Yeah, the triggers for nuke, infest and boom all explicitly ignore torrasques, as should the triggers for divine judgement, but evidently it misfired for some reason.

If I can't find the loophole in the triggers (quite possible), I might just put in a last-ditch set of triggers that will remove torrasques from the field if they have been running around for 1 minute or longer (could only ever happen due to a bug).

New version, 2.02:
- Fixed 2 economic exploits (never seen these used on b.net, though)
- Fixed Torrasque being taken by Infestation, Divine Judgement
- Fixed other possible but rare Torrasque bug where it would fail to detonate and run around for the rest of game immortal
- Protoss balance tweaks:
-- Council $300 from $320
-- Immortal $270 from $280
-- Observer $280 from $320, -5 shields, -10 hp (35/70)
-- Void Ray +1 shields, +10 hp (37/370)
-- Mind control is again researched by default
-- Carrier gets +25 HP, -25 shields

Protoss balance changes were due to Protoss not seeming to have really good mid-tier units available. The Void Ray is mostly good in early to mid and pretty rubbish later, but with observers costing 320 and not always necessary, and reavers costing 950, there didn't seem to be much impetus to go after them. So now Void Rays have been bumped up a notch and made more accessible. Same goes for Immortals - paying $320 on a building that essentially does nothing is a big cash outlay.

Seems that I didn't actually have any triggers protecting the Torrasque from infestation or divine judgement after all. There was a trigger with the comment indicating it was protected, but it didn't actually do anything! Going through my old versions, it looks like it's been that way since at least 1.45 (didn't go any further back). Guess this is one case where commenting your triggers leads to bugs! I haven't tested the other torrasque fix, as it requires a bad coincidence of timers to test that probably hardly ever happens in-game, and can't be bothered jumping through hoops to test it myself, but it should fix the potential bug without screwing anything else up.

Download here: http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Nov 13 2010, 11:10 pm by Lanthanide.

I can't leave well enough alone

New version 2.03:
- Terran refund for addons dropped to 66% from 75%
- Nuke price increased from 2925 to 2995 (double = 5990)
- Infestation price dropped from 3333 to 3222 (double = 6444)
- Divine Judgement price dropped from 3750 to 3500 (double = 7000)
- Terran nuke damage from Archon dropped to 2900 from 3500
- Terran nuke could sometimes do 2x damage to fortress, this is fixed (not thoroughly tested but should be good)
- Mothership slightly increased anti-scourge defense (this is very mild and the difference is not obvious)
- Void Ray dropped back to 36/360
- Random timer for Void Ray and Roach healing jitter has been reduced, effectively this means VR and Roach are stronger now

Mainly the changes around here are to do with the specials, specifically trying to nerf Terran's one relative to the others, because it was just too powerful. I played a game yesterday with a terran who had set a set build plan for whatever enemy he faced (eg, he didn't have to react to what units they sent at him), who would sit and turtle and save for nukes and at the end would refund all his addons and buy a single nuke to win the game. So the changes here are to make nukes much less viable as the centre of your strategy. Basically the terran could use nukes much too frequently compared to the other specials. Just played a game of PPZ vs ZTT and the special balance seemed to work quite well.

The way the random timer for Void Ray and Roach worked is like this: normally there are 7 ticks between Void Ray shielding, but there's a random chance (by switch randomization, 50/50) that at tick 2 before the shielding happens, the timer could be increased by another tick. This gave a distribution that looked like this, between shields:
7 ticks: 50%
8 ticks: 25%
9 ticks: 12.5%
10 ticks: 6.25%
11 ticks: 3.125%, etc
The average of this series boils down to 8 ticks, but there were occasional spots where it could go to 9, 10, 11 or even more ticks before they healed. The void ray has 0 armor, so once the shields were down they were like hot butter and very easy to defeat. The new randomization caps the delay at 9 ticks, like this:
7 ticks: 50%
8 ticks: 25%
9 ticks: 25%
So now they shield much more reliably, and therefore are much less prone to premature death. The same randomization factor applies to Roaches also, but their timer is much longer, something like 17 ticks by default, so the jitter here didn't affect them nearly as much as it did VRs.

http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/

New version, probably last for a while, if not ever. Might do some small tweaks in the future, who knows.

