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).

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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.
  

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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.

This looks exactly like when I did my remake of Town Wars: I found some little details that bugged me much, and when I started working on it, I just ended up re-creating the whole thing (because the map was too well protected) and implementing a lot of features.

How did you do that? I don't understand how this could be checked without EUDs.

Secondly, are you ever intending to finish this? If SC2 is interfering, or if you lost your sense of purpose, or something, I understand - I'd just like to know where you are on it and why.

EDIT: Nevermind, read your post in the other thread.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 11 2010, 8:50 pm by ImagoDeo.

Same way upgrades are transferred from regular players to the CPU. Note that the upgrade sharing only happens when your units spawn, so it is still possible for you to research the Leg upgrade even if your purple ally just researched it too, but when purple's zealots spawn you will gain the upgrade.

Basically when someone spawns units, I have additional triggers that say "did they spawn a zealot?". If they did, then it creates 2 zealots for that player, gives one to the CPU and back to the player, and then gives a zealot to each of the other players on the team, and then removes them all. This distributes upgrades back from the field (Mind Control can steal upgrades) to the currently spawning player, and from there to the other two players.

Note that somewhat inexplicably as I was playing this posted version last night there was an infinite Infestation bug. Considering I've had those triggers in for a long time and never seen this issue before, it was rather irritating. So I'm going to post a new version later tonight (about 11 hours from now). I'm 95% sure I know what the root cause of the infinite loop was, but even if I can't reproduce it, I should be able to greatly reduce the chances of it happening. I'll also add in some screenshots too, I was in a bit of a rush to get this posted yesterday.

Ok, I think I've fixed the infinite infestation bug - I managed to reproduce it. I've uploaded a new version of the map that has this fixed, as well as some screenshots. Also tweaked Void Ray slightly to make it a tiny bit more powerful as it was a tad anemic.

Hmm very interesting version you did. I like all the new balances and fixes. I'll definitely play this a lot It looks much more fun to play now but I had a couple of thoughts though on the changes you did.


Though I've played other versions, I've played 3v3 and 2v2. and usually it already helps them when a player leaves cause they would have a bad spawn and their partner would be slowing them down with a weak spawn. And with the person having the weak spawn leaving, it helps them already so only their good units spawn. It's a thought on what I think, just saying.


My question on this was how does it really make early special use less overpowered? Doesn't it really make it better cause it spawns units to defend after the Defense building died? Just wondering D:

Other than that, it's a pretty good map and glad you did fixes to it I have a request though, it would be nice but can you make a "No Special" version? I like playing in double minerals but it makes specials way more spammable relying less on spawn.

Yes, that is a distinct possibility, I've witnessed it myself. It is also possible that the good player will be the one that leaves (drops or just quits in disgust). It also means that you can play a 1vs2 or 2vs3 game if you don't get enough players without having to worry about it being too unbalanced.

The end game generally ends up being who can pull off the better use of specials, though, and the weak team is significantly disadvantaged by having fewer players. The old partial refund used by NudeRaider in some of his versions was way too unbalanced as the weak team would generally always win, and he himself commented on that. I considered having it so when the stronger team used a special, the weak team gained 1/3rd of the price back, but never implemented it as I'm unsure how balanced that would be. In light of this, if the weak team gets 15% bonus to minerals for a lengthy period of time, their spawn should be ahead of the stronger team, however they are still at risk of being clobbered from specials. So I think it is a reasonable compromise in the end - weak teams are still likely to die from specials, but they'll be much more competitive until that happens.


In older versions where the protoss special was Mind Control and it only stole about 50% of units, it was much less powerful. The majority of the power of Divine Judgement and Infestation comes not from stealing enemy units, but from depriving the enemy of units. In Desert Strike Night, you convert all enemy units to your side, and now facing no resistence, they just waltz straight to the enemy Silo/Temple and destroy it. As people usually time the special to occur just after a new spawn, it means the victim team has to sit there for a full countdown cycle until they spawn a defense, or are forced to use a boom.

If the enemy team has been crafty and uses a special much earlier in the game than usual, the victim team will be forced to use a boom or risk losing their defense. Having the reinforcements spawn means that even if they lose their defense, they still get an early reinforcement spawn to help protect their temple until their next 'regular' spawn occurs (at which point hopefully some of the reinforcements will still be alive). If the reinforcements spawn late in the game, then they generally offer merely token resistance to the enemy forces, but I still think they make it more fair.

