Because all of the units have reduced HP, there is really not much of a push especially when there are many enemy units left on the other side of the field. In order for Terran to win, not only it needs the 3,000 damage to the temple, but also the MC'ed units need to push and do additional damage. However, because of significantly reduced HP all units, most of my units die or make too slow of a push and there is a new spawn by the time my units reach to the temple.

I think a minor buff to the nuke would be making changes to the spider mines. The spider mines in 2.51 is almost useless since all those confused units will get near it and the mine is only good for killing 1~2 badly injured units. Some of them even wander around the spawn location so those 6~7 mines placed in the spawn location is useless to kill some ground units for the next spawn.

I was toying with increasing the HP of the stolen units from 5% to 7% or 8% to make up for the thinned numbers, but really that isn't a huge increase in practice. I could potentially give the units stolen at the temple much higher HP too (40%+), since they also have the scattering effect applied to them this wouldn't be too bad?

What would you suggest with the spider mines?

Installing it on all over the field would be one idea. Or better yet, when the units are confused, can you make them not to wander around the spawn location?

When you say "all over the field" what do you mean? At the moment spider mines are placed in the enemy half of the field, because all of the enemy units in your own half are stolen and there's thus no point putting them there because they won't kill anything.

No, no control over this.

nukes make the enemy units very high!! They wander all over looking stoned!! Hell im really high now!! just like the scatterd nuked units!




*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* STONERS LEGEND *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Thanks for that. Looked like a boring game About the time you said he was learning fast he had about 10 drones mining gas...

Anyway it seems the boom only triggered because he sent all 3 ammo running directly at the beacon all at once. I'm still not 100% why it went off, because the ammo should always be moved back to their pen during the intro battle. The first two are moved back, but somehow the 3rd isn't. I suspect it's something flakey to do with the 'bring' condition update problem. Anyway I fixed it by checking for the "into ended" switch being set for the triggers that actually execute the booms, so this should guarantee that it can't happen.

As for the healing, there's no reason that this shouldn't have actually been healed - it is the same trigger as the one that kills all of the units on the battlefield and that clearly fired. My only guess here is that because only a very small amount of damage was done, the HP probably still registered as 100% after rounding or because of floating point imprecision etc, so the "set HP to 100%" trigger didn't actually change anything because it calculated that it was already at 100% HP? I will do a little testing around this to see if I can reproduce it and fix it (such as by setting HP to 10% and immediately back to 100%).

Yea it was a boring game.. On what speed did you watch it? I tried on fast, 2x, 8x and 16x and it bugged every time..

Watch it in multiplayer, it plays at 16x speed just fine then. See this post: http://www.staredit.net/324131/

Oh, yeah I forgot about that, thanks!

Earlier, there had been some discussion about Hallucination and making it more useful. I had two thoughts about this, actually.

The first idea is to spawn a single Tassadar when Hallucination is researched, which respawns after dying. This Tassadar would have the Move order spammed to him alone, telling him to go towards the enemy base; this trigger would come after the one that gives the whole armies the Patrol order. This would prevent him from attacking. Hallucinations of random nearby units would spawn near Tassadar at a rate increasing as Templar Archives are built. There is a maximum of one Tassadar per team at any time.

The second idea is similar, and would probably be preferable assuming it is acceptable to use Give Units, which is a fairly large assumption as it clears orders. While Hallucination is researched, periodically loop through all Templars and summon Hallucinations of random nearby units. Alternatively, if possible, you could instead choose one random Templar and spawn them at him. (I have heard that using Give Units on a single unit gives one fairly randomly, though have no evidence for such besides hearsay.)

In both cases, you'd have to manually spawn the Hallucinations. Also, I've been saying "Hallucinations of random nearby units", but it could obviously be weighted as you see fit.

