I'll describe the features after explaining the motivation behind making them. I enjoy playing phantom, but there is a major flaw with them. These two things that make it great:

1) Struggle between one player with many resources and many with low resources
2) Deception

But they not compatible in existing phantom maps. Either the phantom will try to bumrush everyone and not use any deception, or they will just wait until people get bored and start attacking each other. If the phantom does not ever use his resources there really is no way to find out who he is.

Some phantom maps rectify this with a cover blow timer, however this makes it so the best strategy for the phantom is to just bumrush everyone from the start, making secrecy, one of the main points of the phantom moot every time.

In Phantom: Chaos, I attempt to solve this problem by having a cover blow timer, but it goes up with kills by anyone (reveal at 0:00). I also added darkness mode which is active anytime the timer is below 5:00, it turns back off if it gets back up to 10:00 (and auto revisions to your allies). This gives the phantom a chance to use secrecy while still having action. For example, if there are two protosses, once it gets dark, you could say, "Ah everyone make detection, [the other player] just sent dts into my base". Then before they can make detection, have your dts attack people without detection. I considered blocking messages while in darkness (by constantly displaying 11 blank lines). This could add more room for deception but would probably be too annoying.

Another feature, phantom selection is not purely random, it strongly favors "good" players. There is nothing worse than a bad phantom and this solves that problem. Basically it checks how fast you build your first worker and move your first 4 workers. It does not do this deterministically so it is still somewhat random.

Blood Phantom is an idea originally by TheNevermind. His idea was really inspiring. In this version, the phantom can change, and it is whoever currently has the highest kills score. At first this seems lame since it can change and might not ever end. But in actuality once a player becomes dominant it turns into an all versus 1 struggle. They get so many kills taking on everyone else that even if they die they are likely to still be the phantom. This basically guarantees you have alot of action.

One major flaw with TheNevermind's map was that it did not explain things well, and even if you understood the concept, it was still sometimes hard to tell if you were the phantom or not if there were many battles (you basically would have to just sit there and watch your income, which is hard to do when you need to be macroing and have tons of money coming in anyways). I also wanted to add some other nice features into it (see below). First I just made notifications for when the phantom changed (and special notifications and a heartbeat sound for the actual phantom). But later I made a leaderboard for kills score. This removes all secrecy ofcourse, making it a much different map. I still need to play it more to decide if it is better this way. There is still room for deception. For example, even if you are not the phantom it could still be beneficial to backstab a fellow slayer and get a high kills score to become the phantom.

Both of these are on BGH, but I lowered the resource per node to prevent infinite turtling stalemates. I know many people frown on BGH for phantom, but I like it (only for phantom) and it is popular, the triggers can easily be ported to any map.

Features for both maps:

--Anti hack without needing EUD (detects automine), and crashes them so they cannot stay in the game. I realize this is not all hackers, but it is most of them. It is 100% accurate for what it aims to detect. Also it won't need updating for new patches and cannot be stopped without also harming the hackers themselves (slowing the actions of the automine). Normally I wouldn't care that much if people hack in my games, but in phantom it can completely ruin the game since they know who the phantom is.

--Phantom bonus = 50% of all slayers mining effort. Constant bonus just doesn't make sense. Viett's idea of bonus = increase by a percent, but of your own income is also good, but I thought I would try something new. I also like this idea because it is independent of number of players and favors a more stable game. It also avoids problems like if a player just has a supply depot left, why should that players presence increase the phantom bonus (in other phantoms, bonus based on number of players)?

--Small map size (about 150k), but still has the sounds. This was possible for 2 reasons, some sounds were on 8-bit and became smaller when made 16-bit but with compression. Also using scmdraft2 just lead to smaller map. If I open it and save with starforge it gets over twice as large instantly.

My goal for these maps was just to take something I like and make it better, while increasing the apparent complexity as little as possible. I realize the world does not need yet another phantom map, but given a choice I will choose these maps when I decide to play phantom because they are much more fun for me, and hopefully others as well.

These maps are open source. After enough play testing and feedback I will make a locked version (possibly renamed too) which will hopefully displace phantom 2.5 as the phantom of choice on bnet.

