Yes, I'm quite aware of that. The concussive damage was the whole point of choosing Kerrigan, simply because mass raynors did so much damage to air units, especially when stimmed.

The problem of course is protoss shields. If I increase their damage too much they'll simply become the ultimate anti-protoss unit. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though.

This is a major new feature and refactoring of existing systems to make them more efficient (been working on it for about 20 hours so far), so it qualifies for a significant version-up to reflect that.

One other idea I just had (not likely to go into 2.30 but possible for 2.31) is to spice up the late game a bit further. Add a 7th gas geyser which will increase income to 52/second (26/second at regular speed), or 6 more than the current 46 max. This would have a down-time of 90 seconds, but would come with an extra Boom Ammo. Not sure whether to give the Boom Ammo as soon as the player builds the 7th gas, or only after the downtime has expired. Giving the boom ammo straight away could work as a last-ditch effort for when you're team is losing, and you don't have enough $ to cast a special but do you do have enough to get the 7th gas and the boom which make just let you eke out a little longer. Note that building gas at this stage with a 90 second cooldown and an income of 46 means you'll be forgoing $4,140. The extra 6 minerals/second means it'll take you 690s = 11 1/2 minutes to recoup that outlay before you start turning a profit.

On the flip side, if your team was already ahead, building the 7th gas will put your income even farther ahead. So the 7th gas could just cost $1500 instead of the usual $750 and not have any cooldown or increased mining attached to it.

Anyway, some mechanism by which you could receive an extra boom ammo late in the game could be interesting. Anyone got other ideas?

Get some sleep

There is a minor bug involving the positioning of the booms that only seems to affect Terran players. Occasionally and vary rarely when I build something next to the boom platform the SCV will drift like a drunkard into the area where the boomers are and cause them to step aside. This usually results in nothing more than a stuck SCV but sometimes the boomers automatically wander onto the pad and BOOM unexpectedly! I only remember this happening when there are 2 or 3 boomers on standby.

Probably that should be mitigated in the new version, just by chance though

I've made all of the bases taller by 2 tiles, but the boom beacon has stayed in the same place and the boom pen has moved out to the right.
So it used to look like this:
XXBoomXX
YYPenYYY

Now it looks like this:
XXBoomXX YYPenYY

This means that the ammo needs to walk 2-3 tiles to the left, instead of 1-2 tiles upwards in order to actually make a boom, so there should be less chance of an SCV pushing them that distance.

One of the sub-features for the new feature is that you can now donate booms to your allies. Which is useful if you're a noob and want someone else to do it.

Is 2.23 yours? Found it being hosted last night. Immortals had been nerfed back to lower dmg. looks and plays just like 2.22 otherwise.

Nope.

So much for my improved protection

There's no such thing as perfect protection. Sorry Lanth D=

I know there's no such thing as perfect protection.

Oh sorry I was just musing. I knew you knew =/

Someone calling themself "Lanthenide" is currently on the East server seeding DS 2.24..... Is that a fake release too??

I'm Lanthanide with an a, not an e.

So yes, that's fake.

I guess it's flattery

Just downloaded it myself. The only significant trigger changes look like allowing you to fly buildings into allies bases (no idea why they allow this, since your units won't spawn properly) and the specials are changed to 6100 for nuke and 6750 for protoss divine judgement (mind control).

Checking units etc is more time consuming since I can't just do a text compare, but they changed stats for Immortals and Void Rays at least. Immortals are 17 PH, 170 shields, 17 armor, 17 damage. Void Rays are 270 HP, 27 shields, 2 armor, 27 damage. Seems they have a fetish for 7's. Stalker was changed to 45 hp, 125 shields, 5 armor (from 70/80/3). They've changed the prices for various buildings quite a lot, too, looks like just for Protoss though. $195 for 1.33 stalkers with those stats looks way unbalanced.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Aug 10 2011, 8:05 am by Lanthanide.

Right, so I've pretty much finished up the changes for my map. But I haven't gone through the last steps of shrinking and protecting it, and I need to play it myself on b.net before I put it up here. I always like to give it a final couple of play throughs to check for any horrendous bugs (and have failed in this task several times already, hence the version leaps from 2.10 to 2.12 to 2.15 to 2.19 to 2.22).

I plan on getting this last stuff done tomorrow, and I'll post the map here and update the thread when I do.

Changelist for 2.30:

New feature: build in your ally's base. All of the bases are now 2 tiles taller, and no longer have water separating players, instead this is now a column of (non-buildable) crevice terrain to mark the boundary between player bases. Physical barriers preventing units from moving from one base to another in the form of a column of flags for each adjacent player are placed on the crevice terrain, these flags are destroyed when each player reaches 3 gas. This is to prevent players from building in their ally's base until they get to 3 gas (to stop early cheese like zerglings + medics etc). Both adjacent players must build 3 gas to remove all of the flags; until then attempting to fly buildings or move units between the bases will result in them being destroyed.

