Zombie apocalypse happens. Humans have been pushed off the planet itself and forced up space elevators into orbit. As the zombies follow behind, our ragtag survivors have to equip themselves for a last stand.
Objective
LSA is a wave-based survival game. As usual, each wave results in the spawning of numerous zombies from the edges of the map. Each wave ends either when most zombies are eliminated-save for a few select types that do not influence the kill count or are different otherwise-or after three minutes.
Every wave, numerous zombie "slots" are rolled for behind the scenes. If all goes well, new types of zombies are introduced most waves, ranging from heavily armored roaches to cliff jumpers, to towering abominations.
There are 4 difficulty levels, ranging from easy softcore mode, to the virtually impossible nightmare setting.
Surviving
This is where Last Stand Alpha differs from the standard formulas of survival games. Whereas most survival maps have the player either controlling a hero with numerous abilities, or a base built up of many production structures and appliances, Last Stand Alpha simplifies base building to a clean yet enjoyable level, removing the need for redundant production facilities altogether. Your workers can construct defenses such as sandbags and bunkers, as well as turrets and towers to provide an unmanned solution to base defense.
Unit Management
With an unmanned solution, there has to be a manned alternative, correct? With no production structures, units are instead produced by equipping survivors with weapons. When the game starts, every player gets a number of civilians (more if there are fewer players) and can morph these survivors into units to fight with.
Additional units are acquired by killing a certain amount of zombies-presented in the leaderboard next to the word "Reinforcements." When the entire team lowers this number to zero, it is reset to a slightly higher value, and civilians for each player show up in the center of the map. Civilians are cloaked and have 1000 health as of now, so protecting the center is not as-of-yet crucial.
Units may be morphed into units such as marines, firebats, casters such as escorts (sentries) or dummies (wannabe high templars). Using minerals, vehicles may also be produced. Minerals are also used to upgrade unit statistics from every unit's unique upgrade menu. This leads us into the next question: how do you acquire minerals?
Economy
There are two ways to acquire minerals.
First off, killing zombies gives a bounty. This bounty starts off at 5 per kill, received every 5 kills-amounting to 25 per 5 kills. As a player produces engineers (SCV's) the 25 minerals given each turn decrease by 3 minerals for each engineer. The exception is the softcore difficulty mode, where this does not not decrease as you make more engineers.
The second and more reliable, albeit less sustainable method, is to mine the space platform's various deposits of scrap scattered around. Each pile of scrap holds about 2000 minerals, and while you can find about 3-4 scrap piles per general baseable area (yes, baseable is a word as of now), you must expand constantly or the piles will run dry, regenerating slowly but giving only a single mineral per 10 second trip instead of five.
Minerals are dropped off at the armory, a structure constructed by both engineers and the later mechanic.
Content
The Survivors
There are over 30-40 units that you can make, but here are some of the basic ones:
Rifleman
A battle-hardened marine, the rifleman deals moderate damage per hit to targets over two times per second. They are decent all-around troops and have both grenades and stimpacks in case you get in trouble. Their health and armor can be upgraded as well as their attacks and range.
RPG Trooper
Equipped with dual rocket launchers, this madman/anti-tank soldier fires debilitating rockets which slow down lesser foes (non-massive) and deal additional damage to armored targets. They share upgrades with the rifleman.
Marksman
Standard anti-light/medium trooper with a long ranged rifle. He can snipe important targets for a quick boost of damage. He can also morph into the mercenary...
Mercenary
A highly-trained assasin and psionic master, the mercenary deals heavy damage at a slow rate to just about anything, but more importantly, she can dominate zombies, adding them to your force.
Sniper
The sniper penetrates armor and has a long range, allowing him to take down targets that other units have difficulties with, such as the fearsome elephantus.
Heavy
With the same minigun as the Mounted M134 turret (built by engineers and mechanics), this soldier deals low damage per hit at an increased fire rate, dealing heavy area damage-especially to lightly armored foes.
Engineer
The Engineer can gather scrap and build basic defenses such as sandbags, bunkers, and Mounted M134's. They can also repair mechanical objects.
Mechanic
The Mechanic wears a heavy suit that protects him from harm. He has decent combat potential, but he also constructs three types of turrets in addition to psi-disrupters and biological healing towers. He gathers minerals as well and doesn't reduce your zombie bounty-but gathers more slowly than an engineer.
