Download:

DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.03 HERE! now with music~!

Specifications:

• Dimensions: 256x192
  
• Tileset: Space
  
• Players: 1-6 (5+ recommended)
  
• Genre: Impossible Scenarios
  
• Size: 18.5 MB
  
• SC Version: Remastered
  
• Current Map Version: 1.03
  
• Missions: 4 + Final Boss Fight
  
• Heroes: 15 Selectable + 6 Secret
  
• Special Thanks to Azurez for hours of balancing and updates discussions as well as creation of terrain and unit selection and placement choices

Description:
This is intended to be a spiritual successor to Impossible Cyrus and direct successor to my previous Impossible Ultraviolet map. This map is a fair step harder than the first. Players consist of a team of up to six players facing five impossible scenarios. It plays something like a combination between an Impossible map and an RPG. WARNING: It is hard. Teamwork and cooperation are required.

Gameplay:
The first player on the team starts out by choosing one of four difficulty settings: normal, hard, insane or impossible. On normal difficulty all enemies have 1/1 weapon/armor upgrades, except scarab damage which remains at 0 upgrades. On hard difficulty it increases to 3 weapon/3 armor/1 scarab upgrade. This pattern continues up to impossible difficulty where enemy upgrades cap at 7/7/3. There's a hidden Impossible Plus mode, given as a game code for beating the game on Impossible difficulty which increases upgrades a final time to 9/9/4.

After this, all players on the team have opportunity to select one of 15 unique heroes. Only one of each hero may be selected each game. There is also an option to randomly select your hero. Players are awarded 2 starting bonus ore for going random as well as the opportunity to obtain a powerful (OP, even) exclusively randomly obtainable arbiter hero. All player selectable heroes have been enhanced in some way or another with EUDs to make them better than their original SCBW selves. There are six heroes only selectable through random hero select or inputting a code given for winning the game in hard mode+

Once players have selected their hero, they are granted 5 lives, 25 starting ore and have the opportunity to select units to accompany their hero through the subsequent mission. Similar to heroes, only one of each unit selection may be chosen per mission. Once units are selected for the mission, your hero and units are moved to the beginning of the mission. Make sure to get all your preparation (ore spending) done before selecting your units. All upgrades have been scaled down to a simplified system requiring single digit integer costs of ore only. Gas is reserved as mana for heroes.

Players have available in the lower section of the map an upgrade area which includes a Gateway with casting options for heroes as well as hero upgrades. Heroes upgrades available at the gateway include Mana Cap upgrades (3 ore each, 10 total), Mana Regeneration upgrades (6+6 ore each, 4 total), and Hero Tesla Regenerator upgrades (2+2 ore each, 5 total). Building a Data Disc (A) displays helpful information about your hero. The upgrade area also contains a Comsat Station as well as buildings for upgrading all the weapons (3+1 or 4+1 ore per upgrade, 10 total) and armors (2+1 ore per upgrade, 10 total) available. There are some new upgrades available, such as the ability to upgrade the damage of Psionic Storm. Hotkeying your gateway and comsat station are highly recommended. I usually hotkey my hero 1, gateway 2, and comsat 0, leaving room for units and upgrade buildings to be hotkeyed inbetween; do whatever works best for you. The lower section finally contains a banning area for troublesome players, an emergency civilian which grants you an extra unit selection on a particularly tough round, a single use level skip usable by the highest numbered player in game (P1 first, P2 if P1 isn't in game, etc) and various storage locations for game maintenance.

Gameplay follows traditional Impossible Scenarios style, with five missions with many pre-placed units as well as ongoing spawns on timers and building kill retaliation spawns. One feature that makes this map unique from many other impossible maps is randomization of spawns. Each pre-placed unit has a category which has 1-8 different possible units it could spawn as for the mission. Timed spawns and retaliation spawns also generally have 2-16 different random combinations which might spawn on any given cycle. The idea here was to give players a feel similar to playing a game of Diablo where each playthrough, while similar to previous ones, is somewhat unique. The final level is a boss level with four bosses you can challenge in whatever order you choose.

