Desert Strike Night - Fixed
I really enjoy Desert Strike, especially Desert Strike Night by Queen-Gambit, however there were several things that annoyed me about the Final version that is common on battle.net, such as the long download time due to including music in the map, and the plethora of "Half" maps that cut the prices for everything in half. So I set out to fix both of these issues, and found a lot of other bugs and improved features along the way.
I've probably spent a good 100-150 hours working on this map to get it balanced and bug-free, and believe I've finally gotten there (version 1.76).
Bugs fixed from Desert Strike Night Final
- Player 2 (north) could not build Infestation (Nydus Canal)
- North's Roaches healed at 2x the rate of south's roaches
- Civ spawning fixed - sometimes north team would start with 4 instead of 3
- Armageddon could sometimes get into an infinite loop, spamming unit placement errors and dozens of Armageddon Knights
- Fixed Nydus Worm (Sunken Colony) refund was greater than cost to build it!
- Fixed building refunds to be fair - all buildings refund either 100%, or 75% for abandoned addons
- Roaches, Broodlings and south's Nydus Worm would sometimes not move or attack (no orders, or Move order instead of Patrol)
- Stopped lifted terran buildings from spawning units
- Sometimes the wall buildings would not be removed properly when building gas
- It was possible to build all hero units before the player had built 5 gas; this was easiest for Protoss
- If you destroyed all your buildings, you would gather minerals at base rate but your units would never spawn, allowing you to stockpile heaps of minerals at no cost to your team so you could ninja specials
- Allow multiple specials to be built per team, and up to 2 per player at a time - previously multiple specials could be destroyed with no refund or effect
- Flying units would sometimes fly out of the spawn buffers onto the battlefield
- Hallucinated Motherships (Arbiter) would gain all special hero abilities; now hallucinated arbiters are destroyed on detection
- Only one science vessal would spawn per player, regardless of how many comsats you had. This is now increased to 3, and additional ones will be refunded.
- If you built 16 barracks, you would effectively spawn 19 barracks' worth of marines.
- Map made more symmetrical
- North's boom area did not cover their entire half of the map, effectively making their boom weaker than south's
- Unnecessary devouring ones at spawn buffers contributed to map max
- You will now very rarely see unit placement errors.
New Features
- Map size reduced to 175k (with Tinymap) from 526k
- Mineral rate is now constant, not in 'spurts', and base rate increased by 15%
- Vespene resource now shows a countdown until mining comes back online after building gas
- Option to pick 1x or 2x mineral rate at map start. 2x mineral rate is equivalent to a "half" map, so only 1 version of this map is required.
- Total team gas now displayed (briefly) on leaderboard - as mineral rate is now constant, there's no way to tell what gas enemies have, so this adds some of the information back.
- All text strings made to uniform colours and styles
- Detector AI greatly improved - no longer suicide on the defense, follow cloaked units around (but not excessively)
- Lurker AI improved - better attacking responsiveness
- Mothership (Arbiter), Infestor (Yggdrasil) and Medivac Dropship (Dropship) heroes all have greatly improved AI
- All heroes have new graphical effects, and improved balance to make all of them useful
- Accidental boom prevention - two players on same team cannot boom within 3 seconds of each other, or of own team using a special.
- Upgrades automatically share between team players and units on field (eg if P1 researches Zealot legs, P2 won't even see the icon in their Citadel)
- Out of bounds air unit detection, so air units do not fly away from the battlefield - they fly back into battle
- When a team is down by 1 player, they get +15% bonus mineral rate, when down by 2 players they get +30% bonus mineral rate (bonuses removed if teams become balanced again)
- Opening battle made more epic, with random hero units and increased unit diversity
New Balancing
- All races much better balanced than in Final - Terran is no longer horrendously expensive, Zerg air is not completely overpowered.
- Divine Judgement weakened a little as it now will kill some units to thin the herd out, costs 3800.
- Infestation improved, now costs 3333
- Armageddon overhauled, now costs 2925. Kills enemy units on enemy side of map, weakens enemy units on your side of map to 10% HP 0% shields, places spider mines (160 dmg) on enemy side of map and at spawn point, deals 3,500 damage to enemy defense/fortress
- Immortals and Reapers are now better balanced compared to Dragoons and Marines - if you mindlessly build Immortals and Reapers, prepare to be in for a shock
- When defense is destroyed, the victim team will now spawn an immediate reinforcement of troops to help defend (makes early special use less overpowered)
- Phoenix renamed to Void Ray, Corsair renamed to Phoenix, Corruptor renamed to Infestor
- Void Ray is now useful - strong ground attack, heals 36 shield points every .53 seconds, has 360 HP with no shields (strong vs weak ground units, needs focus fire or strong units to kill).
- Many buildings now spawn half units, eg 1.5 dragoons or 2.5 vikings. This means if you have 1 Dragoon building, you will spawn 1 unit, then 2, then 1, then 2... If you have 2 buildings, you will spawn 3, 3, 3, 3 and so on.
- Improved detector AI means they now home in on enemy cloaked units, but don't following them around closely (you'll see what I mean). They also home in on Motherships, however the Mothership's auto-kill special ability will always spare 1 overlord/observer/science vessal, so as not to make the cloaking too overpowered (if there are 2 overlords, they could still kill 1, and other units can of course kill the one that the mothership didn't).
- There are now two types of Dark Templar, as per the 2 types in SC2. The Lenassa are regular Dark Templar, and the Zer'atai are based on Zeratul. The Zer'atai have more HP, shields and armor and do more damage and has Zeratul's 26% attack speed bonus, but at a cost of 20% speed penalty. This was done to better balance DTemplar due to the hugely improved detector AI.
- Similar to above, Lurkers were given more HP as they're more likely to be detected.
DOWNLOAD HERE: http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/
~Map by: Lanthanide
Based on Desert Strike Night Final by Queen-Gambit and NudeRaider.
Some stats compared to Desert Strike Night Final:
- 140k vs 175k with sounds removed, pre-Tinymap
- 175k w/ Tinymap vs 526k no Tinymap
- 16,640 trigger lines vs 16,597 lines
- 1,039 triggers vs 1,089 triggers
- 200 locations vs 170 locations. 41 locations used for the air boundary checking alone, so 159 locations for all other features.
- 901 strings at 43,161 bytes vs 812 strings at 34,984 bytes
- 564 pre-placed units vs 678 pre-placed units
Post has been edited 7 time(s), last time on Nov 13 2010, 4:46 am by Lanthanide.
None.