Ok, I probably did that so the graphics looked proper because I'm actually overlapping them close together. Will have a look at it. However Bio above says that sprites don't count towards the unit max and that pure sprites don't even count against the sprite limit (I'm guessing he means doesn't count against weapons sprite limit). So this may not really matter.

Ahh, probably just left over from testing, then. Sloppy of me.

I'll be keeping the Fixed because the map is based on Desert Strike Night Final, which was based on Desert Strike Night. I originally called it Fixed because there were several really bad bugs in Final, as well as the balance generally just being quite poor, so I 'fixed' those issues, as well as adding some fundamental improvements like better detector and lurker AI and better/more interesting heroes.

Hmm, odd, will have to check that. I wouldn't think any of them would be doodads proper because I simply copied and pasted them between the bases using the base terrain. They're also cut up and mixed a bit to ensure there are no gaps to let units sneak through.

Map max is only an issue late-game. By late game, there are no flags left on the map. Having the flags act as a visual barrier is much easier to understand for players than an invisible kill zone that disappears for no obvious reason. When the flags are gone, you know you can access their base now. The flags with the message saying "build 2 mines to remove" or whatever also act as instructions. In general Starcraft is quite lacking when it comes to informing players about game systems because there's no way to have text appear in a fixed position on the map or change unit names over time.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 17 2012, 2:34 am by Lanthanide.

One Word: No.

More Than One Word: They are needed for new players to the game, otherwise they just go "WTF?!?!?" and get turned off from the game and/or leave. Either way, flags work, no flags, don't work/ will have lots of people totally confused.
edit: Ninja'ed by Lanthanide as I was typing this lol.

This is a fundamental philosophy behind my map-making. Of course I've really only made DSNight, but I also worked for a while on my blood pressure marathon map (which will completely blow all the others out of the water, if I ever finish it...).

Removing confusion and adding more feedback to the game to make it easier to play is the best way to get your map to be played, assuming it's already fun to begin with. You can have the most fun map in the world but if it takes 2 hours of effort to learn WTF is going on, it will be hard for it to become popular.

That's why I added the vespene gas countdown for when your income will resume, for example, as well as the "number of units spawned" leaderboard display.

Actually, I said that pure sprites don't count towards the unit limit. They definitely count towards the sprite limit.

...There are actually a lot of limits in SC's code, many affecting multiple things. >.>

T is certainly not OP.

What I've observed is a lot of Zs to fall into the fastest game trap and use hydras as their bread and butter. This might be because zerglings can feel completely useless (which they kind of are, they're like cannon fodder, really). A few supply depots and any T will just massacre zerglings. In any case, these Zs have plenty of units, but end up getting completely shut down by a well-balanced army that's well prepared for mass hydra. Ultralisks are wonderful in large numbers, too. They're like fricken tanks.

Mid game muta to late game devourer/guardian seems standard for Z. Devourers really pack a punch in any massed air units. Acid spores not only slow down the attack speed of units, but cause them to take more damage. They can especially shut down BCs. Fortunately for T, I've found that max medic with restore is absolutely key against devourers, since they can help to keep down acid spores that ruin the BC's fire rate. But its not a complete win, there are only so many restores.

The P I've been playing with haven't seemed all that terrible, but do seem to miss out on getting enough DAs against Z. They'll have one or two, but not nearly enough to completely shut down Z. The immortals are almost frustrating, much like a handful of void rays, which require a dozen units to even damage. It gives P a huge tank advantage, like slow moving ultralisks.

Ah yes, I mis-read it.

Anyway I had a look at the doodads: indeed some of the rocky bits are doodads, so I converted them to terrain, but they didn't have sprites associated with them anyway. Of the arches in the middle, 2 of them were doodads. I believe I originally did this for a layering/graphical effect (as previously briefly mentioned), but now that I've converted them to terrain they still appear to display correctly, so not sure what that was about. They also had 4 sprites associated with them, and again these don't appear to have been necessary, so I deleted them too. Maybe this will help with the valkyrie attacks?

As for the 2 erroneous locations in P1 base, can't see them myself. If you're talking about the extra locations to the left and right of the boom beacon, these are intended to be there. They're the 'current player' versions of the locations that move around the map as each player executes their triggers, I just store them in P1's base for convenience.

Yeah, that's why I introduced the infested kerrigan, to hopefully help Zerg in this direction. But I think limiting them to 4 just doesn't cut the mustard. Wondering now if I should cut their HP to 170 or so and make them 1.33 per queens nest. Might bump zergling HP up to 40. Zerg's annoying ground weakness is that they just don't have that many units and the only one that does splash is the lurker, but their AI is rubbish which makes them ineffective mid-late game: they're really only effective early on because no one has detectors.

Yeah, I really really hate trying to balance acid spores. It's almost impossible in a mass map like this, because acid spores + corsairs are incredibly strong. It seems Terran's best counter is restore, and protoss is maelstrom, which gets a bit corny (and sucks if an allied noob researches MC). If I could I would remove the cooldown effect, or cap spores at 4-5 max.