Also when the defense is killed, it kills enemy units surrounding the temple, which also helps kill enemy units stolen from your team by a special just after they spawned.

Note that there is nothing stopping a clever player from timing a special to go off just after the defense is destroyed, thereby stealing/killing (Armageddon) the new reinforcement spawn as well...

The core idea for this map to avoid the necessity of 'Half' maps by integrating double mineral spawn as a selectable option, so if I were to add in 'No Specials' I would also make that it choice at the start of the game. However I don't want to make too many choices as it ends up being cumbersome, and a lot of people don't like DS Ultima precisely for that reason.

I haven't played 'half' maps very much, do they generally leave specials at full price while halving everything else? If that is the case, then clearly the double mineral version I have does not adequately reflect that behaviour as it simply means you can use specials twice as often, resulting in massive special spamming. Thankfully with my triggers that allow you to build 2 specials at once, I could modify them to force the player to have 2x minerals before they could build a special, if required.

I also added some more items to the "balance" section.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 13 2010, 5:45 am by Lanthanide.

Ah I see what you mean and understand why you put a bonus mineral rate.


Well that's cool then on having reinforcements and I'll keep a note on that

From what I remember in the Desert Strike, I'm pretty sure the half version had the special prices on full only reducing the spawn buildings but on the D-Strike Night Half version, the specials are still full prices and the hero building costs are just a little reduced on minerals by like 200-500 or so. I think it would be good to require 2x the minerals of the special in double minerals. I've played a couple of games on double minerals and the specials do really get abused and spammed considering how fast you get minerals.

Right, I'm at home now, and just checked a Half map in the editor, and you're correct, the specials are full price and the heroes have 200-400 off them.

I can handle the specials (pretty sure), but I'd have to implement a new system to handle keeping the heroes at the same price and really I don't think that's necessary.

Any other balance changes/tweaks you think could be useful? I think I'll bump the price of stasis and energy up to 300/400 or maybe 250/350 from 200/300, because right now by the time you can build a mothership, $500 is pocket change.

I wonder if lurkers could perhaps use +1 damage. Right now they're +25hp -2 damage compared to Final, but the price has also gone up by 80 to get 2x lurkers, and Lair only gives 1.5 instead of 2 now so you need to get Queen's Nest/Hive to get the full 2x. Lurkers seem to be a early to early-mid unit in DS, so perhaps they need their damage put up by 1 to make them a bit more of a threat again?

Also I'm not sure about Ultralisks. They have 400 HP and get 6 armor with the upgrade, which is the highest outside of mothership/archon/overlord, and I think it might just be bit much? The archon has such high armor to help it counter the ultralisk, but considering you can buy 2 ultralisks for every 1 archon, it may not be balanced enough yet. Perhaps 5 armor / 450 HP on the ultralisk, and maybe +1 damage on Archon? Frankly I find myself buying Templar Archives for the archon more than the high templar, but I think that's probably a good thing. Having said that however, Dark Archons are a good counter to ultralisks.

Just played a 1vs1 game as protoss vs terran. I was getting creamed by the terran, but after building 5 stargates and 4 carriers, I just sat back and slowly pushed. So carriers probably need to be nerfed a bit. Current stats are 175/225 shield/hp, 5 armor, 25/20 interceptors 3 armor with 12 damage. Possibilities (1, or a few of the following):
225 shield, 175 HP
3-4 armor
Damage down to 8+3 (don't want to go any lower)
Price up to 880 from 850
25/15 interceptors
0-2 armor interceptors

The issue with carrires is their long range and the distraction of interceptors. Interceptors are currently re-built for all carriers at 1 every 1.5 seconds, which I think is a good rate. So perhaps the best changes would be to the interceptors, reducing their HP slightly and taking damage down to 8+3? Note that Battlecruisers and Guardians have 5 armor, and Valks/Devs/Wraiths/Scouts/Corsairs/Scourge have 4 armor and Mutas have 3, so I don't really want to drop the damage down any further than 11 or they start to become very ineffective against other air units. Protoss already have trouble with enemy motherships, which have 18 armor, because none of their AA can penetrate the armor (Scouts do 30 damage, but get 2x armor penalty so only do 1 damage in the end) - they need Archons, Immortals or Psi Storm to take down motherships.

Perhaps Void Rays could use +2-4 air damage as well? Note they do 2x6 damage, so end up only doing 2 damage to BC, 4 to most air, 6 to Mutas and 1 to Overlords and Motherships.

