Just wondering about the mothership, couldn't you make it Danimoth (Arbiter) as the hero? It would be easy to change the triggers and the dark archon couldn't steal it.

Hallucination is not worth being there lol, whoever wanted hallucination back must've been most likely noobs. But its extremely pointless does not and will not help anything, how about immortals hallucinate, an high templars do the shocking, dunno if you can install that trigger but it'd be cool if immortals can hallucinate an high templars could just storm

*sigh*

Hero units cannot cast spells, otherwise I would do this.

Hero units (Tassadar high templar) cannot cast spells, otherwise I would (probably) do this.

^ Wasn't there old versions where HT would Hallucinate the carrier as soon as the army spawned? Those fake carriers were excellent tankers for the devourers while my carrier does work. Or was this because the AI of High Templar was pretty bad but had full energy when it spawned?

Yes, I do recall this happening as well. It would have been because the HTs had full energy. Heinermann's list also says they "cast it while idle" so perhaps being ordered to attack to the enemy base immediately after spawn prevents them from having any idle time, and so they don't cast it? Or maybe they need to be stuck inside a ball of other units so they can't move anywhere, forcing them to be 'idle'?

I'm going to play around with it a bit before 2.52 is out.

How can you order HT to attack when it has no attack? Or is moving to the enemy base considered as an attack?

I used the phrase loosely: the actual order is "patrol". In the case of HTs and other units without attack, they just move and will retreat or retaliate with spells when attacked. Contrast this to "move" where they would not retreat or retaliate.

What happens if you select a group of HTs in SC and attack-move? What if you select HTs and other units with attacks and attack-move? Do the HTs just stay behind or move with the other units?

This is invalid one since there is no attack command.


If you select with other units, the HT will move with other units until it reaches the point you designated. I'm pretty sure it is on 'move' though instead of 'patrol'.

Regardless of what happens when you give the order as a human player, a trigger giving an order to an AI player works the way it is being described by Lanthanide. Issuing the Patrol order via trigger makes units walk back and forth between two points, engaging enemies if they have an attack. Computer players will cast spells from their units according to certain algorithms, so the Templars do storm, but that's tangential.

2.52 most likely won't be out this weekend. The aforementioned spawning system by jjf turned out to not be as effective as I'd hoped. Instead I'm going to go with a slightly revised version of the current one that will work better, which will actually be less work than jjf's to implement but requires me to roll back some of those changes. Also I haven't looked into hallucination yet.

Just had an epic game that lasted for 41 minutes, me and a terran vs 2 protoss, ended up winning with our temple having about 95% health left. Nuke is pretty powerful when used well now, even though my ally only had 5 gas vs 6 for everyone else. One of the protoss had a huge number of zealots and carriers while the other had dragoons, reavers some carriers and lots of stargates. The initial prison cell battle lasted for almost 13 minutes (about 20 spawn waves), by far the longest I've ever had - our cell got down to 48hp but we managed to push back and eventually destroyed theirs after I thought "to hell with this" and used my insta-spawn.

One change I'm going to make to nuke is the enemy units directly around your temple that are stolen will scatter like the enemy units do, so it's not quite so much of a 'massive push' like it is at the moment. I may also implement a little thinning of the stolen units, not to the same extent as happens with infestation or MC though.

Also I'll cap tempest carriers to 9 on the battlefield per team; any newly spawned ones will be replaced with regular carriers instead. This is different to how the battlefield caps work for other units, where the excess newly-spawned ones will simply be removed.

"One change I'm going to make to nuke is the enemy units directly around your temple that are stolen will scatter like the enemy units do, so it's not quite so much of a 'massive push' like it is at the moment."
This doesn't sound very good. I've never had a good push, maybe when I waited so the enemy units get "clumped" around, and lots of them, then I can get a descent push, but it's still not a big thing. Maybe you should leave it this way?

Not sure if you've played 2.51 or not, but it steals all enemy units on your half of the field. So if there are, say, 20 carriers and 30-40 corsairs/scouts on your side of the field, then you're generally not going to have that much trouble pushing with them. Or at least you shouldn't.

Also you'll generally only have units directly on top of your temple if they just used a special, in particular infestation which creates a lot of the 'brood lord' mutalisks that get in real close when attacking. These are the units that will scatter; the rest of them out towards where your silo area will simply turn around and march directly back to the enemy. Also the normal nuke scattering effect has a 15 real-time second timer that prevents the normal battlefield orders from being given to the enemy units; no such timer will apply to your own units however, so this means that depending on when you do the nuke, the limited scatter that is applied may only last 2 or 3 seconds before a normal lot of battlefield orders comes through. If you're nuke just after spawn however, the first lot of orders don't come through until 47 seconds on the countdown timer (and basically every 15 countdown seconds after that).

Okay well, this is a big issue I believe. but,
Allies can attack my base and destroy my buildings and it's quite annoying because I can't stop them from doing it and there's nothing stopping them from doing it either. there should be swift punishment if you destroy a allied building or something that can be put in place to stop the person from attacking the building.