Yeah, I might take down immortals damage to 14 from the current 15. Note that the recent shield changes didn't actually improve the immortals vs the zerg in my tests. The problem before is that immortals really sucked vs terran, so no one really built them. Now that they're more viable, people will build them more often. Much like broodlings were always good (or at least decent) but no one built them.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 17 2012, 9:14 am by Lanthanide.

Doesn't anyone here thinks that 20+ carriers are overpowered against terran or zerg. 5-10 carriers aren't powerful but more than 20 i can't really make anything to counter them unless i'm also protoss. Against terran, marines and goliaths just tend to attack interceptors while zealots are hacking them. Does anyone here knows how to counter them? When you make carriers its 8 interceptors each so going 20 carriers its equal to what 160 interceptors?

We've had discussions about carriers earlier in the thread.

Mass BCs. EMP and lockdown will also go a long way to helping, so you should definitely get 4 science vessals and all 10 bunkers with the proper energy upgrades. Also get Thor, because it has a passive ability to insta-kill interceptors that fly near by it every few seconds. Similarly protoss allies should get mothership because it also has an insta-kill ability against interceptors (in addition and wider in radius to the regular unit killing ability).

The best strategy is to not let the protoss build that many in the first place. Carriers are quite expensive so for any individual player to mass 20 they would have invested a lot of money, which implies your team has been slacking during the early game and let the enemies gas up and horde money. The obvious exception here is where you're up against 2 or 3 protoss players that have each built 4-5 carriers, or once a death ball gets going they can be difficult to beat - but that's true of any of the races air units once they get into a death ball. The best option may simply be to boom it in that case, before it gets to your defense/temple.

Enough Goliaths with range will plow through most things that live in the sky. The main reason Carriers are so very effective in large numbers is that the AI gets distracted and attacks the interceptors, which are happily rebuilt. Ghost's lockdown won't target interceptors though, which goes a long way in shutting down their air power. Divide and conquer, as they say.

Mass BC is fairly lethal against them too. If they have 20 carriers you could have 30 BCs, which is quite a force to be reckoned with, maybe even with yamato. Sure, they'll target the interceptors, but chances are they have enough brute force to force their way past that. Devourers ruin this though. Devourers just ruin everything.

Sci vessels with d-matrix can be helpful, if not emp if you want better defensive abilities. D-matrix is somewhere around the order of absorbing 200 - 300 points of damage. Keeping them healthy is important, because that's where the power is.

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Z certainly do have plenty of problems when it comes to anti-air. P just seems to tear them to shreds with spells. Mass devourer/guardian is nice, but having that many units stacked on top of each other isn't the brightest thing against a DA happy P. It's simply asking to get maelstrom'd. Then the P sneaks in the archons and psionic storms to just wreck havoc on everything.

The advantage to being Z, of course, is that a P that researches hallucinate just nullified their high templars.

In regular melee, ZvP was a match-up that almost seemed to be in favor of Z. Dark swarm + ultra/ling would just tear up anything in its way. My expiriments with this haven't exactly resulted in success. Maybe I didn't get enough ultras, but I do remember that the real damage behind the Z dark swarm is the cracklings, and the ultras were cannon fodder. Zealots do absolute shit to ultras, and everything else that P has is either too expensive or ranged. Psionic storm helps even the sides, but if your unit composition is right, ultras end up spacing out the zerglings enough. I'll have to play around with it some more.

5-6 Collosi and lots of archons kick ass against zerg ground.

Well I've already tried mass BC i think 20 science facilitys with max science vessel max ghosts with plenty of goliaths and wraiths. The battle is 1v1 TvP. I've already destroyed his silo and night defense and we both have already 6 gas. I have mass BC, max science vessel, max ghosts, and plenty of wraiths, goliaths, marines, medics. He also have mixtures of units but you'll notice he has a lot of dragoons and air units. It would end soon but by the time you'll go against 20+ carriers, terran units can really do nothing. Even if you save 1 or 2 booms that army of carriers will just push the terran army. Newbies won't really get to that point where the battle is almost even. I'm saying we got to that point where no one has used boom yet but saving it for when someone used special. Terran have the edge at first but when encountering mass carriers no one could really win using terran against protoss let alone nuke against divine judgment. I think the same goes for zerg but the only advantage of zerg is the 500+ minerals for every special against protoss so zerg can win. And by the way i'm playing in garena and there's always a time when its too long to wait for 3 players to make it 2-2. So someone who joins will just say one on one. There's really no problem when its 2-2 or 3-3 but 1v1 terran can't really win against zerg and almost impossible to win against protoss. And by the way it's just my opinion and i'm always waiting for an update.