Tassadar is already used for the Immortals, so the first option is out unless I restricted it for just this purpose, which isn't worth it. Also what you're describing is really more of a hero unit that would be available before all the other races had a chance to get their own, which isn't really fair. I briefly experimented with a protoss hero unit (before making the warp prism, which I'm not entirely happy with) that created hallucinated units, but there didn't seem to be a lot of point in it since hallucinations take 2x damage and can't deal any damage and get in the way of your own units attacking the enemies.

Also the only way to detect whether hallucination has been researched is to use EUDs, so that makes this rather more difficult to deal with.

The second one is slightly more interesting, as I've observed in my last few games that by far the Protoss' biggest weakness is that their spawn size is so small compared to the other races (and this may be the reason that carriers are so strong for protoss as it artificially boosts their army size dramatically). The only thing they can really spam at all is zealots; in recent games I've found myself building a bunch of gateways in the mid to late stages (3-5 gas) just to beef my spawn size up, and it has actually worked quite well. So introducing additional hallucinated units into the protoss army could be an interesting way to achieve this.

I think if I were to do some special meddling with hallucination, I'd just make the hallucinated units spawn with the regular army, rather than having some sort of spawning system on the battlefield as you've described, because that is just too much effort to trigger and could introduce weird behaviours into the game.

How about if you add .5 or 1 Hallucinated Archon to the regular Archon/Templar? Or maybe 1 hallucinated zealots to the 3.5 zealots?

I was trying to think of candidates for adding, the best one really is onto the stargate, a hallucinated scout or something. I think a hallucinated archon with all those shields and HP/armor would be a bit unfair.

But this in itself is also quite annoying for players, because they'll see like 10 scouts but only 5 of them would be doing damage. They won't look blue because they only appear blue to the originally owning player (which would be the CPU), and in fact spawning them in the first place isn't straightforward because you can't Give hallucinations between players.

I guess ideally the hallucinated units would be of a different base unit type, so whenever you saw one you would know it was really a hallucination.

I tried to list the units that are not present in the battlefield

Unused units:
Terran:
SCV
Gui Montag (Firebat)
Jim Raynor (Vulture)
Dugalle (BC)
Samir Duran/Alexei Stukov (Ghost)
Magellan (Vessel)

Zerg:
Drone
Matriarch (Queen)
Unclean One (Defiler)
Devouring One (Zergling)
Infested Duran (Ghost)

Protoss:
Hero Dark Templar (not Zeratul or regular dark templar)
Aldaris (High Templar that can attack)
Mojo (Scout)
Danimoth (Arbitor)

Most of them are hero units and we know that they can't cast spells, so the Matriarch or the Unclean One or Magellan are function-less.
There should be other ways to introduce these other units though.

@ HSL the scv's on the battlefield thing would be good cause they can repair tanks or other mechanic units, I wonder why triggers like that hadnlt been added in yet o.O i mean like whats the point of having a probe on the field and not a scv to repair damaged terran units. even if the scvs die easily they maybe can get some tweaking like armor or some other trigger

The probes are certainly good for taking Ghost's lockdown.

Aldaris, unfortunately, cannot be spawned via trigger, iirc.

Mojo would probably be the best choice for Hallucination...

Oh, and actually, hero Zerg casters could have an interesting use: When one dies, do something useful. Magellan could be used the same way, but that seems odd thematically. It's just a (probably stupid) thought.

Isn't the same for Dugalle (BC) or whatever his name is? I don't see much use for the Hero Firebat/Vulture, they won't do much use late game due to their damage type. Samir/Alexei, I guess the same since the regular ghost and the Reapers (Sarah) are already there. Magellan (Vessel), I suggested that to Lanth for extra detection with no support/attacks (D.Matrix, Irrd). As for SCV, I dunno if he can make it work so they repair damaged mech units.

Drone doesn't have much use and where would he be put in a building? Matriarch and Unclean One are Hero support units so of course they won't use spells. Devouring One, I suggested that to be added with the Ultralisk. And isn't Infested Duran used at the end after the victory/defeat? It seems he would be more of a Zerg Hero instead of a regular spawning unit.