When you build buildings in your ally's base, when it is your ally's turn to spawn (timer reaches 0, or prison cell/defense triggered) units in your ally's base will spawn along with their units. If your ally leaves the game, all of their buildings on the map will disappear, but yours will remain; any buildings you had in their (now vacant) base will spawn at your regular spawn interval - this means you aren't penalised if your ally leaves mid-game and you had built in their base, those units will simply be added to your normal spawn. You can build in your ally's base whenever the flag barriers between you are removed; so in a 1v1 game each player can build in any of the 3 bases and their units will all spawn together. This means there is practically no limit on building space any more, which will be useful in those No Special games as it means Zerg don't automatically have the upper hand now.

Players are prevented from building income on their ally's gas vents to prevent griefing. Attempting to build on your ally's vents will cancel the building and give an automatic refund of $750.

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.

Other changes:

• New 10 second message at the start of the map advising of rip-offs circulating on b.net, specifically listing 2.21, 2.23 and 2.24 as being rip-offs with a URL pointing to this thread for the latest genuine version.
  
• Many other trigger systems have been re-written to be more efficient. This will mean slightly less CPU time checking triggers and less intensive conditions to check such as Bring. Even with all of the new systems in place for this map, the total trigger count has only increased by 28.
  
• Removed accidental debug trigger in left behind from 2.20.
  
• 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).
  
• Player alliance is now detected and set in a more clever manner, so alliance is now not a preserved trigger. This means if you order one of your workers to kill a building, it will do so forth-with and won't need to be re-ordered constantly. This may also improve CPU player behaviour (if we're lucky).
  
• Mineral rate bonus for uneven teams is no longer applied when specials have been disabled.
  
• Bug from 2.20 where overlords had a build time of 0, causing any Zerg player that built one to crash (oops!)
  
• Leaderboard cycle times slightly adjusted - "We spawn next" will now display for slightly shorter amount of time, and resources and total gas mined will each show for slightly longer.
  
• Immortals returned to 13 damage (2.20 bug).
  
• Removed now unused vulture engine upgrade (2.20 oversight)
  
• Warp prism +$50 to $850
  
• Warp prism AI has been made less defensive (will fly around the front lines more often). Previous changes and buffs have made this hero overpowered, particularly compared to the 2 terran ones.
  
• Thor price -$300 to $935
  
• Medivac price -$100 to $1435
  

As you can see, the major update is the ability to build in your ally's base. I was thinking for a while a way to give players the ability to get other race's units in their spawn - medics reinforcing a zerg spawn, or ghosts with the protoss. This is an excellent way to do it, as it rewards team work, as well as provides another bonus for mixed-race teams. It also allows for more team-work with gasses - P2 could focus on gassing, with P1 and P3 building units in P2's base to prop them up. Same goes for newbies or other players that just have lame spawns or who could clearly use some extra spice to help turn the tide. I saw the aborted attempt at this in 2.21 once I got ahold of it and figured I could roll it into a proper solution - this required quite a lot of rejigging of existing triggers and I put at least 10-15 hours into this feature alone to get it working properly. Adding in the donation of booms between players was a bonus that could now be done easily without having to implement additional discrete systems to achieve this.

You can also see a variety of bug fixes and other improvements made, including several sloppy 2.20 bugs fixed up.

The hero changes are basically just because the Warp Prism with the final set of buffs was really quite powerful, and was particularly cheap compared to the other terran heroes which probably aren't as good. Thor isn't quite as good as the warp prism (does have strong anti-air though) and medivac isn't as good as mothership, but their prices really weren't justified in comparison to Protoss heroes.

There aren't any other balance changes because I haven't actually played 2.22 since about a day after I released it! I've simply been working on this new version of the map. I now intend to play this quite a bit before releasing the next version which will have more balance changes (probably mainly around reapers/firebats). Also thinking about adding the new mechanic for players to buy one additional boom after they reach 6 gas, as discussed in recent posts above. Current thinking is a gas vent that unlocks once the player builds 6 gas which costs $1,500-$2,000 to build on instead of the usual $750 and gives 1 boom ammo but no extra income. I'd like to try and come up with a way of making it an "interesting choice", as Blizzard likes to say, where the player is forced to make a strategic choice about whether to get the boom or not. Simply making it expensive isn't particularly inventive and I think is difficult to make it a particularly tricky decision: if it's too cheap everyone will simply buy it because Booms are very valuable, but if it's too expensive it'll be a rip-off and no one will get it.

Maybe I could do some system were booms increase in price the more that are bought? So the first one bought costs $1000, then the second costs $1500, 3rd $2000, up to $3,500 for the 6th? This will give players an incentive to gas to 6 and buy the boom quickly; on the other hand it means that the player that is winning is even more likely to win (and there's enough of that in this map already). Maybe just have increasing price for booms on the same team? $1,500, $2,000 and $2,500? Also in the case of imbalanced teams if 1 team can get 3 additional booms and the smaller team can only get 2 additional booms, the smaller team would be even harder pressed to win.

Also maybe having up to 6 booms will just make the games drag on forever. Tricky tricky.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Aug 15 2011, 11:38 am by Lanthanide.

Keep up the great work!


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)

"Cannot create additional units" or spawn error messages comes up too often when one base is filled....