I also noticed as zerg that the bottom tiles are unbuildable, but are buildable for protoss/terran.

Protoss Zealots have to much of a advantage at the start of the game, I built about 5 spawning pools/upgraded hatchery/2 Evolutionary Chambers and they still beat me (I was second player) maybe a little tune down to zealots?

There's no reliable way to detect when someone is attacking their ally's buildings. The only possible check would be if a protoss player had zerg building kills, they must have killed their ally's buildings. But that doesn't work for allied protoss buildings, of course. Also if your ally is building in your base and getting in the way, being able to kill their buildings is worthwhile.

Can't do anything about the bottom row being unbuildable; I expect if I made it 1 tile shorter then the zerg simply wouldn't be able to build in the 'new' bottom row. Generally you shouldn't be running out of base space anyway. Also I often find that having a zerg ally in the 2nd base is good because it means I am much more likely to be able to get my probes through to either of my ally's bases whereas with a terran or protoss in the 2nd base they often build a wall that you can't navigate (generally terran will have a building they can lift off, but not always).

As for zealots, I reduced their spawn size down to 3.25 recently and that seems to have helped the early first few spawns. Terran will usually beat protoss if they build all firebats with their starting money and reapers are very good vs zealots too. Zerg can probably beat them too if you build all spawning pools or broodlings; hydralisks aren't good vs zealots because they do explosive damage so zealots only take 50% damage on their hp and hydralisks don't have huge HP so the zealots can take them down fast.

well for the alliances, I think preserving it would be the first line of protection, so your unit will stop attacking the building (only exception for this is drones which are fast animated units) anyways I don't think you have a preserved alliance in the map yet.

I think that Mutalisk life should be raised a little and armor decreased because storm just rips them to streads.

Preserving alliance prevents you from destroying your own buildings or workers. I specifically put a system in place around 2.20 or so in order to not require alliances to be preserved.

Mutalisks already seem to be the preferred air unit for a lot of zerg players. Any increase in HP would have to be offset by a decrease in spawn rate.

Well, mutalisks are effective against protoss who has a lot of dragoons.
On a side note, there's no point of buffing the dragoons and nerfing the archons since protoss eventually has to go for some mass of archons to fight those clumped-up units in late game, but i digress.
They already have 4 armors which is very robust against tier-1 and tier-2 units. By the time the protoss gets out templar-archon forces, you should appropriately convert them to guardians and devourers so they are more against the protoss army.

Just played a quick game of 2.51 (yes, yes, I'm supposed to focus on school, but I felt I did a good job today applying for 17 internships) and here's my thought:

What happened with the spawn triggering method? I had this obnoxious zerg opponent who was the bottom player and he would spawn 500 units per turn which easily max-ed out the map. When the 'cannot create more units' issue happened, only his spawn got the full spawn while i had reduced or zero spawn after each turn.

I thought it used to be the opponent gets the full spawn with my reduced spawn followed by my full spawn the next turn with the opponent having reduced spawn.

Yes, I was pondering whether I need to make more changes to dragoons or not. The last 2 games I played have been very very illustrative for balancing purposes. The first was the 41 minute long game and the second was me PZ vs PP again. One of the P's went archon/dark archon and the other went mass stalkers. My zerg ally went ultralisk and the dragoons just got slaughtered very quickly. Looking at the DPS calculations, there's just no way that dragoons can keep up with the damage that archons deal, especially because they have splash. I don't really want to change the unit stats any further; I think any more changes to dragoons would be making them cost $180 from $200 and/or spawn 1.33 instead of the current 1.25.

They also built lots of carriers and they were pushing with them because they built up a huge ball, but once we cleared them out thanks to the brutalisk we had sufficient air forces to prevent them massing and effectively pushed for the rest of the game. I was watching the corsiars/scouts trying to deal with the interceptors and they basically weren't attacking the carriers at all. I'll have a look at how the invulnerability cycle works on the interceptors because I believe at the moment there will always be a mix of invincible and vulnerable interceptors at any one time, so the air units can always target interceptors instead of the parent carriers which is where they really need to target. So if I make it so all interceptors are invincible at the same time, that should help. If that doesn't make a significant difference, then I'll also look at reducing interceptor HP.

It is still in there and hasn't changed. I assume this was a 1v1 game?

The cycle does alternate, so what you should have been seeing is something like this:
Z: full or reduced spawn, you: reduced or no spawn
You: full or reduced spawn, Z: reduced or no spawn
Then cycle.

You should not have seen this combination at any time:
Z: reduced spawn, you: reduced spawn

The changes I am looking at for spawning in 2.52 would make this last combination possible which would be more fair.

This would be a pretty awesome patch. I guess I forgot to keep track of who gets the full spawn or the reduced spawn and kept using the booms when it was my turn to get the full spawn which made space for the opponent to also get a full spawn.

As for the carriers, is it possible to elongate the build-time of the interceptors in addition to making them all invincible and not invincible at once?