I thought the Hero Dark Templar was being used? Isn't he the one with the speed or is that the regular one? Because I know Zeratul has a faster attack rate. As for what Bio said, Aldaris can't be spawned via trigger. Mojo is used in the beginning for choice isn't he? Aside that he would be useful for a hallucination. I doubt Danimoth is going to be added in, I think Lanth said he doesn't want the uniqueness of the Hero units to be ruined, only wanting one of them on the field to set them apart from the other units.

A lot of these replies already make a lot of the points I would make, but I'll throw in a some extra.

There are no 'triggers' that can make SCVs repair units. SCV repairing units is part of the regular "build-base" computer AIs, which I don't use in this map. Another aspect is that repair costs are based on unit build times and costs, which I currently set to 0 and small numbers like 0/0 or 1/1 because it's also used for the Dark Archon's MC. So I'd have to change these values around to fit both repair and MC which would take a bit of fiddling. I also doubt that the SCVs would repair if I did all of this anyway.

Yes, the probes are present because Protoss players are forced to spend money on pylons to build, so giving them a unit was only fair. Initially when I introduced probes they were way too strong for the price, but now they're about right. They certainly are very good at soaking up lockdowns, which is why I'll never remove them - I consider this a feature.

That's an interesting possibility. I'd have to make them unique (hero-type) units however, as the only way to detect that a unit has died at a certain position on the map is to center a location on them every cycle, then when you discover that the location is not at it's previous 'storage' spot but has moved somewhere on the map and yet there is no unit present, that unit must have died. I do this with the mothership where it has an extra attack on death that can kill more units in a wider area around it, because the mothership often ends up suiciding especially vs terran goliaths.

Yes. There is nothing special about the firebat hero whatsoever, however Raynor vulture has a faster attack rate with a cooldown of 22 instead of 30. This is quite common for a lot of the 'named' heroes where the base unit has a standard 30 cooldown: Fenix, Raynor BC and Zeratul. As I've found in earlier versions of DS, having the hero and standard versions in the map as 'regular' units is generally difficult to balance.

Yes, I've considered this, but ultimately went with just making all science vessals a bit cheaper, rather than making the first one especially cheap (and giving you a no-spells magellan). Ultimately every unit type I add to the map needs half a dozen triggers changed for it and I quite like the balance of the existing science vessals. Terran are often the last player to get detection due to their cost compared to the other races and I'm fine with that. Each race has strengths and weaknesses and this is one terrans.

Although I can't see any purpose for this, since devouring ones have the same niche as ultralisks: melee damage and the devouring one has no notable features compared to regular zerglings.

Yes, although this in itself isn't much of a reason because that cinematic could easily be removed entirely. I'm resistant to using these hero ghosts just because they look identical to the regular ghosts (which use lockdown) so 'reading' them on the battlefield is not easy. But certainly one of Zerg's drawbacks at the moment is they only have hydralisks for ranged which is Explosive damage, although ghosts doing concussive isn't particularly helpful either. Protoss also only have Explosive ranged units, except for Immortals but they can only target ground and have very short range.

There are 3 types of dark templar in the game, the hero and Zeratul versions are from SC vanilla and Zeratul has a faster attack rate, both walk at a 'slow' speed. The 3rd templar was the standard trainable unit that was introduced in brood war; it has the same stats as the hero version except the movement speed is increased (and spells can target them, etc). I make use of the standard unit and the zeratul hero, the standard hero is unused. There's no compelling reason to begin using them.

Yes, Mojo is used at the beginning, but I could replace him with another air unit such as the matriarch. Basically it needs to be a fast-moving air unit not used for other purposes, which rules out the various BC heroes, Danimoth etc.

Yes, Danimoth especially because the mothership is a very powerful hero so being able to visually track it on the battlefield is a point of interest for observing how the battle is going. If I was going to use Danimoth, I'd use him as the void ray.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 19 2012, 7:55 pm by Lanthanide.

I'm still all about the idea for the ability as a Zerg to infest a command center and spawn infested durans. Make it really expensive and really powerful.