Players start with 25 ore. Each mission has several mineral chunks hidden around which when found by a hero will grant the team +2 ore. All players are awarded with +1 ore & +40 gas at 100 team kills, +2 ore & +40 gas at 200, +4/+40 at 400, +8/+40 at 800, and +16/+40 at 1600. Players are also awarded +10 ore at the end of every mission and +10 ore for killing the wandering Kakaru. There is limited ore available on the map, resulting in the requirement of heroes to select certain paths or builds. A more recent addition is that for every player missing from the game, with maximum bonuses at 2 players, players get additional starting ore and ore per level (applies retroactively if someone leaves later on).

Given the combination of range of difficulty levels, randomization of spawns and many unique heroes with a plethora of upgrade paths, no game is likely to feel exactly the same as another, the goal of course being great replay value.

Screenshots:



Gameplay Videos:





Updates:

• 05/06/22: Version 0.00 notes. Made initial changes to transfer map to new tileset. Changed mission spawning patterns.
  
• 05/08/22: Version 0.01 notes. Corrected mission 4 area where enemies attacked unit select area
  
• 05/08/22: Version 0.02 notes. Converted boss fight triggers to mission 5.
  
• 05/08/22: Version 0.03 notes. Added trigger to move players to mission for mission 5 (oops).
  
• 05/09/22: Version 0.04 notes. Changed name, removed AzSpace from title at Azurez' request. Changed Plibblisk hydra boss to Dragonlisk muta boss. Added updated terrain from Azurez. Added notification of difficulty level selected for all players. Increased Boss' HP & SP & DMG 50%.
  
• 06/16/22: Version 0.05 notes. Added victory screen. Fixed Mission 4&5 boundaries. Scrambled victory codes. Fixed invincible civilian in arena. Increased mission 2 difficulty rush spawns. Fixed name. Made Mature Chrysalis Zerg Carapace armor (increases with difficulty). Fixed border of unit selection area terrain. Fixed bunker hotkey. Changed Engineer's Protoss build hotkey P->V. Changed Dragonlisk to Hamsterlisk, same unit different name. Omnighost's hideout 0 resource cost (in case wanting to repair for whatever reason). Increased Mission 1 spawn pressure. Changed unit picks for boss level to match the original map. Added extra HP&SP for bosses (bosses now have between 30K and 50K combined HP&SP). Extra 5 starting ore per difficulty level. Extra 3 ore per level per difficulty level. Added black hero unit rush spawns. Fixed level skipper. Fixed Witch enemy units post-Confuse behavior. Added Overlord (detector) pre-placed units & added detection for Mature Chrysalis and increased HP to 1000.
  
• 06/18/22: Version 0.06 notes missing?
  
• 06/18/22: Version 0.07 notes. Fixed Mission 2 spawns.
  
• 06/20/22: Version 0.08 notes. Changed Irradiate hotkey I->R/A. Changed lurker, devourer & guardian to cost 0 ore, 40 gas for lurker and devourer, 120 for guardian. Fixed glitch with mission 4 spawning. Doubled length between mission 2 spawns.
  
• 08/26/22: Version 0.09 notes. Added music toggleable at Comsat Station (default off).
  
• 08/28/22: Version 0.10 notes. Fixed victory codes to display properly. Easy mode gives SP, HP and NRG regeneration codes, Hard+ unlocks hero codes and harder difficulty modes.
• 09/11/22: Version 0.11 notes. Found sneaky trigger resulting in victory codes not displaying properly. Should work this time
  
• 01/08/23: Version 0.12 notes. Removed UV hero code (due to folks breaking into map and obtaining it without truly earning it). Removed Code #'s from trigger comments. Made it so enemy UV heroes are not mind controllable. Fixed boss fight boundaries. Checked for leftover units after Mission 4, checked top border of Mission 4 for enemy units. Replaced Hallucination ability on Cyborg DT with Ensnare. Changed Cyborg DT energy regen to be higher (1.25x->2x). Changed Mech HP to 250, reduced collision box sides from 11 to 8. Increased Cyborg DT vision 7->9. Reshuffled Victory Codes. Made Victory Codes display through ore rather than text (in an attempt to obfuscate them from people opening the map). Fixed players being able to run hallucinations around different mission levels. Changed Sciencecruiser's Irradiate ability into Restore.
  
