Hello Hectopascals

Ok I need help..... How do I balance Units for a Massish/Income Map

Well the map idea is that player makes building allowing them to buy units (Weakest is Zling but can be spawned in mass numbers and cheap cost and effective in thier Large Number While Ultra being strongest and costing the most but very powerful in groups of 4 or so)
So if anyone knows how to do a unit balance tell me how ...please and thanks ahead of time

If you want to achieve any sort of reasonable balance in your map, you're going to have to do it yourself. There are no magic numbers we can give you that will allow you to balance your map perfectly. You'll need to be constantly testing it through trial and error and making different unit compositions and match-ups that may arise in the map. There are some things you need to keep in mind with massing/madness type of maps:
1) Range or melee? If melee, remember that melee units can only deal damage once they've reached their targets. Your unit could have a huge amount of attack, but if he gets killed before he reaches his target, his damage output is still zero. If ranged, ranged units derive their power from their ability to cluster into huge balls and simultaneously attack, in effect, a ranged army will get several attacks before a melee army even gets close.

2) Small or large numbers? In small groups of units that are evenly matched, melee tends to have an advantage because all melee units in the group can effectively get close and kill the weaker ranged units. However, if you only balance around small encounters, your large battles will be out of whack because of the power of ranged units in number. A huge portion of the ranged army can attack at any point when engaging a melee army, while the melee army can only attack once they're directly beside an enemy. So even if the melee class is much stronger than the ranged units, the ability of 40 units attacking a time (ranged) can still greatly outdo 20 units attacking at a time (melee having to line up to attack)

3) Unit tiers - It's easy to balance when they're two different types of units, but when there are a large number, it becomes overly difficult. Melee armies facing each other when one possesses slightly weaker tier of units (zerglings vs zealots) still allows the losing side to rack up kills and minerals, but when a weak melee army faces off against strong ranged unit (zerglings vs ghosts) there is no way for the zerglings to usually even get close. Usually melee needs a lot more armor and hp than ranged units in order to actually get close. Also keep in mind very strong melee units can still be relatively countered by a weaker ranged force because of point 1 and 2. Happens all the time in massing games, you level up ahead of someone, you get some hero zealots, he still has ghosts, but whenever you fight you lose because of the ghosts outmatch them because of their range

Well Im thinking Using Zling,Rine,Ghost,Zlot,Tank,gol,Zlot,Dragoon,HT,DT,Ultra
Weast-------Strongest
Its gonna be a map based on One of my FAV GBA games MegaMan Battle Network(i felt like saying that)
Zling=Mettaur Rine=Gunny Ghost=Canndumb Zlot=Punchy Tank=Tank Gol=Magnum Turrent HT=Killer Eye DT=Swordy Dragoon=Bettle Ulta=Scuttlets

Balance is really determined mostly through testing, testing, and more testing. Find a bunch of beta testers and run a few rounds with the map on bnet if you can. If anything is imbalanced, it should show pretty quickly and you can nerf/buff units as necessary.

(Units should be adjusted to some ballpark estimates for HP/attack though. Maybe post some examples of what you put in this thread? There isn't a rigorous criteria for these things, so do whatever you want, and use common sense to judge whether or not X is appropriate. You should probably keep the rines substantially weaker than the zerglings, however, since we do not want positive feedback to lock the player with lings out of the game.)

Anyways, some really vague rules of thumb when going up a tier are as follows. You don't have to adhere to them, but they give a general idea of how balance turns out.

• If going from melee unit ---> ranged unit
  • The ranged unit should have a lot less HP than the melee unit.
    
  • The ranged unit should have a bit DPS than the melee unit.
    
  • The melee unit should be able to kill the ranged unit quickly.
    
• If going from ranged unit ---> melee unit
  • The melee unit should have a lot more HP than the ranged unit in the tier below.
    
  • The melee unit should have substantially increased attack/DPS.
    

P.S. HTs will make your map hit the sprite limit very quickly, so you might want to switch to another unit (Archon/Hydra).

Check the "use unit default" for the stats. Have players mine minerals. Figure out the time it takes after building a unit and it coming out, then make a series of deathcount timers so that when you step on the beacon, you wait for a little while before you get the unit.

if you want attack speeds and move speeds, the move speeds are in the wiki under list of starcraft units, and the attack speeds are somewhere in the theory and ideas forum. search for posts my me (rockz) with the works "attack speed", or posts by anyone "byperion".

I can't help but notice that you've got a lot of small units as weak units and larger units as strong units. It's important to keep in mind that a cluster of small units will have a greater density than a cluster of large units, which in turn will translate into a greater volume of fire when all else is equal, as well as having the incoming enemy damage spread across more units. It might be nice to have a small number of strong units, but keep in mind that there is a finite area in which your units are able to attack the enemy's units and participate in the absorption of enemy fire, and if each powerful unit is large and thus takes up the space of (say) 8 weaker units within that area, while being less than eight times as powerful, it will actually be disadvantageous to invest in the strong units. Just something to keep in mind...

And it can't be repeated enough that there's no substitute for testing and tweaking.

Creating good mass maps is nigh impossible because of the low sprite unit of 100 attack animations at a time.
So keep number of units as low as possible. Better increase stats and raise spawning time.

For more considerations about balance search UMS MMA for the key word "balance". You'll find relevant topics like "help with defense map".

That very sprite limit is a crucial element of strategy in mass maps. Goliaths, wraiths, scouts, and many other similar units "locked up" very frequently late-game, making their actual damage much lower than their high attack might indicate. This leads to higher-level play and more in-depth strategies, surprisingly. Check out StrategyWiki's article on EVOLVES for an example.

Units not shooting is always stupid imo, no matter the strategies you can derive from it.

Rant @ Blizzard, not me. The point of a "mass" game is to have a mass of units, not very few units with high attack/HP, so reducing unit quantity to make all of them able to attack at the same time (as you have suggested) completely defeats the point of the scenario.

Its not really a Mass Map PreSay but its gonna have the unit train of defend your castle 2 the SC map(If anyone has played it you know what i mean)

i aslo wanna add a sorta income system as well

Well if players aren't playing against each other, then it's not really an issue of balance anymore because you can easily control what attacks each other. Making income should be relatively easy though, just base it purely off the use of death counters and you should be fine. Madness and Income/Defense maps are completely different by the way.

Players will fight each other
i was thinking maybe more a income of buildings