Hi guys,

It's been ages since I've been here and the same goes for editing, I even have to re-learn all the commands and SCMDraft's syntax, lol. Anyway, I'm busy with creating a game roughly based on 'Plants vs Zombies'.

Basically you have like 5 lanes on which you can build money generators, turrets, walls, special turrets, etc. Starting slowly but with decreasing intervals random waves of zombies approach to EAT YOUR BRAINZ! You need turrets (or actually shooting plants ) in every lane since a turret in lane 1 can't shoot a zombie in lane 2.

To stick with the Zombie and for other more practical reasons I want to have all incoming Zombies to move very slow. I haven't figured out how to do this though, so I need your help.

Options:
1. Constantly moving burrowed units under the incoming zombies (practically impossibly considering there are going to be lots of zombies incoming)
2. Every X ms attempt to move units to null terrain then ordering them again to move (it works pretty good, requires only 1 trigger and a timer, but doesn't work for air and it looks pretty weird; Reavers don't move at all but just start dancing and Goliaths and Ragnassaur show off with break dancing moves).
3. An AI who works as a 'stop' order?
4. ?

Preferably I want something that works for both ground and air, doesn't screw to much with their animation and isn't all too complicated.

Any ideas?

PS: Just for the fun of it I attached my testing map with the funny moving.
PPS: Eh, wrong sub-forum, my bad

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Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Mar 16 2010, 10:40 am by Daedalus.

To make it work for air just put lifted terran buildings above that null terrain you mentioned.

Moving them to Null terrain or terrain with air units over it will create excessive lag when you do it to several units(StarCraft has to scan the entire area for open spots, which takes a considerable amount of memory), the best methods would be to do that same idea, except place a location outside the map, simply edit its coordinates and change them so they're outside the map's limits. Doing this will reduce lag considerably, as StarCraft now simply sees that the location is invalid, and stops there, rather than attempting to find an open spot for the unit, but the unit will still stop.

You could get a computer to ensnare the zombies.

Thanks Falkoner, at least I'll be able to slow both ground and air.

@Stickynote. It would be quite hard to have tens of units being ensared every second... unless you know a simple and 100%-working method? Besides, I would like to save Ensnare for the players so they will can slow down the zombies even more .

So other then the moving-to-invalid-location trick and ensnare there is no other way to slow down both ground and air units?

There is a 100% working method; I figured it out for a map. Ok. Run the strategic suicide mission ai for the computer owning the queen. Must be a queen, not the hero. Place a unit that isn't the queen near the queen and owned by the same player. Have the zombie player attack that unit, and the queen will ensnare it.

For what you need it for, I don't think there's any other way, of course, you have to remember that with this the units will be hard to attack, so if that's a problem perhaps you'll need to stick with ensnare(which could look cool for zombies anyway).