing.
-Raynors penetrating shot does not knockback, at least what it does isn’t what one would expect when reading “knockback”.
Now for more indepth talk.
Part 1 – Enemies
How much do you scale enemy life per player? I played 7 times with fullhouse and 1 time solo. And when I played solo – I actually did the damage I’d expected to do, killing enemy minions in 3-4 autoattack shots. When I played fullhouse however, it was taking seemingly around 15-20 shots to kill a single minion with game mostly revolving around:
1) Running around enemies trying to separate the wave into a smaller groups
2) Running around enemies waiting for cooldowns to wear off so that you can damage them.
It feels like you’re scaling +50-100% life for each player. Please don’t. At max a 15% increase otherwise enemies seem improportionally bulletspongy unless players spam their cooldowns in synch. And bulletspongy every now and then is fine. But when it’s all you get at all times it becomes boring, pretty much throwing away weapon attack micro and making heroes rely solely on cooldowns.
How about increasing the amounts spawned? You don’t have to spawn them all at the same time, each wave can have miniwaves, and you balance the amount of players by tweaking enemy quality and quantity in those waves.
Altho, such change alone would not be enough. Yes, a part of dullness when playing with full house comes from bulltetspongy nature of scaling, but that’s only like 15% of the issue.
When relating to enemies – a major problem is lack of variety in challenge. The 20 waves you fight are essentially allthesame, sprinkeld with affixes that do nothing but amplify boring parts of the design over time (enemy + life and + damage aren’t very interesting affixes when enemies already take forever to kill).
This can be addressed by adding more interesting enemies (enemy offensive/support mages? magic/melee hybrids?). However, I think there is an opportunity in here to really spice things up. How about adding buffed up HotS heroes as bosses every 5 waves. This way wave 1-4 will be a warm-up period and wave 5 will be a spike of excitement in a face of boss battle. If you decided to segment waves into miniwaves you can even spawn boss as 1st part of the wave with reinforcements spawning every X seconds from a portal behind them so that players need to formulate some sort of strategies.
Bonus Point: Make enemies more different aestethically. Right now enemies are mostly this small, thin mass of gray. Scaling them up and giving them more colors could be a good start. Look at usual sc2 units – they are all buff with distinct silhouette and a nice spread of teamcolor. Try to find a way to add color to enemies, either buy retexturing or by adding colorful in-game effects to them.
Part 2 - Heroes
So, uh, lack of variety in challenge really amplifies the obvious absence of depth in hero management.
As it stands right now – you always fight the same enemies and your skills see very little change (except for few OP things like infinite mana Jaina). There is nothing to look forward to as the game goes on, no strategizing by increasing your stats, no making a fallback plans by purchasing potions and whatnot. It’s a very dry hero management that is all about using those 4 skills you’re given from the start.
The talents you have are nice, but they’re not enough.
Do you want to stay 100% faithful to HotS?
If yes then your best bet is to polish everything else so much that the game plays great in spite of restrictions you decided to impose on yourself.
You still can have some other form of resource control. Like money for kills which can buy boons for temp hero buffs or hire mercenaries to be stationed at certain points in the map.
If you however are willing to mix things then here are other options that instantly come to mind:
1) Give cash for kills and for reaching certain waves. Add shop, in shop sell consumables (life/mana pots, scrolls of 1-time use spells) and items. For starters items can give you things like life, attack damage, spell damage and maybe some passive. WC3 hero items could be nice starting point of reference.
2) Skillpoints and perks. If you don’t want a shop, you can expand skill system. Every level grants a skillpoint and each skillpoint can be used to either increase skills aspect/level or grant a passive boost (life/mana/armor/regen). Talens can be reworked into here to to unlock additional spell upgrade aspects.
Part 3 – Closing Thoughts
Initially I played around 4 fullhouse games on normal. We won all games by spamming abilities, but it didn’t feel satisfying. Game just showed us victory screen while background displayed “wave 21/20”. No closure, no outro, just the “you won, now go away” cut =/
So for now, this feels like 3/5, mostly because of all the HotS importing work and that it functions properly. It’s dozen times better than previous version, but then again, previous version mostly had obvious technical grievances that had to be addressed before any design feedback.
So anyway, I’ll be keeping an eye on this. Hope the feedback was of use. It’s a shame there aren’t more people posting their view so that you don’t get your feedback from just me, but oh well..
0
Ah, I remembered about this tread and played map today. Hotkeys, a-move and objective ping made it even more enjoyable.
Some new notes from my playtrough.
- Combine bnet lobby teams into one team;
- Change color/transparency of 0 damage tags to be less distracting (gray them out with 40-50% fade?) In the start of the game we were quite spammed with those, it felt weird;
- Announce and display somewhere the chosen difficulty, I had no idea what difficulty we played on in 6 player game, I chose "very easy", but we started with level 30 enemies and 10 min into game we ran into a bunch of swordsmen that pretty much wiped out our party.