I also wonder if I should just scrap weapon damage upgrades and just incorporate the damage into all of the base damages. Eg instead of being 40 + 12, Zer'atai DTemps would just be 52 damage. Then, for the units that do 2x damage (scout, zealot, firebat, goliath) I could have those ones with weapon upgrades, so Zealot would be 11 + 11 instead of 16 + 6.

I won't get to make any changes until the weekend.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on May 13 2010, 11:20 am by Lanthanide.

Yeah the prices for stasis and it's +50 energy could be higher since the mineral rate is fast by that time.

I've played as Zerg for a couple of games, I tend to make Lurkers as soon as I can but I think they seem fine as they are now.

I've always thought the Ultralisks were weak, well from the previous versions. The stats seem alright now but they're never used much when I play against other zerg players, they tend to spam the Greater Spire so much along with Hydralisks or something. You should probably leave the Ultralisks as they are now. I think you should buff up the Archon a bit though, little more damage and maybe set it's HP to 30. I buy more the Templar Archives for both units but more the Templar I wanted to ask something though. What causes a High Templar to use Hallucination? Is it even in this version? I've played some 1v1's with a friend and they never seem to do it anymore like in the other versions. It sorta makes the Templar less useful besides it's storm. I always liked Hallucination, doing it on the Archons, Scouts or Carriers. I've never used Dark Archons much though. I usually just get that building for the Dark Templar.

Carriers always do make a big difference in the game. Their Interceptors always get bothersome and the units focus killing those. Damage should stay the same but just lowering their HP/Shields. Would it be a really bad idea to maybe remove the HP from the Interceptors so the units just focus on the carriers itself or the other units instead of getting distraction by Interceptors?

The Mothership does have some tough armor.. but maybe a little HP reduction would work?

Aren't the Void Rays meant more for the ground units instead of air? People use plenty of Scouts and Corsairs anyways.

I was wondering about that though. What would be the reason for removing the armor upgrades and just adding it all as base armor? Same would go with the weapons upgrades. I mean yeah you could just make things easier by setting it all to base, but like the example with the Zealot, 11+11 instead of 16+6. It's still really 22 damage isn't it? O.o

Void rays?

I've been working on new versions of this, with several balances changes, as well as the 2x mineral cost for specials in fast mode.

I'm up to v1.82, but unforunately TinyMap has just barfed on me (sent Farty a PM about it) and refuses to work, but once I get it going I'll post up the latest version.

Hydralisk: +1 damage
Lurker: +1 damage
Ultralisk: -1 default armor, -$100 upgrade cost
Zergling: -$9
Marauder: +2x1 damage, -5 hp
Hellion: -1 damage
Marauder & Hellion: Slightly tweaked spawn so that hellions will spawn behind marauders, this makes them much more powerful so they stay in a group, and greatly increases their strength. I thought I'd taken Hellion armor down to 0, but checking it just now shows it is still at 2. I will need to do some balancing testing here again.
Viking: -2x1 air damage
Tech to armageddon: Free, +$50 cloak energy upgrade
Carrier: -1 damage, +$30 capacity upgrade, 0 armor on interceptor, interceptor rebuild time up to 2seconds, from 1.5
Void Ray: +2x2 air damage, shields set to 6, then 100%, instead of 0, then 100%
Phoenix: -1 damage
Zealot: +2x1 damage
Scout: +2x1 air damage
Mothership: 6.25% slower auto-attack, stasis costs 280, energy costs 350

Fixed bug where +100 bonus minerals was not actually given for building 6 gas (doh)
Fixed bug where Armageddon Waste could be left behind at spawn area when it should've been cleaned up

+1 damage to lurker doesn't make a huge difference, but I think they were just a little underpowered for the price for such an early game unit - if you're going to spend that much $, you should get something pretty good for it.

Ultralisks really seemed overpowered to me. I've seen people build nothing but ultralisks and just mow over any enemy ground, and I think a lot of that is due to the high armor. With the speed upgrade, ultralisks are only slightly slower than zerglings.

I haven't touched the Archons as I think they're ok.

I'm not sure why they don't use Hallucination much. I've seen them use it when it's been researched, and other times they haven't. I'd say 80-90% of games I play it isn't researched though, so don't have a lot of experience with it.