Ion Gunner
The answer to large groups of mid-ranged enemies, the Ion Gunner is an upgradeable trooper with an ion rifle that deals biological area damage to nearby units, friend or foe. He is short-ranged but can be upgraded to fire at a longer distance.
Pyro
Exactly what it says on the tin. Shares upgrades with the mechanic.
Vehicles
Vehicles cost minerals to build but are generally more resilient and thus more efficient with regards to attrition.
David
(Uses Goliath model. See what I did there?) Equipped with autocannons and anti-armor missiles, this mech can strafe zombies and take hits from ranged enemies, making it ideal for supporting other troops.
Abrams
It can run over targets, and deploy into artillery mode, where it deals reduced damage at increased range.
The Zombies
Zombies are modelled after zerg units. Once again, there are countless zombies that you will face, but here are the basic types you should get around to knowing:
Spewers
These roaches devastate structured with ranged acid. Killing them first is preferable to avoid compromising your barricade.
Tinylings
These zerglings travel quickly and penetrate armor. It's important to have weaponry capable of dealing with a lot of them at once, since they tend to rush your bunkers quickly.
Skeletal Archers
These short-ranged zombies cause nearby infantry to fire more slowly. Garrison them in bunkers and stay away from them to avoid these effects. Or just use vehicles.
"only real complain is that you are punished too hard for not getting eco going early on you should keep the current incomes system but add a nouns to each kill of the player to make the game easier then it is now. As it stands it is too hard to get going well, to get your eco going along with the defenses"
Grammar please?
--
Alright, so since this is a forum full of mapmakers (I hope) is it possible to get answers on the following issue?
Basically, at some point in the game (it does NOT happen on a certain wave. Before you say it does, play it more than once) usually past wave 20 or so, some kind of lag starts to occur. This lag eventually causes one player (and this player is the same player between games played by the same party) to show up on the disconnect list. He never disconnects, though. What happens then, is the game freezes up for all players, forcing everyone to ctrl-alt-delete out of the game.
I need help tracking this issue down.
--
Also, new update for the U.S. players. Thermal gunners have a better (in most regards) attack that doesn't kill friendlies as much, and there are a few new units. I recently added an anti-armor mech that's available from the david past tier 2.
Also, I enabled a bounty equivalent to 1 mineral per kill in nightmare mode, up to 2 minerals per kill to all players in softcore mode. I lowered mineral regeneration rates and minerals per scrap pile to compensate for that, however. If this bounty is too low I might increase it to 2 or more per kill in nightmare. I need feedback on this.
I'll also try playing some games with people when possible without building a base, setting up an armory in someone's base just for the zombie vaccine and tier 4 research.
I decided I'd post this here, since the map has come a long way since the beginning and I'd like some professional feedback.
"Last Stand Alpha" is currently only on the U.S. realm. (I'm not sure how to upload it to the EU realm)
It is a survival map where players fight off hordes of zerg. However, it differs from other zerg defense maps in that units are not trained. Rather, killing enemies contributes kills to the team, and once the team's kill pool hits the equivalent of 25 kills per player, each team member receives a civilian. (This is to discourage killstealing, while encouraging teamwork.)
Civilians are the primary currency used to make units. Each civilian can morph into a unit (in the case of infantry, for free. In the case of vehicles, for a sum of minerals) or, given a specific upgrade (Zombie vaccine) can be used to create a second civilian (This is not recursive. Both civilians afterward cannot create any more civilians).
Early units include Riflemen, which deal damage to a single unit and can utilize stimpacks and grenades for speed and quick damage. Davids are moderately armored mechs with superior survivability to early infantry and decent all-around damage against everything. Marksmen can deal damage against unarmored targets. RPGs slow enemies down and deal splash damage, making them useful against non-armored for both reasons. Melee Troops can deal damage quickly given enough upgrades and Engineers are used to build structures including AoE Minigun Turrets and Sandbags for protection.
Later on you can use Mechanics to construct Flame Turrets and Mounted Cannons to counter everything with turrets. You may use Ion Gunners to counter biological targets (most enemies) in an area, or use Snipers to pierce enemy armor at the cost of raw damage.
Bunkers also protect your units as well as your base at a steeper price (2 minerals for a sandbag, 50 for a bunker). Awesome Personnel Carriers can not only protect soldiers inside and act as mobile bunkers (when still), but they can morph into flying Blackhawks which transport infantry over cliffs.
As you upgrade to the next tiers, new units are unlocked. There are about 40 or so units that you can use.