• -$30 pylon (Crusader Stalker) cost
  
• -$30 templar archives (Archon/High Templar)
  
• -$20 citadel of adun (Dark Archon/Dark Templar)
  
• Maelstrom researched by default, MC not researched (costs $200)
  
• Void Ray now shields to 9 before back to full, previously it was 6 then full. So this is a buff.
  
• When mothership dies, it has a chance to kill 1 extra enemy unit in the nearby area
  
• -$20 medic
  
• -$30 ghost
  
• Command Center -$100
  
• Science vessal +$100 (so essentially first science vessal costs $100 extra now)
  
• Science Vessal -10 hp
  
• Hydralisk -10 hp
  
• Hydralisk range +$10
  
• Hydralisk speed +$30
  
• Overlord speed +$10
  
• Defiler 2 armor (from 4)
  
• Defiler max 5, +$22
  
• Greater Spire +$14 (Guardian/Devourer)
  
• Spire +$32 (Mutalisk/Scourge)
  
• Queen +$31
  
• Ultralisk +$17
  
• Hive +$8 (lurker, overlord)
  
• Roach +15
  
• Hydraliks +$28
  
• Zergling +$7
  

As you can see, I really increased the prices of zerg units a lot. Hydralisk spam in particular was quite devestating as it is an early unit. Plague was also very overpowered (CPU is plague-happy) so capping defilers helps here. Swarm is also very powerful.

Zerg prices were increased by roughly 10% overall, but some units were increased more than others. I made an excel sheet where I compared $ per HP for each race, and Zerg was 1.33, Terran 1.54 and Protoss 1.43. It was a straight comparison of the cost compared to HP return, and didn't include upgrades. Upgrades for protoss are quite expensive overall (reaver, dweb, stasis, energy ups, carrier in particular). Terran spiked out so high because of the cost of medic and ghost for small HP return, but I also don't see these units used as much as they should be, so making them cheaper should encourage that. The prices should help stop zerg from being quite so overwhelming, as well as de-emphasizing hydralisk and mutalisk spam.

Okay, I've just encountered an absolutely horrible balance issue. It really pissed me off, hence why I am here. You've limited defilers, medics, everything, but you didn't weaken CORSAIRS. Now, we had a 2v2, PP vs TT (I was on the T side), and NOTHING we did could reverse the game. We couldn't even kill the enemy silo, because once they started massing corsairs and reavers, the scouts killed off our BCs, the corsairs killed off our wraiths and disabled our goliaths / marines from shooting, and eventually no damage could be done against the protoss army with ANY terran units!

Now that is just completely f---ed up. You need a Zerg to have devourers to kill corsairs because they are just so rigged with their D-Web that stops EVERY TERRAN UNIT from being effective, and whatever could help kill corsairs die from the corsairs or the accompanying scouts that kill the air that could harm them. The mass of protoss air is FLAWLESS against Terran. Nothing can fight it back.

Do something about this.

There is already some behind-the-scenes limitating of DWeb going on there. It applies to most spell casters, but in particular to the DA, HT and Corsair, so Protoss get the brunt of it.

The modification is that when you mass particular spell casters, past a certain limit the units spawn with a lower % of energy, instead of the default 100%. This means there are diminishing returns on adding extra units. See reply #33 in this thread, it seem that corsairs only get capped after the 7th one, so I could make this stricter.

Did the terrans try going for 4 science vessals each, with EMP? That drains energy and shields. Also ghosts for lockdown on corsairs and reavers.

As for limiting the units, I don't really want to do that. At the moment the units that are limited are spell casters, where massing them is completely OP (like queens, ghosts, defilers and science vessals) and void rays / roaches because they have special health dynamics. If I place a cap on protoss air, it really gimps them too much, especially against Zerg.