• 01/09/23: Version 0.13 notes. Fixed issue introduced in last patch with nukes being unusable.
  
• 01/18/23: Version 0.14 notes. Fixed Mission 4 issue with being able to skip past destroying enemy Barracks and Mature Crysalis. Fixed Mission 4 east side death + Mission 5 west side death.
  
• 01/19/23: Version 0.15 notes. Fixed Mission 5 west side (again).
  
• 01/21/23: Version 0.16 notes. Fixed Mission 5 west side free healing issue. Sloppy updates lately, I'm a little rusty, hoping I finally corrected the issues
  
• 01/25/23: Version 0.17 notes. Fixed bug where players could exit the final mission after beating it and exploit various game mechanics to obtain a victory code for a higher difficulty level than the actual one beaten.
  
• 09/11/23: Version 0.18 notes. Randomized boss spawn locations. Made cannons and other towers invincible on boss stage until boss is spawned. Made the holding area unbuildable. Added +1 scourge to Psycho's 40 ability. Modified the Shadowcraft substantially making him more arbiter-like with a set of energy abilities. Increased Tesla Regenerator cost 2+2->3+3. Swap Cannon and Dragoon construct cost 80<->70. Psycho starting ore +10. Psycho 120 skill duration 20s->30s. Psycho now gets 1 permanent Aerial Support with 120 ability instead of scourges. Guardian gas cost 120->80. Capped Elite Marines at 6, Dev Ones at 4, Hunter Killers at 4 and Elite Firebats at 2. This should allow for the niche circumstances I was worried about while still implementing a reasonable limit to avoid players abusing a glitch to get more than intended. Increased Dev One limit for Summoner +1. Buffed Dev One armor +1. Added battery explosion ability in 11x11 area for Shadowcraft every 45 seconds.
  
• 09/11/23: Version 0.19 notes. Fixed Shadowcraft 1 ore heal to include energy.
  
• 09/23/23: Version 0.20 notes. Reduced bosses' HP by 50%. Bound bosses spawning area to within the catwalks. Reduced Ultrarbiter boss' spawn rate by 50% from once every 2.5s to once every 3.75s. Provided temporary vision at boss spawn via creation of P7 scanner sweep. Increased Mindflayer's base energy regeneration rate by 1x the rate that normal units regenerate energy.
  
• 09/27/23: Version 0.21 notes. Capped Psycho's Air Support at 1. Reduced Psycho's 40 skill to 1 scourge. Added SP regen after 3s to Psycho's 40 skill. Increased Assassin's base NRG regeneration +0.5x normal spellcaster regen rate. Added passive observer spawn to Assassin every 4 casts of Decoy (max 1). Reduced Eng Gol construct cost from 100->90. Buffed Omnighost slightly by converting 4K SP to HP.
  