Upgrades are located in a tab in each unit's command card. Upgrades are instant and each cost around 100 minerals, but often more (especially in the case of armor).
Minerals themselves are mined from piles of scrap located around the map. These are dropped off at the armory (engineering bay-in the game it looks like supply crates).
There is currently a tier system in place used to unlock units. Tiers are researched at the armory. However, I might do something with the long-term kills statistic in the future to replace the tier system. I'd love to be able to use higher-tier units at the start, and personally I don't think the tiers add much to the game.
Thoughts? I'd like to hear your opinion on the tier system. Is it good? fine? bad?
Pictures are probably coming later. I'm a bit short on time right now.
I'm working on a map that is an extension of melee play, but on a much larger map scale. As I develop the mod I plan to add more features but right now, it's on a normal melee map (forbidden planet) but the map is modified as to be larger and less boring to fight on.
One of the biggest issues as of now however is gameplay balance. It is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of a unit when it is not actively being used. So I'd like to have the AI test unit compositions for me. However, I have no experience with AI scripting, and sadly, the AI doesn't seem to like my custom units at all (technically they already exist... I'm talking about goliaths, killteam marauders, firebats, the APC, stone zealots, and so on).
Is there any way to have the AI utilize these new units? I do not wish to modify the AI itself, but rather I just want to add my units into its composition. If I have to learn how to script the AI then so be it. I know java, at least.
Actually, I solved it myself. Thanks for responding though. ;)
It turns out, what i first did was move the mod to the 'mods' folder, because I had kept it in the 'maps' folder (in the sc2 directory). For some reason, all the mod data was wiped after I moved the mod, and I happened to upload the mod to battle.net after the data was wiped for some reason. I uploaded a slightly older version of the mod and now it works.
So I have this mod uploaded to battle.net. It contains custom data but has dependencies on the campaign.
I want to apply these changes to a map.
However, the problem is that whenever I add the mod as a dependency for the map (extinction), which has no campaign dependency, it simply uses the campaign definitions for everything, instead of my custom data, even though my mod is set as a dependency and the campaign is not.
0
Last Stand Alpha
Background
Zombie apocalypse happens. Humans have been pushed off the planet itself and forced up space elevators into orbit. As the zombies follow behind, our ragtag survivors have to equip themselves for a last stand.
Objective
LSA is a wave-based survival game. As usual, each wave results in the spawning of numerous zombies from the edges of the map. Each wave ends either when most zombies are eliminated-save for a few select types that do not influence the kill count or are different otherwise-or after three minutes. Every wave, numerous zombie "slots" are rolled for behind the scenes. If all goes well, new types of zombies are introduced most waves, ranging from heavily armored roaches to cliff jumpers, to towering abominations.
There are 4 difficulty levels, ranging from easy softcore mode, to the virtually impossible nightmare setting.
Surviving
This is where Last Stand Alpha differs from the standard formulas of survival games. Whereas most survival maps have the player either controlling a hero with numerous abilities, or a base built up of many production structures and appliances, Last Stand Alpha simplifies base building to a clean yet enjoyable level, removing the need for redundant production facilities altogether. Your workers can construct defenses such as sandbags and bunkers, as well as turrets and towers to provide an unmanned solution to base defense.
Unit Management
With an unmanned solution, there has to be a manned alternative, correct? With no production structures, units are instead produced by equipping survivors with weapons. When the game starts, every player gets a number of civilians (more if there are fewer players) and can morph these survivors into units to fight with.
Additional units are acquired by killing a certain amount of zombies-presented in the leaderboard next to the word "Reinforcements." When the entire team lowers this number to zero, it is reset to a slightly higher value, and civilians for each player show up in the center of the map. Civilians are cloaked and have 1000 health as of now, so protecting the center is not as-of-yet crucial.
Units may be morphed into units such as marines, firebats, casters such as escorts (sentries) or dummies (wannabe high templars). Using minerals, vehicles may also be produced. Minerals are also used to upgrade unit statistics from every unit's unique upgrade menu. This leads us into the next question: how do you acquire minerals?
Economy
There are two ways to acquire minerals.
First off, killing zombies gives a bounty. This bounty starts off at 5 per kill, received every 5 kills-amounting to 25 per 5 kills. As a player produces engineers (SCV's) the 25 minerals given each turn decrease by 3 minerals for each engineer. The exception is the softcore difficulty mode, where this does not not decrease as you make more engineers.