Phantom Chaos beta.scm
Blood Phantom BGH 0.6.scm

enjoy,
flag

edit: phantom 4.2
Phantom 4.2 BGH.scm
(non locked version).scm

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jun 6 2009, 6:17 pm by flagitious.

In my perspective, this'd fit better in the Melee Projects

Yay for moar phantom.

The only Blood Phantom I played, no one understood that I ceased to be phantom after I got owned by a bunch of marines, so they just sat there while he built up his army and hunted down my drones... Pretty sad. Though fun.

I've decided to add more to the map, maybe this should be moved to works in progress? (not sure on staredit.net policy here)

For normal phantom I went ahead and added the vote for resource amount. I think this is a bad thing to have, but people seem to miss it. Also added a 2nd phantom for when there are 7-8 players in the game (each gets 25% slayer mining, until one dies then other gets full 50% again).

I plan to improve Blood Phantom more after finishing regular phantom 4.2, which I feel like I must do quickly because I released version 4.1 prematurely with lots of bugs

I have completed testing and modifying all the changes, I also renamed it to phantom 4 instead of chaos. Here are the files
Phantom 4.2 BGH.scm
(non locked version).scm

I also developed a macro system for generating triggers using ruby, I'll edit this post with link to it once I have written a brief description of them.
Edit: http://www.staredit.net/topic/7600/

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 6 2009, 7:56 pm by flagitious.

Made yet another phantom map, this one is for people who don't like the darkness and reveal in 4.2. It is basically meant to replace 2.5 by being the same but superior.

Here is a list of improvements from 2.5 to 2.6:
Auto Mine / Stat Hack / Drop hack detection (crashes the guilty)
Slayer elimination notifications
Vote without wasting time (by uncheck ally vic, thx viett for the idea)
Smaller file size, 137kb instead of 353kb
Replays won't desynch when watched at higher speeds (no waits in intro)
Anti idle phantom selection (won't pick players that are afk, also tends to pick more skilled players but still be very random)
Vanilla SC Compatible
Map starts off semi fog of war (so you can see terrain, but also where you have been)
Slightly smaller resource bonus when few players (proportional to number of players - 2 instead of number of players, that way 1v1 there is no bonus)
Also made the bonus not change when players leave (the bonus is determined at time of chosing phantom). This is to prevent weird things like it being wise for slayers to just give up and exit if they are weak.
Observer mode (lift cc at start)

Phantom 2.6 BGH.scm
source code

I also made some changes to Phantom 4:

Made it so when cover blow timer runs out, player with list kills is destroyed (this is to provide more incentive for chaos, since it is not known exactly who has least kills).
Leaderboard units, when light
Allied victory based resource voting (same as 2.6)
Map fog of war start (same as 2.6)
Improved hacker detection (same as 2.6)
Changed timings or darkness/etc a bit
Added 2 minute warning
Fixed bug where it did not re give vision when "let there be light"
Observer players no longer lose vision during darkness
Changed it so 2 phantoms only in 8 player games.
Fixed resource bonus so that it no longer awards bonus when canceling units/buildings
Also changed resource bonus code so that it gives correct display in end of game charts (this required more triggers, it has to calculate mined and spent instead of just current)

Phantom 4.4 BGH.scm
source code


I tried to make it so that there are 3 viable timings for a phantom to go buck wild. None of which is too powerful.

1. rush asap
2. as soon as darkness hits (weaker attack, but advantage of stealth)
3. once slayers start to kill each other to avoid being removed from the game / after reveal + slayer removed from the game

I personally prefer to attack fast, but most people prefer to wait, and 4.2 was not conductive to them, hopefully this will make all play styles about equal, will need testing and balancing.

Ideas still considering:
multi state leaderboard when light (resource MINED, units, kills)
make it so removes least kills slayer not least kills player
making it start with halluc minerals/gas for turbo start

This topic maybe should be moved to maps in development forum.
Edit, updated maps from beta version

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 29 2009, 5:27 pm by flagitious.

I am very impressed with how you did some of the issue balancing in Phantom, overall.

Though, 50% is a bit extreme when there is 5 other people mining, that is WAY to much of an advantage. Perhaps 25% with one and 12.5% with two? (2 ore and gas, 1 ore and gas with two)