• 11/08/23: Version 1.00 notes. Fixed bosses being able to leave arena. Made boss' HP&SP based on difficulty selected: 1X, 2X... 5X. Made boss' HP&SP double in Gauntlet Mode. Bosses starting HP&SPs: Hamsterlisk: 8000HP, Omnighost: 5500/2000, Azchon: 7500/5000, Ultrarbiter: 5000/5000. Fixed issue with enmies attacking unit selections on Mission 4. Added mutalisk every third cast of 40 spell for Matriarch. Made Mech 120 spell spawn up to 2 goliaths after Support Drone (subsequent casts). Made Mech 40 give SCV every 2nd cast (max 2). Changed Mech's mana structure 10+15->0+20. Turned off alliance trigger at game end (since everyone tries to fight anyway, figured I'd let them). Made Witch 120 spell into Dark Ritual adding 10-20 gas to the team per cast, Dark Ritual levels up the more it is used giving more mana as it levels up. Removed Vision code (never intended for it to be used in serious gameplay and apparently folks used it rampantly, go figure). Added HP regen to Engineer's Combat Mode. Slightly nerfed Commando's 120 spell 20s->15s. Changed Psi Storm's upgrade cost 3+0->1+1. Increased Shadowcraft's base gas 0+20->40+20. Slightly nerfed Marshall's 120 Medfield Generator, made it only heal every 2 seconds instead of constantly, changed duration 15s->16s.
  
• 11/09/23: Version 1.01 notes. Fixed bug with boss' HP&SP progression. Fixed Engineer's 120 spell HP regen to work with all players instead of just P1. Updated Hero selection info to reflect recent changes to heroes. Reduced attack speed of Snipeshot (Special Ops 40 spell) unit to prevent double snipes.
  
• 11/10/23: Version 1.02 notes. Fixed bug with basic marine attack (seems I accidentally changed it to Mech's air attack).
  
• 12/04/23: Version 1.03 notes. Reduced Boss' HP&SP growth by difficulty by 50%. Increased Marshall's Medfield Generator healing rate every 2s->0.5s. Removed hydralisk spawns from Witch's 120, when ultralisk's are at cap (2), the spell now heals the ultralisks as well as performing the newly added Dark Ritual bonus gas for the team. Made the white P12 units in the unit selection area invincible prior to selection to hopefully rectify some AI oddities.

Download:

DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.03 HERE! now with music~!

Post has been edited 17 time(s), last time on Dec 28 2023, 8:03 am by Ultraviolet.

Made several updates recently, admittedly been a little sloppy requiring several versions to get some issues corrected. I guess that's what I get for taking a break and getting busy with RL

• 01/08/23: Version 0.12 notes. Removed UV hero code (due to folks breaking into map and obtaining it without truly earning it). Removed Code #'s from trigger comments. Made it so enemy UV heroes are not mind controllable. Fixed boss fight boundaries. Checked for leftover units after Mission 4, checked top border of Mission 4 for enemy units. Replaced Hallucination ability on Cyborg DT with Ensnare. Changed Cyborg DT energy regen to be higher (1.25x->2x). Changed Mech HP to 250, reduced collision box sides from 11 to 8. Increased Cyborg DT vision 7->9. Reshuffled Victory Codes. Made Victory Codes display through ore rather than text (in an attempt to obfuscate them from people opening the map). Fixed players being able to run hallucinations around different mission levels. Changed Sciencecruiser's Irradiate ability into Restore.
  
• 01/09/23: Version 0.13 notes. Fixed issue introduced in last patch with nukes being unusable.
  
• 01/18/23: Version 0.14 notes. Fixed Mission 4 issue with being able to skip past destroying enemy Barracks and Mature Crysalis. Fixed Mission 4 east side death + Mission 5 west side death.
  
• 01/19/23: Version 0.15 notes. Fixed Mission 5 west side (again).
  
• 01/21/23: Version 0.16 notes. Fixed Mission 5 west side free healing issue. Sloppy updates lately, I'm a little rusty, hoping I finally corrected the issues

orz need code can pass .
too hard! for me

Yeah this one is really tough.. you need a good team of experienced players working together to beat it. The first map is a little more forgiving, although neither are easy. They are "Impossible" maps after all

the engineer is broken(v0.17)
buildings don't produce units

It's not. You most likely have Gift Mode toggled on. Use the Info button (A) at the Spell Panel to toggle gift mode on or off. When gift mode is on, only allies can turn the buildings into units, when gift mode is off, only the engineer can turn them into units. I had to implement that system to prevent the engineer from automatically converting all buildings since part of his role is to be able to give units to other players.

what heroes can an engineer craft? and how many units of one kind are required for the hero, except marine.
why is the SP regen code from version 0.11 not working in version 0.17?