The second and more reliable, albeit less sustainable method, is to mine the space platform's various deposits of scrap scattered around. Each pile of scrap holds about 2000 minerals, and while you can find about 3-4 scrap piles per general baseable area (yes, baseable is a word as of now), you must expand constantly or the piles will run dry, regenerating slowly but giving only a single mineral per 10 second trip instead of five. Minerals are dropped off at the armory, a structure constructed by both engineers and the later mechanic.
Content
The Survivors
There are over 30-40 units that you can make, but here are some of the basic ones:
Rifleman
A battle-hardened marine, the rifleman deals moderate damage per hit to targets over two times per second. They are decent all-around troops and have both grenades and stimpacks in case you get in trouble. Their health and armor can be upgraded as well as their attacks and range.
RPG Trooper
Equipped with dual rocket launchers, this madman/anti-tank soldier fires debilitating rockets which slow down lesser foes (non-massive) and deal additional damage to armored targets. They share upgrades with the rifleman.
Marksman
Standard anti-light/medium trooper with a long ranged rifle. He can snipe important targets for a quick boost of damage. He can also morph into the mercenary...
Mercenary
A highly-trained assasin and psionic master, the mercenary deals heavy damage at a slow rate to just about anything, but more importantly, she can dominate zombies, adding them to your force.
Sniper
The sniper penetrates armor and has a long range, allowing him to take down targets that other units have difficulties with, such as the fearsome elephantus.
Heavy
With the same minigun as the Mounted M134 turret (built by engineers and mechanics), this soldier deals low damage per hit at an increased fire rate, dealing heavy area damage-especially to lightly armored foes.
Engineer
The Engineer can gather scrap and build basic defenses such as sandbags, bunkers, and Mounted M134's. They can also repair mechanical objects.
Mechanic
The Mechanic wears a heavy suit that protects him from harm. He has decent combat potential, but he also constructs three types of turrets in addition to psi-disrupters and biological healing towers. He gathers minerals as well and doesn't reduce your zombie bounty-but gathers more slowly than an engineer.
Ion Gunner
The answer to large groups of mid-ranged enemies, the Ion Gunner is an upgradeable trooper with an ion rifle that deals biological area damage to nearby units, friend or foe. He is short-ranged but can be upgraded to fire at a longer distance.
Pyro
Exactly what it says on the tin. Shares upgrades with the mechanic.
Vehicles
Vehicles cost minerals to build but are generally more resilient and thus more efficient with regards to attrition.
David
(Uses Goliath model. See what I did there?) Equipped with autocannons and anti-armor missiles, this mech can strafe zombies and take hits from ranged enemies, making it ideal for supporting other troops.
Abrams
It can run over targets, and deploy into artillery mode, where it deals reduced damage at increased range.
The Zombies
Zombies are modelled after zerg units. Once again, there are countless zombies that you will face, but here are the basic types you should get around to knowing:
Spewers
These roaches devastate structured with ranged acid. Killing them first is preferable to avoid compromising your barricade.
Tinylings
These zerglings travel quickly and penetrate armor. It's important to have weaponry capable of dealing with a lot of them at once, since they tend to rush your bunkers quickly.
Skeletal Archers
These short-ranged zombies cause nearby infantry to fire more slowly. Garrison them in bunkers and stay away from them to avoid these effects. Or just use vehicles.
And that's all for now. Good night folks!
0
"only real complain is that you are punished too hard for not getting eco going early on you should keep the current incomes system but add a nouns to each kill of the player to make the game easier then it is now. As it stands it is too hard to get going well, to get your eco going along with the defenses"
Grammar please?
--Alright, so since this is a forum full of mapmakers (I hope) is it possible to get answers on the following issue?
Basically, at some point in the game (it does NOT happen on a certain wave. Before you say it does, play it more than once) usually past wave 20 or so, some kind of lag starts to occur. This lag eventually causes one player (and this player is the same player between games played by the same party) to show up on the disconnect list. He never disconnects, though. What happens then, is the game freezes up for all players, forcing everyone to ctrl-alt-delete out of the game.
I need help tracking this issue down.
--Also, new update for the U.S. players. Thermal gunners have a better (in most regards) attack that doesn't kill friendlies as much, and there are a few new units. I recently added an anti-armor mech that's available from the david past tier 2.