Well this map isn't designed with 1v1 in mind. A large part of that is because I don't play it, but also because this really is a team map. I've talked about balancing issues before, such as having to balance the races as if everyone uses the spellcaster units, so if a player doesn't build them then they will have a harder time than they otherwise might. It's similar for 1v1: if I balance the game too strongly in the direction of 1v1 it may begin to upset the balance for the other combinations too much.

Any suggestions for what could be done? I'm thinking Reducing the HP/shields in interceptors so they're much easier to kill (perhaps 1-shot by goliaths, for example) could be an option. One thing I've thought about just now is that when interceptors are damaged they will fly inside the carrier to heal themselves before relaunching (this is why plague is very useful vs carriers), so if I could periodically 'injure' the interceptors once you got to very high concentrations of them, that would force a few of them to fly back to their carriers. Then once carriers/interceptors die, the injure triggers would stop. This would help to limit the number of interceptors actively in play at any one time.

Do it but make sure that it actually works as intended during testing. Otherwise it could cause huge balance issues. Testing is REQUIRED for anything like this. More so I would say than the balancing you've done in the last few patches.

Do what? I presented two options. Do both?

I always do testing on new systems like this.

Try removing the shields of interceptors i think carriers would be more balanced that way because 8 interceptors for each carriers are too strong massively. And as i've said 20+ carriers will be just swarming with interceptors all over the place and most enemy units will just attack them. So could you lower the time of rebuilding interceptors significantly because interceptors just seems so unlimited when you see mass carriers on the field.

And by the way replenishing shields for immortals just made zealots useless. Everyone would just be better building immortals than zealots on 2.48.

It'd be better to reduce their HP rather than shields, because they're small units and take 50% damage vs explosive, which counts as scout, corsair, devourer and valkyrie attacks, whereas shields take 100% damage from these sources.

There already is a system in place to reduce the speed at which interceptors are created, based on the total number of interceptors on the field.

Immortals do less damage than zealots (15 vs 22) and move significantly slower. Later on in the game the slow movement is less of an issue, but early on you'll be giving up a lot of ground if you rely on slow units only. Also the shield regen really only improves them vs terran significantly, they're pretty much just as strong as they were vs zerg and protoss because for those races it is the HP that matters most, more than the armor points (which is what regenning shields at a value of 3 represents).

I'll probably reduce the immortal damage to 14 in the next version, and possibly reduce their HP a little too.

Also, no one really built zealots anyway. Nor did they build immortals. At least they're being built now - that's an improvement.

Then you should further reduced their building time. You should try using combination of terran or zerg without protoss versus another team with one protoss or two protoss should be better so you'll see what mass carriers and interceptors would do. And you can't really test by doing just carriers it should be mixture of units because carriers alone would just be sitting ducks. I think the role of carriers in this game is to divert all enemy attacks to their interceptors so other units can destroy them while confused attacking unlimited mass interceptors.

I have asked many players "what is the strongest race in desert strike night fixed?" almost all of them would just say protoss. If you asked me i would also say protoss for units and zerg for specials just because of the 500+ mineral advantage. So there goes the balancing issues.

And also zerg became weaker at the beginning of the game. You needed 300+ + 400+ minerals just to make lurkers, queens at start can't really do anything unless you upgrade broodlings. So that's additional 139 maybe. In the 2nd round or 3rd round there are already detectors. Unlike the previous versions it would just be 426 to make lurkers and additional 256 to make it 2. But upgrading hive for 256 and still 1 queen just added overlord doesn't it seem to be expensive compared to protoss just 270 and with bonus corsair.

ghosts and wraiths only cloak for a few seconds after being hit.
!! Glitch !!
I know you did it for the Infested Kerrigan but its gay that you let it affect other units that otherwise would of been cloaked for a while.

Reducing their building time would make them build faster.

I don't think Protoss are unbalanced because of carriers, I think protoss are unbalanced because of Archons and psi storm and possibly immortals.

The total cost to get the overlords is exactly the same in 2.48 as it was in 2.47.

As I've previously outlined, the lair can't really be much cheaper than it is, or it will allow zerg to get mutalisks very very early, and the protoss in particular doesn't have any counter for them. I'll look at making the queens nest cheaper though and making it spawn more kerrigans.

I didn't "let" it affect other units. If it does, it is indeed an unintended bug. The only thing I can even think of here is that the ghosts and wraiths you were looking at had already used up their energy, decloaked, and then tried to cloak again after being hit. Note that ghosts have lockdown which will quickly drain their energy, and wraiths don't start off with much to begin with.

Archons actually do shit damage under swarm. Reavers pack a huge punch though. In traditional ZvP, reavers weren't used all too often since they were too slow and fat to do anything. Carting them around in shuttles helps, but Z scourge with micro nullifies that.

So I played around with it a bit more. It turns out devourers just don't cast dark swarm well enough for it to be effective; it's somewhat of a useless tactic in that regard. Ultra/ling really did devour the ground thrown at it though. I ended up mixing hydras later on to help deal with the air, which seemed slightly effective, but not as much as I had hoped.

I think Z could benefit from more scourge.