I played a version that had invincible interceptors, and it really just doesn't work. It's nice in theory, but as soon as you get some other units in the mix, and because carriers have such long range, nothing can actually get to the carriers to kill them because the interceptors obliterate them first. Now with having weaker interceptors and a time delay before interceptors are rebuilt, enemy units have a better chance of fighting through to get to the carriers themselves. Of course interceptors still draw fire, but carriers are the most expensive air unit in the game so this isn't too big a deal IMO.

I think the mothership is probably good as it is. As noted above, protoss air mainly has a problem with it, but the only way to fix that would be to drastically reduce armor, or drastically increase damage of 1 of the protoss air. Unfortunately neither is really an option. It only takes 2 BC shots to take it out, or 1 scourge, once the shields are down.

Giving the void ray extra air damage is just to help it out early on. They can easily get distracted by overlords, observers or science vessals, and because they have such low damage they stay distracted for a long time. Also see below about 2x damage.

As for removing armor upgrades, there are several units that have less than 3 armor, such as the void ray, observer and interceptors with 0, and the Hellion with 2. If I gave all units 3 armor upgrades, I'd have no way to give these units less armor - there is no way to control how much armor a unit gets from armor upgrades like you can with weapon upgrades.

As for weapon upgrades, the main reason for rolling them in is simplicity. Why bother showing a dragoon does 13 + 6 damage and an archon does 33 + 9 and an immortal does 21 + 6 and a ultralisk does 18 + 9 and a siege tank does 65 + 15? Showing that they do 19, 42, 27, 28 and 80 damage is a lot more straightforward and makes units more comparable. There is an annoying b.net newb idea that if units have 0 upgrades they must be broken or weak or something. However all units have 1 weapon upgrade, but have 0 bonus so they just show their default. Except for the Zealot, Firebat, Golaith Air and Scout/Void Ray air damage, which show as 12+12, 12+12, 14+14, 16+16 and 8+8. Yes you are correct saying that 11+11 is the same as 16+6, but the key thing to remember is that units with 2x attacks are penalised twice by enemy armor. A zealot with 12+12 damage has an apparent total damage of 24, but actually it will only do 18 damage to an ultralisk with 3 armor because it becomes 9+9 = 18, while a Dragoon with 19 damage will do 16 damage to the same ultralisk, because they only get hit by armor once. This last is also the reason for the changes to the unit damages in the above list, because whatever value I specify for the weapon damage must be a multiple of 4, and 22 and 30 which the Zealot, Firebat, Viking and Scout did are not multiples of 4.

Well I'm just going to go ahead with all the balance changes but other things are starting to be a bother now. The units seem to do other things or nothing sometimes. Like for Zerg, half of the Zerglings and Hydralisks start to just randomly burrow in the middle of the battlefield and only half of the spawn goes to fight, making the enemy easier to kill and group up. Then with Protoss, the Reavers also do nothing but move sometimes even though they have scarabs so they just go to the enemy and die not even shooting. That's about it for now, haven't seen anything wrong with Terran yet.

Ok, I've updated the file to 1.84.

This has all the balance and other changes in the post above, although zerglings are now -$20, Marauders do 10+10 with 65 HP and Hellions do 24 damage with 80 hp and 2 armor.

For the reaver, this is likely to be the regular AI indecision. There's certainly nothing unusual about how reavers are ordered in my map - they are patrolled like any other unit. I haven't seen any systemic problem with this, I'm guessing it's just the AI crapping out when it is faced with many targets, and being unable to choose which one to fire at. It can happen in Melee games too.

For burrowing, I have seen a few units run off and burrow, but again not a wide systemic problem. I don't believe I ever saw them burrow in Final, though. One thing I had changed is that Burrow was researched by default, whereas in Final it was only Enabled for P4 and P8. I have now set it to Disabled for all players, although the wiki says that the CPU can use burrow even when it is disabled, but hopefully this will influence? Anyway, there's nothing I can really do about it apart from this.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 18 2010, 10:59 am by Lanthanide.

Hmm well from disabling the burrow for all players, the lurkers really suck now. They were better before but now they take more hits than usual then they burrow. I guess you should enable the burrow back on the computers. Couldn't you do more of a detection when the hydralisks and zerglings burrow and just order them to attack again when they do?

Hmm, yeah, I really should've tested with Lurkers before I posted that. Oh well, it was late at night. I'll do some testing later and confirm that changing the burrow status does indeed affect their behaviour. I had burrowed as 'researched' and it is now 'disabled', perhaps the middle ground of 'enabled' may fix lurkers while also deterring lings/hydras. Final has it set as 'enabled'.