Also, I enabled a bounty equivalent to 1 mineral per kill in nightmare mode, up to 2 minerals per kill to all players in softcore mode. I lowered mineral regeneration rates and minerals per scrap pile to compensate for that, however. If this bounty is too low I might increase it to 2 or more per kill in nightmare. I need feedback on this.
I'll also try playing some games with people when possible without building a base, setting up an armory in someone's base just for the zombie vaccine and tier 4 research.
0
Would it be appropriate to bump this? I'm continuing to update it. I can't figure out though, how to get access to the EU realm.
0
I decided I'd post this here, since the map has come a long way since the beginning and I'd like some professional feedback.
"Last Stand Alpha" is currently only on the U.S. realm. (I'm not sure how to upload it to the EU realm)
It is a survival map where players fight off hordes of zerg. However, it differs from other zerg defense maps in that units are not trained. Rather, killing enemies contributes kills to the team, and once the team's kill pool hits the equivalent of 25 kills per player, each team member receives a civilian. (This is to discourage killstealing, while encouraging teamwork.)
Civilians are the primary currency used to make units. Each civilian can morph into a unit (in the case of infantry, for free. In the case of vehicles, for a sum of minerals) or, given a specific upgrade (Zombie vaccine) can be used to create a second civilian (This is not recursive. Both civilians afterward cannot create any more civilians).
Early units include Riflemen, which deal damage to a single unit and can utilize stimpacks and grenades for speed and quick damage. Davids are moderately armored mechs with superior survivability to early infantry and decent all-around damage against everything. Marksmen can deal damage against unarmored targets. RPGs slow enemies down and deal splash damage, making them useful against non-armored for both reasons. Melee Troops can deal damage quickly given enough upgrades and Engineers are used to build structures including AoE Minigun Turrets and Sandbags for protection.
Later on you can use Mechanics to construct Flame Turrets and Mounted Cannons to counter everything with turrets. You may use Ion Gunners to counter biological targets (most enemies) in an area, or use Snipers to pierce enemy armor at the cost of raw damage.
Bunkers also protect your units as well as your base at a steeper price (2 minerals for a sandbag, 50 for a bunker). Awesome Personnel Carriers can not only protect soldiers inside and act as mobile bunkers (when still), but they can morph into flying Blackhawks which transport infantry over cliffs.
As you upgrade to the next tiers, new units are unlocked. There are about 40 or so units that you can use.
Upgrades are located in a tab in each unit's command card. Upgrades are instant and each cost around 100 minerals, but often more (especially in the case of armor). Minerals themselves are mined from piles of scrap located around the map. These are dropped off at the armory (engineering bay-in the game it looks like supply crates).
There is currently a tier system in place used to unlock units. Tiers are researched at the armory. However, I might do something with the long-term kills statistic in the future to replace the tier system. I'd love to be able to use higher-tier units at the start, and personally I don't think the tiers add much to the game.
Thoughts? I'd like to hear your opinion on the tier system. Is it good? fine? bad?
Pictures are probably coming later. I'm a bit short on time right now.
0
Hi, my name is FruitNinja.
I'm working on a map that is an extension of melee play, but on a much larger map scale. As I develop the mod I plan to add more features but right now, it's on a normal melee map (forbidden planet) but the map is modified as to be larger and less boring to fight on.
One of the biggest issues as of now however is gameplay balance. It is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of a unit when it is not actively being used. So I'd like to have the AI test unit compositions for me. However, I have no experience with AI scripting, and sadly, the AI doesn't seem to like my custom units at all (technically they already exist... I'm talking about goliaths, killteam marauders, firebats, the APC, stone zealots, and so on).
Is there any way to have the AI utilize these new units? I do not wish to modify the AI itself, but rather I just want to add my units into its composition. If I have to learn how to script the AI then so be it. I know java, at least.
0
Actually, I solved it myself. Thanks for responding though. ;)
It turns out, what i first did was move the mod to the 'mods' folder, because I had kept it in the 'maps' folder (in the sc2 directory). For some reason, all the mod data was wiped after I moved the mod, and I happened to upload the mod to battle.net after the data was wiped for some reason. I uploaded a slightly older version of the mod and now it works.
0
So I have this mod uploaded to battle.net. It contains custom data but has dependencies on the campaign.
I want to apply these changes to a map.
However, the problem is that whenever I add the mod as a dependency for the map (extinction), which has no campaign dependency, it simply uses the campaign definitions for everything, instead of my custom data, even though my mod is set as a dependency and the campaign is not.
Any help on getting it to use my custom data?