Marine is the only one.


I learned that people were using cheat engine to unfairly gain access to codes, so I had to make some modifications to the code system to try to obfuscate them from any cheaters. I imagine that you acquired the code authentically, so I'll go ahead and send you the new SP regen code in a private message.

How even would go about using cheat engine for that? I know you can look for values you know to find addresses and then change values at addresses you found. But what do you do if neither know the code nor the address?

I never saw it personally and don't remember perfectly, but a player in our Battle.net group showed me how it was done at one point. I believe they were simply reading the data from the comments section and/or display text triggers since for each code I had a comment like "CODE MARSHALL 1234" or something along those lines. I ended up removing the codes from the comments and display text and doing some basic math and a couple other weird tricks so the code numbers never are readable in a straightforward format. We tested again after I implemented the changes, and the tester wasn't able to locate the codes anymore. If someone managed to break into the map, they could still easily enough extrapolate the codes, but I believe EE2 breaks it pretty well from being unlocked and as far as I know, no one has managed to obtain the codes unfairly since.

first of all i cannot express enough how great this map is. the best part is heroes with unique abilities which require some new approaches. i liked building strategies and doing micro with unusual, fresh combinations of units and skills which are never seen in other impossible maps. hell maybe it is not restricted to imposs, and i don't think i've seen anything like this before. i love this game so much that i've cleared the hardest mode+gauntlet with almost every hero. thanks so much for your exceptional work.

it is kinda difficult to determine in general if a method is a valid strat or cheese. for example you can exceed the limit of elite marines/hunter killers with a shuttle even though it takes forever. or you can bomb under a hallucination of bomber hero. these methods at least require you to come up with the idea and restrict you to specific unit pick. (engineer can collect unlimited numbers elite marines with bunkers which i'd not consider the most effective personally. that's a different story)

however some abilities just depends on the game speed, which sounds ridiculous to me; if you make a room in bnet at a faster setting(#x1 or #x2), it allows you to hit enemies more times with snipe(special ops) or fire breath(phoenix).
in #x1 everything becomes 1.17 times faster but snipe isn't removed fast like others, which lets you attack twice. things are 1.45 times faster in #x2, but the number of hits is the same as #x1 fortunately. meanwhile it's even possible to hit more than twice in #x3 or higher, but you cannot play at this speed in multiplayer mode.
the same thing happens for fire breath, which allows firebats to walk to a distant enemy and destroy it. the distance depends on the game speed.

if you have a plan to standardize the duration, i think it'd be better to buff the duration in fastest(without #x) and make it equivalent to #x1 or #x2. but that's jut my thought.

Hey, thanks so much for playing and for giving your kind and thoughtful feedback. These are the kind of comments that inspire me to keep working on these maps. It brings me a lot of joy to know that you are out there enjoying my creation so much


The strategies you refer to lie somewhere in between valid and cheese, leaning towards cheese. The core of the issue is that they're based off quirks in SC:BW which are difficult to circumvent as a mapper. The shuttle/bunker bug is due to SC:BW not detecting units contained in those units/structures in conditions. I could detect if a player owns more than X quantity of Elite Marines or Hunter Killers and simply remove the units, but I haven't done so in an attempt to allow for certain niche circumstances, like a player using their civ to buy two sets of Elite Marine packs or Hunter Killer packs. Even still, I could set a maximum limit that accounted for that, but the bug wouldn't be fixed entirely, it would just prevent people from going totally nuts with it. The hallucination bug is also one where actions in SC:BW aren't specific enough for me to specifically center a location only on real units and conditions can't detect hallucinations so it puts me in a bind. Ultimately, I ended up resigning to the fact that if players have played the game enough to think of such things to gain a small advantage, so be it.