As for detecting if a zergling or hydralisk is burrowed - this is possible if you're dealing with only a single unit in a known location. If you are dealing with many units across wide locations, it becomes much more difficult, and really it is impractical in a map like DS where you don't even know how many zerglings or hydras you're going to be dealing with at any given moment.

If I need to update the map again, then I could play around with an idea I had last night for interceptors. One reason that invincible interceptors were so overpowered, is that when interceptors are damaged they will re-dock with the carrier and then fly out again once healed (shields set to 100%, HP regens quite fast). This effectively means the difference between killing an interceptor, and damaging it, is that when it is killed you have to re-build it to replace it, but both have the same sort of effect on DPS of the carrier. If you make interceptors invincible, it turns the carriers into unstoppable bulldozers, especially if other units are there to prevent the enemies ever actually killing the carrier itself. On the other hand if interceptors are vulnerable, the enemy spends all their time shooting the interceptors and not the other units. So my idea would be to cycle the invincibility of interceptors - make them invincible for 2 seconds, then vulnerable, then invincible, then vulnerable etc. That way enemy units when faced with a wall of carriers and nothing else will actually advance to attack the carriers themselves. This could quite a bit of play-time to balance correctly - carriers might need to be buffed, or I could add the 1 damage back to the interceptors, etc.

Right, I've uploaded a new version, 1.85.

In my testing I found that Leon was indeed correct, the burrow change for Zerg really gimped the lurkers. So I've set burrowed to Enabled, which fixed that. I don't know if lings and hydras also burrow, didn't bother to check because we need to have it Enabled for lurkers to work properly regardless.

I set up a test where I had a number of carriers vs a number of roaches and hydras spawning at the same time. Think it was about 10 carriers vs 20 roaches and 21 hydras. With 1.84 settings on the carriers, the carriers would slaughter the zerg force every single spawn. If I set interceptors to invincible, the zerg force would always slaughter the carriers. I found that when I set up the cycle of invincibility for the interceptors, 2 second normal, 2 seconds invulnerable, that the battle was evenly matched for a good 5 minutes. The zerg looked like they would eventually overwhelm the carriers, although on each respawn the carriers did make a sizeable dent in the zerg. I think this is definitely where we want to be with carriers. I also took interceptors down to 5 shields 20 HP from 30 sheilds 15 HP to help account for the invincibility protection they now get. Interestingly there are always some interceptors that are vulnerable at any given moment, because I am using "toggle invincibility state", so either it depends when the carrier itself spawned, or when the interceptors were launched out of the carrier as to what state it is in. I have dropped the carrier capacity upgrade to $450 from $580, as Carriers have effectively received a big nerf, and carriers with 4 interceptors are likely to be totally ineffectual.

I also added in a small random delay for Roach healing and Void Ray shielding. Previously it was 1.5 and 0.58 seconds fixed cycle, but now it ranges from 1.42 to 1.92 and 0.5 to .92 seconds respectively. For the Roach this is pretty inperceptible, but it does mean that Roaches from opposing sides are now going to heal at different times, instead of always being in sync. The difference is much more obvious for the Void Ray (because of the much shorter period). In effect this change amounts to a small buff, because on average the heal/shield cycle is now going to be slightly faster than it was before, but likewise the greater potential interval weakens them. Hopefully this will strengthen the void ray in particular against late-game units, while not making it too overpowered vs early game units (marines and hydras in particular).

Right, yet another new version up. Few balance changes and 1 fix:
- Players that leave, their buildings will now be destroyed (helps prevent map max)
- Zealots back to 22 damage, now does 12+10 since 11+11 is impossible. Oh well.
- Dragoons -10 HP so now 80/60
- Immortals -40 shields, +20 HP so now 120/120
- +$10 banshee/valkyrie
- +10 HP Battlecruiser
- Marauder 10+10 damage, 65 HP, 4 armor
- Hellion 24 damage, 80 hp, 1 armor

Hopefully this should be the last update, unless someone finds some bugs.

I was wondering - if someone leaves in a 3v3 so it will be 2v3, won't the 1 against 1 spawns always be stronger for the 2 side with their 15% gain bonus? I mean, sure, when it's all about specials and stuff the total mineral count will be somewhat balanced, but when it's just 2 against 3 at the beginning, the individual spawns for each bonus-enjoying players will always be stronger than whatever comes up against it.

Am I wrong?

Wait, roaches? Void rays?

SC2 elements in SC1? Sounds interesting!