So re-balancing is probably the best bet. Options:
- Increase cost, I was thinking of putting the price up by $30 to $680 anyway
- Reduce corsair spawn rate, I believe it is 1.5 at the moment, drop to 1.25?
- Reduce corsair damage - they already only do 6, and most air units have 4 or 5 armor, so hardly do damage as it is
- Reduce corsair armor - I think they're 4 at the moment, drop to 3 would seem reasonable
- Reduce corsair HP/shields
- Make the corsair energy spawn harsher, something like starting at #6 and every 2nd corsair thereafter, instead of start 7 / every 3rd.
- Increase price of dweb, but it already is pretty expensive at $320 I believe and this is only a 1-off hit, and corsairs are pretty worthless without it. Putting in some of these other changes may require the price to be lowered to help compensate, anyway. It is already pretty expensive to pay $850 for a fleet beacon to have access to the upgrade in the first place.

I don't really want to touch the scout too much, because protoss air is already very difficult to balance: corsairs need to do low damage, due to huge splash, but this makes them weak vs armored enemies. Scouts do explosive damage, and have 2 separate missiles so suffer a 2x armor penalty on their attacks. Carriers obviously need their interceptors to do small amounts of damage, which again makes them very penalised by armor. Arbiters hardly ever actually attack, and have very slow cooldown, and it is already being used as mothership in this map (hence why the mothership 'special attack' is so strong, to help counterbalance other weak protoss air).

I think you should limit the amount of distruption web with making the energy harsher, but instead of #6 it should be like #5. Otherwise, the stats are fine. Also, no, we didn't try to EMP, but I don't think that would have helped, as corsairs cast the webs really fast.

New version:

• Queen -20hp to 180
  
• Scourge -20hp to 45, -10 damage to 80
  
• 1.33 Scrouge from Spire instead of 1.5
  
• All Zerg upgrades +$20
  
• Mothership +45 shields, now 600
  
• Corsair -10 hp, +10 shields, now 90/90. This is effectively a slight nerf as shields have +3 armor while HP has +4 armor, and also shields take full damage and are affected by EMP.
  
• Gateway +$30 to $680
  
• D-Web -$20 to $300
  
• Corsair energy nerf: now starts at 5, then 7, then 10, then every 2nd or 3rd corsair after that. They start with 140 energy and dweb costs 165 to cast, so it takes them approx 30 seconds after spawning before they can cast it once. Other corsairs start with 250 energy, so after 1 cast are down to 85 and therefore take about 100 seconds or so before they can re-cast.
  

Scourge seemed just a bit overpowered, especially with their high HP meant they basically always hit their target, and with high damage could quickly take out enemy fleets. Often I would see Zerg make huge numbers of spires and never bother upgrading them at all. Corsair nerfed a little, as per Zhuinden's report above, and also many players on b.net regarded protoss air as the strongest, so I don't feel too wrong in making these changes. Mothership buffed a little, as it often died too quickly.

http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/

New version, 2.06:

• Baneling +9 damage, +10 hp
  
• Nydus worm fires every 3.5 seconds, down from 4 seconds
  
• Infester has a slightly bigger radius, and slighter faster infest rate
  
• Lurker +1 damage
  
• Mothership can now attack slightly faster, but only when surrounded by lots of enemies
  
• Collosus (reaver) - lower rate at which Scarabs spawn in an attempt to reduce units contributing to map max, but didn't make it low enough so doesn't have much of an effect
  
• Immortal -$10, +5 HP, +5 shields (125/125)
  
• Dragoon spawns 1.33 down from 1.5, +5 hp, +5 shields, -1 damage
  
• Archon from the nuke sometimes didn't attack at all, so attempted to address that. Now very slight possibility that it might double-hit again
  
• Wraith +10 hp, +1 AA damage
  
• Viking -2 air damage, +$80 to charon boosters
  

General changes here are to make zerg heroes and mothership a little stronger. Make vikings a bit weaker as they are a bit overpowered (very good at taking mothership down, with long range), so made wraiths a bit better in return as many people thought they were too weak anyway.

