Thanks very much to the previous posters, i got the heroes working now, but running into 2 new problems.

The photon cannons will often (about 1 time out of 3) shoot at a target but completely miss it, hitting the ground and doing no damage. I'd say there's no way around it except that the cannons in Spawn D 5.8 don't do this (at least not remotely as often). With 20ish cannons up I still leak vultures (!) because they all miss so many times. Does anyone know how i can go about fixing this problem?

Also, I am betting this is not fixable, but my melee heroes are getting killed when the target they're attacking gets attacked by one of my Sunkens. I can't make the heroes invuln, because i want Zerg units to be able to attack (and kill) them as a counter. Is there any way short of either cutting off sunken access to their patrol area or using only ranged heroes to fix this problem?

Thanks in advance

I bet you use squared terrain instead of isometric. Because then you dont see where is high ground and where normal elevation.

But the behaviour tells me that cannons stand on low ground and the units are running on high ground.

NudeRaider perfectly answered the first problem. If the cannons are on 'low terrain' and the opponents are on 'high terrain,' The photon cannons only have a 70% chance of hitting the target. Change the terrain and it should fix the problem.

The second problem... I'm unsure what you're trying to say; it sounds like the melee heroes are taking damage by the sunken colonies; but...
1. I don't think (though I may be wrong) that sunken colonies have splash damage.
2. If you own both the heroes and the sunken colony, splash damage shouldn't affect the heroes. However, if one player owns a sunken colony and another player owns a melee hero, and a sunken colony has splash damage, the hero will receive damage from the sunken colony.

If you could elaborate on the second problem a bit more, that'd be helpful.
Especially that part

Thanks very much nuderaider, i am using squared and i didn't realize that was the case with elevation. that problem is fixed, i really appreciate the help.

as for the sunkens, ill elaborate. Player 1 (human) owns the sunken colony. Player 8 (comp) sends units past it on a set path, and the sunken attacks the units. Player 7 (comp) owns the hero and is ALLIED to Player 1, ENEMY to Player 8. The hero patrols along a portion of the path that Player 8's units must cross.

When Player 7's melee hero is attacking a unit sent by Player 8, and then Player 1's sunken attacks the same unit sent by Player 8, the hero owned by Player 7 dies. I'm pretty sure this is because of splash damage. I always was under the impression that sunken colonies had that.

Hmm... Okay, I guess... Splash damage it is? You can either give the heroes to player 1, or the sunken colonies to player 7 to stop the splashing. If this isn't possible (kill counts or what have you), maybe you could make a separate area for heroes and colonies...

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 10 2007, 5:50 am by Roy.

Sunken colonies don't do splash though...

I don't quite understand what happens exactly. Why should your hero die when his enemy gets killed by a sunken?! Does the sunken kill him after? Is it killed by a trigger? Is there a splash unit killing it? If you tell us what kills the heros we will probably be able to tell you how to avoid it.

However you can make unbuildable terrain where the hero is patrolling to prevent sunkens (and cannons) to be built there.

Addition: Yeah, sunkens don't do splash. What you explained sounds like a kill by triggers. There's nothing else that would make the hero die. Or perhaps you forgot to mention some details?

When you want to build cannons where the hero patrols but want to restrict sunkens make a location at the patrol area and remove all creep colonies, give the player the drone and his money back and inform him that he would have to build somewhere else.
To make clear where he can build sunkens you could take another terrain there.