Keep up the great work!
Thanks! Glad to have a fan.
You sure this is a good idea?? Sounds like it could be exploited for a massively overpowered spawn (all 3 build in the 3rd spawn to start) although the opponent could do the same.... Also need a way to prevent the teammate from destroying your buildings!! (rage quitters/griefers)
If all 3 players build in 1 base, then that base will have a big spawn and the other 2 bases will have no/small spawn. In my experience, the best gains are made when all 3 players have teams of equal size, or at least there's no weak spawn. A weak spawn tends to lose up any ground gained by a strong spawn. So I don't think this will likely be an issue. Also by requiring 3 gas to be built first, it ensures that people will have to build at least a few buildings in their own base (unless they just rush gas, in which case the enemy team will get the prison cell and probably the silo down).
As for players destroying your buildings, there's no real way to achieve this, except to make all buildings invincible which means you can't destroy your own. Unless you then have a toggle that you control to make them uninvincible again, but that's really cumbersome and requires more map space etc. I guess if this proves to be a problem I'll have to implement a ban system, which in itself is problematic because you don't want to let ban decisions of your own team members up to the enemy team because if someone is griefing you it is to the enemy's benefit and so they may not ban them. Then with a team of 3 it is easy to require 2 votes to ban someone, but in a team of 2 there's really no fair way to ban your team mate - I guess you can just quit at that point.
"Cannot create additional units" or spawn error messages comes up too often when one base is filled....
Yeah, and there's no real way to fix that due to SC limitations. Various mitigations could be introduced (I've put in a very simple one already a few versions back), but ultimately the problem is unsolvable. I might put in more mitigations in future, if I can be bothered. It's a lot of effort for fairly marginal reward - map max doesn't tend to happen in 3v3 with specials enabled, which is frankly what this map is designed for. Certainly it is not designed for specials disabled.
New feature: donate boom ammo to your ally. Once you have built 3 gas and removed your flag barrier, you can walk your boom ammo towards your ally's base to donate it to them. Note that this doesn't require your ally to also have built 3 gas. The booms are donated to your immediately adjacent neighbor - so P1 can donate to P2, and P2 can donate to P1 or P3, and P3 can donate to P2, but there is no way for P3 to directly donate to P1 or vice versa, and same applies to P5, P6 and P7 respectively.
Does it work when P2 or P6 are gone?
Yes. In that case, when P1 walks their boom into P2's base, nothing will happen, it'll simply keep walking. When P1's boom gets to P3's base, it'll be donated to P3.
Fixed bug where P1 could leave the game after selecting the mineral rate but before selecting to enable/disable specials which would prevent the game from progressing. Now if the player leaves in this case, it will assume specials are enabled (along with whatever mineral rate P1 chose before they left).
A similar bug popped up once when the rate was selected but the P1 player decided to fly around and spy on the enemy races then timed out. Please limit the picker to the map center.
Yeah, that's actually where I saw this happen too. First off, the player view is centred to the centre of the map, so the only way to scout out enemy bases is if you've got some sort of hacks installed. If you've got hacked installed, you might as well just use map hack and be done with it.
Secondly, the unit is actually a hallucinated scout hero. Hallucinated unit locations can't be detected with conditions such as "bring unit to location" so there's no easy way for me to detect when the player has left the centre of the map. I could rig something up, or stop using a hallucinated unit, but because of #1 above I don't really see any point in spending the effort to do that.
The absence of resource amounts during the spawn actually adds to the strategy... Did they use or not?? Otherwise the enemy can counter too easily.
Yeah, I know. But more often than not I found that if you were paying attention, the existing timing was still enough to see what was happening. I found myself getting frustrated waiting for the "we spawn next" thing to go away, which isn't as necessary due to the beacons on the map anyway. The time changes we're talking about here are quite minimal anyway: it's gone from 2.66s to 2.16 display for 'we spawn next', and +0.25s each for resources / total gas built per team displays. I think that with these revised timers, if you're not paying attention you'll still be caught out. Probably the real impact of the change is not that the income display will show longer, but that it will show 0.50s earlier after a new spawn than it used to. But again, I don't think this is a biggie.
Please do not make it less than $2000 as it is very valuable ability to vaporize the enemy near your base! Maybe limit 1 per team for balancing the missing player problem.
Yeah, I think if I go with a pure $ figure it will be at least $1,500 and quite likely $2,000 simply because it is very powerful. Making it 1 per team fixes the missing player problem, but does take a way a bit of the player choice. It also means only 1 player on a team of 3 needs to be making the decision of "do I get a boom or save extra $ for a special", when I want all players to be making this decision. This is a difficult issue to resolve though, much as unbalanced teams use of specials is difficult to resolve nicely.
Maybe a reverse of that would work better... make the first boom the most expensive then reduce by $500 for the second and third?
Yeah, if I went with a variable cost, having a reducing schedule would work better than an increasing one. But it's still early days for this idea. If you've got any ideas of your own I'd be glad to hear them! I sort of like the idea of making the cost free, or just regular $750, but have it act as a drain on resources, like -2min/sec, so it gets more expensive over time. Not sure if that's a great idea, and communicating it to players is a small niggle (pop-up display is fine, but players may miss it, not read it, not fully understand it etc).
Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 16 2011, 2:08 am by Lanthanide.
None.