Biggest change is to Immortal/Dragoons - massing dragoons was simply way too effective, as with their 8 range they could concentrate a lot of firepower on a single target and were very cheap at $190 for 1.5. So now it's only 1.33 for $190, and they do slightly less damage. The extra HP and health means they're still good early on, but ultimately massing them isn't quite as cost effective any more. In exchange, Immortals have been bumped up a little.

http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/

I approve of this change. In fact, I do not understand why I haven't posted about how Infestor doesn't seem as useful as it costs. I'm guessing that changes now.

...hey, I was wondering. What's the best anti of zerg guardians and devos?

The changes to infestor weren't very big. It does actually have a spot directly underneath it where it will steal an additional unit, so it can steal up to 2 units each time it fires. Both the radius of the small location and the bigger location were increased a little, but not by a huge amount. There's also no control over the type of unit you get (since SC doesn't have any concept of unit groupings), so it can easily be weak if it steals zerglings or marines, or quite strong if it steals archons and BCs.

Devourers are very difficult to balance, as I have no control over the acid spores, which increase damage taken as an armor debuff, and more importantly increase attack cooldown by something like 8.25% per hit. This is particularly nasty against BCs as they already have a slow cooldown, so they end up taking forever to hit.

The best AA in the game are the vikings, due to the long range and pretty high damage, although I did just nerf them in the last version and make wraiths a bit better. For protoss, carriers and phoenixes are least affected by the cooldown of the acid spores. For zerg, scourge.

Some guy named KING was weeping to me about how "hallucination does not work", I have no idea what he wants with that but whatever.

However, I think the 2.01 update has greatly decreased the power of Divine Judgement in comparison to Infestation which costs less and essentially does a lot hella more damage - Banelings, and a shitload of mutalisks and guardians that do 25 damage each - 10 damage on the temple each! While with Divine Judgement, you just get some goliaths and stuff that do 1 damage on the temple. xD So in its essence, I think Divine Judgement is clearly weak in comparison, and should not kill so many units off, especially for its high price. (Not to mention that Armageddon doesn't kill off the Swarm Guardians because they are out of range, which also give higher power to Infestation..)

And I have a strange suggestion / thought, I think mass guardians are greatly overpowered due to their 27 damage which is pretty damn high (and make even Protoss Archons uneffective). However, I know you only get 1 each greater spire - but I was thinking - that each spire could make a higher count of Guardians, but have lower damage. Like, 1,5 Guardian and 20 damage or something. That was a random number, you are the calculation expert. xP But I think it's worth to think about it.

Probably he means that the computer AI never casts hallucination. Which is mostly true - I vary rarely see it. But then again, hardly anyone ever researches it, because storm is much better anyway. Very little I can do, and not worth investigating further because no one researches it anyway.

Yeah, infest is probably a little overpowered compared to DJ, especially now that I reduced the costs of both. The reason they both kill off so many units is to prevent repeated DJ's from each side from being very effective - diminishing returns. DJ can actually be much more damaging then infest, but it depends on your enemies units when they spawn - tanks, reavers, archons and lots of guardians are good candidates for dealing lots of damage to the temple at spawn time. Probably the best fix here would be for infest to leave some enemy units still alive and weaker (like only 10-15% of them), to force the newly infested units to duke it out for a few seconds before racing straight to the temple.

Yes, guardians are quite strong, but they are essentially the Zerg's capital ship. Terran get BCs and Protoss gets Carriers, Zerg needs something equivalent. I've already nerfed Dev's as much as is reasonable, a lot of it through price increases and #'s decreases. Zerg best counter for Guardians is plague + scrourge, Terran can go for BCs, wraiths or Goliaths while the protoss is probably stuck with psi storm and scouts and corsairs, not too effective when there are lots of mutas, scourge and dev's around too, so the protoss has the hardest time vs guardians. Protoss mass carriers is still very powerful, but the key is that they must be massed - really only become useful when you get at a bare minimum 6, and 9 is better. Of course as they build up over repeated spawns, they get increasingly powerful. 1 or 2 carriers by themselves aren't much good, which is why you don't see many players going mass carriers - due to the apparent expense and apparent weakness of them.