This is interesting, and I was admittedly not aware of it prior to you bringing it to my attention. That being said, generally from what I've seen, abilities like Special Ops' Snipe and Phoenix's Fire Breath are underutilized. So if increasing the game speed makes them more useful, that doesn't really bother me. I'm not sure how I could even change that without affecting the effect in the regular game speed as well.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 13 2023, 2:40 am by Ultraviolet.

Updated map to version 0.19. See OP for update notes.

Several updates in the last couple months, final forwarded versions to indicate it's a full release. On version 1.02 now, see OP for update notes.

i'm glad to see you keep working on this. thanks for the update!

my general impression is that these changes are mostly against the abilities which make some of non-cloaked heroes valuable(including psi storm). most of the changes seem reasonable but my concern is based on the fact that cloaked heroes have already been more preferred. perhaps i need to play more games to understand the changes so that i can say more about them. but marshall seems to be lethally nerfed. as marshall only has emp and medfield to rely on, there are much less tactical options for the hero after nerf; in imp+ gauntlet you cannot tank against 2 enemy heroes, and barely tank 1 psycho, ranger(guardian), or etc. in the previous version, i never thought marshall was even close to op compared to other heroes. also, the skill was not trivial to use and had to be treated carefully. (the generator was very vulnerable to splash dmg, and there were still risky situations where you aggro'd a huge number of enemy heroes.)




in imp+ gauntlet, damage a nuke deals to azchon & ultrarbiter exceeds 65535 that is the max value of a single hit. the actual dmg is calculated like; for azchon, (75000+50000)*2/3 % 65536 = about 18000 and for ultrarbiter, (50000+50000)*2/3 % 65536 = about 1000. however the '50% splash' completely deals the damage without overflow. so if you deliberately miss the target by 128-192px, it can deal 42000 and 33000 dmg for the bosses respectively (much greater than a perfect shot). it may be pretty unintuitive that missing a shot deals more.

i think the previous verion was nicely beatable with various combinations of heroes, and wouldn't mind ramping up the difficulty a bit from that. but the bosses seem to be buffed too much. after playing a few games, i feel that diversity of hero choice would be very limited due to the boss battle (at least in imp+ gauntlet)

could you make the boss' hp&sp displayed somewhere in game? cause 5 digit hp isn't shown in the panel. off the top of my head, the rank field(under the unit name) would be a good space for it. if tech allows, it'd be nice to see the current hp too.

I'm glad to see you are still playing You're very welcome.

It's funny when I realize the discrepancies between my artistic dream and what players actually accomplish. Whenever I hear complaints about Impossible+ or Gauntlet mode being imbalanced, especially when they're combined, my first reaction is, "Wtf? I never intended for those modes to be beatable or even fun." I'm personally not that great at the game and the highest version I've even tried to play is Insane mode. We did not win Most of my testers are better than me, but they still aren't consistently playing Impossible+ or Gauntlet mode. What this amounts to is that most of the balancing decisions for the map are made based on performance in normal-insane mode. Anything beyond that I'm really not that aware of other than that I intended for those modes to be so hard that they are practically unbeatable. With your feedback, it sounds like I still haven't accomplished that, but it's harder at least

For the Marshall changes, from my understanding, he was over-performing on the lower difficulties which is why I reduced the frequency of his Medfield Generator ability. I don't play much anymore, so most of the feedback I get is from players in our Battle.net group chat for the maps (message me on app at Ultraviolet#11426 for an invite). I generally try to make contentious decisions debatable in the Ideas & Suggestions group to come up with a good decision that the majority agree with. It makes sense the ability wouldn't be nearly as effective on Impossible+ mode as the enemy damages get very high which also would explain why the cloaking heroes are more popular in your experience. Many playing on the lower difficulties prefer the tanking heroes or DPS heroes, including Marshall. I'm not promising anything, but I'll have to think on that one since the situation appears a bit more nuanced than I realized.