Does it work when P2 or P6 are gone?

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.

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.

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.

Maybe a reverse of that would work better... make the first boom the most expensive then reduce by $500 for the second and third?


Just a few thoughts

Thanks! Glad to have a fan.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's not a hack, just select the picker hologram then right click on the mini-map anywhere you want it to fly.

Right, so I played some games of 2.30 and found quite a few bugs. I made a revised version of 2.30 which fixed one bug and introduced another one (forgot to remove a test/debug trigger). So I made 2.31 to remove that and found a couple more bugs.

So now I've got 2.32 which I'll be hosting on b.net, still not going to upload it here until I've ironed out any other big bugs. Big thanks to the players who helped me test 2.30 and 2.31. You were all very very helpful, much more so than people I've had in the past who played initial releases of new versions.

Here's 2.32 up for DL on sen: http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/

First off, I forgot to mention in the notes above that I've made the angled terrain where it meets the water prettier - now it uses ISOM cliffs instead of just ending on a square edge like it did.

Additional changes from above changelist, in 2.32:

• When a player left the game early, it would remove the geysers from their base, but accidentally also removed geysers from their adjacent ally's base.
  
• Debug trigger made P6 (Orange) die whenever P1 had 5 or more probes (used to test fix for above issue). This would happen if you built 5 probes or built enough pylons to spawn at least 5 probes, as spawned units are briefly owned by the spawning player.
  
• Added check to prevent P1 from flying the scout too far away from the centre of the map. I wasn't going to do this initially, but I found I had a perfectly sized location already which I could re-purpose during this stage of the game without any downsides, so I did.
  
• Nuke damage was (again!) broken and did only 50 damage instead of correct 3200. Stupid shared weapons screw me up all the time.
  
• When bottom team built a special, top team players would gain vision of their base. This was a result of the refactoring of the special system that I did, and I didn't even consider this sort of vision issue cropping up. Fixed - players should never have vision of the enemy bases.
  
• When terrans were building buildings against the flag line, the SCV would sometimes wander into the flags during or after construction, and would be killed. This was to prevent people getting their SCV into their ally's base before having built 3 gas. Now the SCV will only be killed if it walks all the way through the flag line (would need to be a deliberate action by the player to occur).
  
• A player (forgot your name!) pointed out that there was a big exploit with the ally base-building with terran. It would be easily possible for P1 to build some buildings right near the dividing line and have them spawn during their spawn slot, and then fly them to their ally's base and have them spawn again. I've prevented this by simply preventing lifted buildings from moving between bases when your ally is present in the game (this means if your ally leaves or never started, as in a 1v1 game, then you can fly your buildings around without penalty). This is a 2-tile wide inverted location so you have to be deliberately flying your building into their base for it to be destroyed.
  
• When giving boom ammo to your ally, if you were P1 giving to P2 you would get a notification message saying that you'd donated it, same for P2 giving to P3. But if P2 gave to P1, or P3 gave to P2, you wouldn't get the message (same applies to P5/6/7 respectively). Fixed this, so you now always get the notification that you've donated the boom to your ally no matter what player you are.
  

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Aug 16 2011, 10:55 am by Lanthanide.

Encountered the failure to spawn prison cells bug, mineral rate selectors stay in the map and gas geysers also appeared (enemy color) in the middle.

See the attached screenshots

Was playing 1v1, nobody was joining so I moved from Green to Red. Started with only Red and Purple players so the mode instantly defaulted to double+specials then it couldn't create the prison cells.




** The filenames say 2.23 but it is indeed.from 2.32

Attachments:

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 17 2011, 12:54 am by Rivalz.

Thanks very much. That'll be a result of the rip-off warning at the start.

I remember testing it as being P2 to check it displayed properly, but didn't do a test where P1 wasn't in the game. Bug definitely needs to be fixed, but not sure if I should release a 2.33 with just this fixed, or wait until I have some other changes (releasing updates to fix bugs that most people never see tends to confuse people because they don't know what changed and why there's a new version).

Reapers definitely need some rebalancing. They simply do too much dmg to tier 1 enemy units for their cost. Not as bad as the immortals were, but in the few games I've played, terran players always built at least a dozen turrets. It may need a cap, but I'd prefer not to do that.

Currently 80 hp, 5 armor, 18 dmg. What about 60 hp, 6 armor, 14 dmg? Not sure on the high armor value, but trying to make them a bit distinctive from other terran units, although it's probable that the 20 HP reduction will eat up most of the benefit from the extra armor point (will have to work it out on paper).

An interesting issue I've encountered is that the upgrades are no longer removed for all same-race teammates once researched.

Yeah, upgrades aren't shared between team mates. GiggleKush told me about this yesterday and I've fixed it.

The upgrades are still given to the CPU players on the battlefield, just not back to the human players. Simple goof in the triggers which I've already fixed.

I'll put out a 2.33 version this weekend with that fixed, as well as the bug that Rivalz reported above, and a couple of other small things. It'll also include a rebalance for reapers.

Got a screenshot of the phonys


Idk if this can help you deal with them.