If I made any changes to guardians it would be to reduce their damage, probably to 24 or 25. Increasing # spawned has two main ramifications: HP on the battlefield increases (and HP per $ spent - Zerg is already the cheapest here), and # of targets on the battlefield increases, which stresses out the AI and exponentially increases your damage dealing output (eg 9 zerlings vs 3 3x as powerful zerglings, 9 lings would probably be better).

Hi, Lanthanide,
I love your map, and played >100 times. (usually choose 2X rate)
I think 2.06 is the most balanced version so far.
At early period, T > Z > P
At later period, P > Z > T
But I find Terran is actually so weak, because it's easy to reach later period for T's opponents.
If i'm P, i can make mass dragoons first(need several reavers if T mass marines or reapers), then mass carriers or corsairs, then save money for DJ and 100% win;
If i'm Z, i can make mass hydras first(sometimes need some guardians), then mass ultralisks and zerglings and 5 defilers(Don't Upgrade Plague). T can't deal with dark swarm.
even though T can deal with P or Z at last, Specials War begin, T still lose.
The key is that nuke is weak against DJ and Infestation.
T even can't destroy the night defense of opponents before 6 gas,
when gas full, T lose, time make T lose.
So I think maybe T need to strengthen.

By the way, i think it's not necessary to make infestation weaken, because at later period DJ is actually more powerful than Infestation, and P's army is more powerful too at later period(with reaver, HT, DA, corsair and carrier, P is indeed powerful).

Sorry my English is not good, i hope you can understand my words, thanks.
Happy new year!

Thanks for the feedback, very helpful.

Do you have any suggestions for what should be changed to help make Terran more competitive?

One way would be to increase the range of Arma around the temple so it actually kills guardians. I think that's the greatest problem with arma - the Guardians with 26 damage still rape the hell out of it and so the only "counter" is booming. Also, I personally think that the nerf of Goliaths greatly reduced its effectiveness - most air units have a high enough armor that it essentially blocks the damage.

I could increase the range of nuke very easily, so I'll probably do that at some point.

As for the nerf on goliaths, don't they now do 22 damage? Most air units have 4 or 5 armor, but a couple have 3 or 0, and shields only have 3 armor also. Goliaths of course get a double penalty from armor, so at worst they do 12 damage instead of 22 when attacking something with 5 armor. That's not inconsiderable, especially with their massive range. Previously they would've done 14 damage - so it's not really a huge difference. The main problem with them is that with charon boosters they have a really massive range, so when a mothership flew over a bunch of goliaths (and the movement AI I have for the mothership forces it to move over the enemies periodically) it'd be shot out of the air and die in no-time. This happened all the time. It also ended up being the terran's main anti-air unit, which was a bit strange because it's a ground unit. It's also very easy to mass them compared to other AA/air units, so I figure everything all up, their new damage is more fair.

I think the range of nuke should be increased, too, but cost more minerals.

then reduce the energy cost of Irradiate. Maybe also increase a little range of EMP, maybe not.
And increase the life of Thor or give Thor the movement AI for avoid damage.

I find the valkyrie can't fire when mass untis exist in the screen, but the units number haven't reach the max limit of game, other air units can still fire, like scout,wraith,devourer.it's very important.Can you fix it?

Not possible. EMP is already very devestating against a protoss enemy anyway, due to draining energy of units (like high temp/dark archon and corsair) as well as shields.

I could increase the life of the Thor. Not sure what you men about a movement AI though, but there's really not much I could do that'd always be helpful in all situations - AI control is very limited in SC mapping.

Nothing I can do about it, limitation of SC with regards to weapon sprites on the screen at a time. It affects other units with weapon sprites too, like goliaths and dragoons, but it's just most noticeable with valk's because they have both a lower cutoff point, and because a valkyrie that doesn't shoot any missiles at all is very obvious. In the last patch I gave +1 AA damage to wraiths to help beef up terran AA (at the expense of goliath damage though, as discussed above).

About the limitation of SC, it's really a big problem.
It's very easy to reach the max units limitation by making mass dragoon and mass carriers(or mass goliaths and mass marines,wraith), at this moment Raider's team even spawn nothing.
I'm thinking whether could reduce the minerals income a little, and reduce the life of Silo,night defense and fortress for compensation.