The damage looping thing for nukes in Impossible+ & Gauntlet mode and how splash damage can do more damage than direct hits in some circumstances is super interesting. I didn't anticipate or intend for that to happen at all, but I see why it's happening. I'm impressed with your analysis, really going the extra mile, thank you That being said, I'm actually rather pleased with the damage reduction as a side effect of the recent HP/SP changes because I have been intentionally trying to reduce the effectiveness of nuking during the boss fight (hence the recent change where bosses no longer spawn at their lair but instead spawn randomly somewhere within the arena). I even considered removing all nuke silos for the boss fight, but opted not to, hoping the randomized spawn locations would help sufficiently reduce nuking's effectiveness. The quirk you discovered with the missed shots just inadvertently adds to the depth of the gameplay in my opinion. I'm always happy to see smart players like yourself coming up with ways to tweak SC's limitations and quirky behaviors & glitches in their favor (like the much loved perma-cloaked Ranger via the arbiter unburrow glitch). Your discovery makes me tempted to increase the boss' SP even further to make it so any nuke wouldn't be damaging in Imp+ mode, but.. I probably won't actually do that heh. Might be a bit too much considering you guys actually play that mode regularly. I'd like to add more modes to make it even harder, but it gets tricky because the map can't handle much more spawning for the enemy comp without issues arising with guard slots. I digress, but the point remains that I always intended for the map's hardest modes to be practically unbeatable.

Your suggestion to list the boss' HP&SP somewhere on the unit, probably in the rank slot like you said, is a good one. I'll look into adding that for a future release. At the moment, in the free time I have, I'm mostly working on cranking out UV3 which Azurez created terrain and unit placements for on desert tileset with some suggestions for level placements and spawn rushing patterns. I'm excited to get an early version out soon (hoping within the next few weeks) that everyone can test. This version we decided to leave out the boss levels all together and instead just have six fully fledged levels, although we may add mini bosses on different levels later on. Stay tuned.

ohh is uv3 being made? can't wait to play it

i see your purpose behind these extra difficulty modes. you said they were not even intended to be beatable or fun. but if you ask me, whether intended or not, the challenge ends up having its own charm in that you really need to build elaborate strats with unique abilities and proper unit choices. it especially requires careful aggro management against enemy heroes that behave differently to normal units, offering unique and deep gameplay that is very rare among other impossible maps. for example, you need to utilize stuffs including what are not used very often such as shuttle to make enemy heroes stop following, queen's parasite to lure 1-2 enemy heroes, and so on. (not to mention traditional key skills like dark swarm and recall) on the difficulty, being close together is not always the best strategy since you cannot always handle a number of enemy heroes aggro'd by other players around you and vice versa. this difficulty has enabled diverse gameplay to emerge even more in my opinion.

that said, the challenge presented by the boss fights is vastly different and it seems rather close to your intention. it's practically impossible to defeat imp+ gauntlet bosses in usual ways, and actually this is somewhat true not only for the current version but also for the older versions. there are bosses like azchon and omnighost whose attacks are not completely avoidable (for azchon's frequent teleportation and omnighost's gravity trap) and you are basically dead if you get hit 1-2 times by them. especially for azchon's ground attack dealing 361 damage, it was considered impossible to defeat the boss without air heroes until some crazy strats were developed;


(for this method other players should wait in the holding area, otherwise boss' teleportation becomes random with probability 1/n where n is the number of players in the stage)
later on, strats for various heroes to beat azchon were made too. and not all of them didn't rely on a nuke.