- So many abilities are timed passive boosts, please make behavior icons and spell button icons the same so that I have easier time determining when what is active;
- I think sometime 20 min into the game music loop stopped. Made me sad, I enjoyed it quite a bit :/
- Localization is tough. Have you considered making something like a language toggle button, based on which language is toggled - UI would switch to that language (you'd need to make a trigger which rewrites button tooltips/names and some world speech/text to predefined english/german translations);
I came to really appreciate all the terrain work while running away from those swordsmen that took me from 12000 to 1000 life in a span of 10 seconds. Still feel like the first time I've played this that this is something special.
0
Definitely!
Concerning already published maps - if there is even 0.01 % that someone will take the map, mutate and publish it for others to play then it's worth it! Also some people learn better from directly dissecting maps inner workings, so it would help such folks too.
About unfinished projects - it's a tough choice, you'd need to showcase what it has, if you have time and mood for that then sure..
0
Looks to me like all "authors" got premium. Grats.
0
1
Okay, so I played it around 6-8 times, at first a bit in single player to get a grip of what's going on.
After being utterly murdered in singleplayer I decided that it would be better to try it with full house after all. After getting utterly murdered in public fullhouse games I made a private party including a guy who played previous versions before, so he knew more than I did. We beat it in 20-ish minutes on our second try.
So, first out the technical stuff:
- Loading screen is mean towards non-widescreen monitor users (https://snag.gy/hQbpzX.jpg). I think one of editors settings allows you to scale loading screen properly for any resolution;
- Patch notes are a mess. First thing the guy I brought in said was: "You sure it's the right version? It hasn't been updated since the middle of last year";
- No menu button. One of the games a guy had a panic attack because he had to leave the game and he couldn't. I tried telling him the hotkeys but he said he was on mac laptop and he didn't have them. We decided to kill everything and trigger defeat so that the guy could leave;
-The chat bar misplacement. This alongside with the above points makes map feel technically broken;
- Timer overflow, I've built a rescue beacon 40 seconds before time and this is the result https://snag.gy/goUsG7.jpg (needing to wait 291 hours for rescue)
- Tesla Coil build button's description said it can attack ground and air units - it attacked only air. I felt very cheated that the iconic Red Alert tesla coil couldn't zap ground units t_t
- Harvest minerals objective also counts minerals from kills. I know what you mean, but it still stood out in a weird way;
-My SC2 hanged on indefinitely when I left games as last remaining player?
New player experience improvement suggestions:
- Make supply pickups semi-shared, e.g. when one player picks a supply crate (+4) all others get +1. This way new players who stay in base to repair ship don't get screwed over as much when someone who knows what to do goes out and takes all nearby supplies.
-Make repair free. You can already heal buildings for energy which is free, as a new player it felt dirt-cheap that I had ran out of my very sparse resources by trying to be helpful and just automatically repairing stuff. You can turn down repair rate to compensate. If you wish to have a quicker emergency repair you can add extra ability that restores buildings/units life in bulk for a portion of it's cost (can be done trough dummy ability + triggers).
Now, for subjective feedback:
It's obvious that you love the map the way it is. These are just my observations after half a day of playing it.
I think the map is a great hybrid of gathering, exploration and defense, at least initially.
Once mules kick in, everything changes. With them in play you mine out entire screens worth of minerals within less than a day cycle. This boosts your economy to insane levels, pretty much surrendering the pace of the game to players. You're either so good it's boring, or you're a newbie and the game kills you cause you built barricades and didn't explore the map from day 0.
Maybe it's the kind of gameplay that Krydon players appreciate, I wouldn't know, wipe out screen from enemies, then under 30 seconds plunder all resources, and then repeat the cycle all the while fortifying your ever invincible fortress. It's an ok gameplay. But for an outsider like me the gap between early, middle and lategame and how quickly it occurred left me feeling somesort of dissonance.
It's as if at some point players were given powerful tools and then in return enemies got buffed, but because pacing is so dependent on player skill it's impossible to balance the game.
And it's not just gathering element being made redundant by mules, exploration also takes a hit from sensor towers. Where once you needed to scout, now you can just scan entire map with a few scan towers in a little under 5 minutes. This surrenders to players even more control and power.
So I imagine if one wanted to normalize the pace, one could do something like:
- Remove mule (or limit it to 1), instead add upgrades for survivor to increase gathering rate (some other upgrades like attack/defense could be neat too). Perhaps a tech research/unlock for a building that slowly mines nearby fields (to process minerals inside base while you explore). Can even be a drone/ability that is released from survivor. (This idea is probably unviable due to current balancing of the game as I imagine it takes into account that at some point players start to gain income in massive chunks).
- Remove scan tower, if pinpointing tech location is an issue then perhaps make a sensor tower that only shows locations of buildings as red dots on minimap, so that players still need to head into unknown, just now they know in which direction to go.
But then again, this map has been around for quite a while, so I imagine that exploring such changes would be out of place.
Regardless, hope you manage to sort out all the technical issues bringing the map down so that more like-minded new and veteran players can appreciate the experience.
Have a nice day~
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If it's a simpler game without much of customization go for evolutions, these are an easy way to keep game varied and interesting. And besides, if pokemon/dbz taught us anything is that changing forms is cool.
If you have complex systems (like equipment and/or some sort of enchantment/slots where it's possible to change units weapon type and add special effects) then idk.
Both systems can be amazing if you invest time in them.