ultimately it was possible in 0.21 to beat every boss without a nuke, given that all of the 6 players were good enough (by a miracle). not saying it was easy or anything, but the difficulty gap between boss and other stages was relatively more reasonable in 0.21 imo. on the contrary, there's no stable way for most of hero combinations to stay alive while dealing the massive amount of hp/sp in the current version. this forces even more dependence on nukes as a result; the statis field trick in the video is now done by engineer, but with 2 nukes aiming at 50% splash as i explained in the previous post. while i respect your decision above all else, i wonder how things would turn out if the boss' hp/sp were set to the middle of the two versions. perhaps you could consider lowering the rate to 1x, 1.5x, ..., 3x for instance. personally i'd like to see azchon beatable with a single nuke, cause the way to fight that boss with ground heroes is very limited and waiting for 2 nukes is kinda dull. i guess ultrarbiter should not be killed easily by 1 nuke even before any of mirror spawn happens. (if you decide to lower the rate or hp itself, you could add more sp in compensation so the nuke dmg would overflow as it is now. but sp cannot exceed 65535 as far as i know)

regarding the feedback in the previous post, i just realized the rank slot is replaced with other states like detector or blind lol. so it might just not be feasible. i hope there's a good compromise for marshall's medfield. while i get it may be too powerful on lower difficulties, it seems inferior to summoner's healing swarm for various reasons, and the 2s-long period isn't short enough to cover its drawback or be helpful in general.

while i am at it, here's one more thing to note. if an enemy is attacked by something under cloaking field by a hero(shadowcraft and ultraviolet, including shadowcraft's attack itself), all the nearby enemy heroes are aggro'd toward an arbiter owned by the team regardless of distance. this behavior seems to originate from how a normal arbiter attracts enemy heroes when a unit covered by the cloaking field attacks them, but it just doesn't work properly for hero's case. it usually gives a lot of trouble to another player having an arbiter, though shadowcraft can cope with the attracted enemies by 40 spell, ensnare, etc before a bad thing happens. also it seems that p7's arbiter in unit selection area is not an exception. you could see enemies that are hit by shadowcraft keep moving direct to the unreachable arbiter. perhaps it's worth trying to make p7's arbiter invincible.

Damn dude. That is a sick strategy, love seeing the ingenuity and mastery of game mechanics you displayed there.


Glad to see you're having fun with it regardless of my original intentions. I intended to make the map unbeatable, but somehow it's even more satisfying to see folks putting in the effort to solve the supposedly impossible modes.


This is also nice to hear. Although I've always found it a bit unfortunate that air heroes seem to trump out ground heroes. I like to think the ground heroes' spells keep it somewhat balanced, but I know it's impossible to perfectly balance across all the modes.


You've made a convincing argument, the HP&SP increase by difficulty system was kind of a prototype anyway, I like your idea of reducing the severity of it while keeping the same idea in mind. I've added that to my update notes for next version.


Oh I guess that solution is no good then since all the bosses are detectors. That sucks, but oh well I suppose. In some ways I like that the boss HP&SP is invisible after normal mode. Feels like it adds to the difficulty a bit.


Ohhh, so that explains that behavior. Thanks for breaking down how that works, I had observed weird behavior around the cloaking heroes, but didn't understand why it was happening the way it was. The P7 arbiters in the corner are already pre-placed as invincible.. The only thing I could do is make them spawn with the permanently cloaked flag checked as well so they are always cloaked, but not sure if that would fix the issue. Guess I could try, but I'm kind of skeptical it will change anything.

really nice to hear the bosses will be nerfed!


air heroes are good for azchon battle just because he cannot attack air directly despite the archon form. i don't think either ground/air hero is better than the other in general. i also think different abilities and spells give heroes different roles, which make up for the balance problem as you mentioned.


alternatively, hp/sp can be displayed under the line 'boss has awakened' or in mission objectives. not showing hp/sp is fine though.


oh what i exactly meant by p7 arbiter was actually p12 arbiter that is given by p7, and not invincible except in stage 4. the other p7 arbiters would explain why the enemies move to the north when hit, which certainly happens in stage 1 where there's no p12 arbiter. i guess making the p12 arbiter invincible would result in the same behavior as in stage 1, which is still better than the behavior of moving away to the south and attempting to escape the stage (they eventually teleport to the center of the stage).

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 29 2023, 8:31 am by responsibIeman.

Version 1.03 released. Primary update is to reduce the growth rate of HP&SP for bosses across all difficulty levels. A few other minor changes were made as well. See OP for notes.