Everyone fighting the Duran hero as he begins attacking their temples and after hes defeated peace can reign over the two temples of Desert Strike.

Well something like that, I offered this idea before. I mean the computer should basically spawn random units that continuely attack and are easily defeated and when the Xel'Naga temple falls you have to kill Duran who has awesome spells then kills the units and can spawn men to attack other temples.

Wouldn't a smaller file size and faster n00b DL be worth it?? Seriously, it could help simplify future bug-free changes and improvements...

Removing those triggers is only like to save 1-2k of size, at the most. It's really not much.

As for simplifying future changes and improvements; I don't believe I've had any bugs that have specifically been a result of the 2x mineral mode features, not since 2.00 anyway.

can u remove the 'centre screen on' trigger? i cant even move my mouse or is there a way to actually move ur mouse when there is a center screen trigger?

Unless you're playing in single player mode (which won't be likely in this map), moving mouse normally doesn't have any problem at all.

Yes, the "can't move mouse" problem will only occur when you play the map in single player. That's actually how I do 99% of my testing for this map, but I found that running it in windowed mode using Chaoslauncher stops the mouse-trapping behaviour so that it's still possible to select and order the configuration scout. For development purposes being able to run SC in a window while I look at the triggers in the map editor is obviously extremely useful too.

OK, coulda sworn you said something in the past about it taking up a lot of triggers.

It does take up a lot of triggers, but triggers aren't very big. And I use tinymap2 to compress the raw map size anyway, so the impact of deleting individual triggers won't be very much on the final map size.

When it comes to removing triggers, I think the main benefit is reducing computational workload, particularly for slower computers, more-so than the slightly reduced download size.

thanks a lot..

Ok, these are the changes I've got so far for the next version, 2.47.

• Fix base-hopping exploit from Hellfire
  
• Insta-spawn powerup -$250 to $1750 to use, no longer requires 4 gas mines to use (seemed an irrelevant check since hardly anyone ever uses it early anyway).
  
• Changed bonus minerals for imbalanced teams, for an imbalance of 1 (2v1 or 3v2) the bonus remains 15% for 0-4 gas mines, but is now 20% for 5 mines and 25% for 6 mines. For an imbalance of 2 (3v1), the bonus remains 30% for 0-4 mines but is now 40% for 5 mines and 50% for 6 mines. The message to notify players continues to say just 15% / 30% bonus though, I don't want to clutter it up further (unless someone can suggest a succinct way of communicating the above numbers).
  
• Mothership changes as noted above: kills max of 6 units when dying instead of 7, sets friendly shields in death radius to 100%, no longer sets enemy shields in death radius to 0%.
  
• Reaver now spawns with 1.5 immortals instead of 2 zealots. The fenix zealots can still be spawned by the Warp Prism (stats unchanged)
  
• Immortals -100 shields, +105 hp: 225 hp now, 15 dmg, 5 armor, $250 for 1.66
  
• Archon +1 armor to 19
  
• Fenix Dragoon +1 dmg to 17, regular Dragoon remains 20
  
• Scout -30 shields, +20 hp
  
• Interceptor -1 dmg to 10, +5 hp/shields to 20/20 and +1 armor to 1
  
• Carrier: -$60 interceptor upgrade to $360, reverse 2.46 changes: +30 hp and interceptor regen time made a littler faster (but not all the way up to 2.45 speed).
  
• Void Ray +1 armor to 2, initial shield replenish pulse up to 8 instead of 12, max build of 5 instead of 6 but max on field remains 9.
  
• Marine range upgrade can no longer be researched: War Pigs will automatically use it however
  
• Stim +$120 to $345
  
• War Pigs +1 dmg to 13 (since they don't use stim)
  
• Goliath +1 grnd dmg to 14, +5 hp to 145
  
• Overlord -1 armor to 5
  
• Broodling +10 hp, spawns 2.5 per creep colony, +$8 to $64 ($73 inc Drone).
  

The changes to imbalanced team mineral rate is where it's needed most: during the special war. This change may make this battle a lot more tenable than it is now.

Biggest balance changes is obviously the nerf to interceptors. Still get lots of people talking about "noob carrier mass" and I think it is perhaps a little too powerful. So dropping the damage here should help, while winding back some of the previous changes. Move from shields to HP for scout is mainly to protect it more against EMP which science vessals will usually dump on corsairs and therefore get the scouts as well. Immortals will hopefully be a bit more viable now, and since so many people seem to be reaver-happy we'll see them on the field a lot more by default. I added the hero zealots in there to help protect the reavers, but now that I spawn reavers and immortals separate from the rest of the units they're the obvious choice to put here, especially as their speed matches up a lot better. Archon armor really only affects those units that do marginal damage to it right now, which is really guardians, void rays and banshees. Guardians now do 22 damage so this'll take their effective damage down to 3 once the shields have been punched through. Void Ray armor change will make it much stronger vs marines and hydralisks, as it had become mostly a unit to use vs other protoss. Balancing this extra armor is the pre-regen pulse to 8 shields instead of 12 so marines etc will be able to punch through a little easier (in earlier synthetic tests, tweaking this number did make a measurable difference to VR strength) and capping spawn back to 5, which is partly to help out noobs who build 6 void rays against an opponent that can easily wipe them out, effectively throwing their money away.

Changes made to further de-emphasize marines, as Stim really makes a huge difference in their strength. Pushing the price up to this level more fairly reflects it's worth (especially when coupled with medics) and removing the range upgrade will weaken marines a bit further too, while giving more benefit to building war pigs who never use stim. I'm considering changing goliaths to 130 hp with 4 armor instead of 145/3 armor like they are now as that would protect them more vs zerlings, zealots and other lower-damage units which I think they have some trouble with that the moment.

Overlord change is because a lot of zerg players tend to get 2-4 of them and they fly around clogging the place up a lot, while protoss and most terrans tend to only get 1-2 of their detectors. Also corsairs do 7 damage and often get stuck at the edge of the map trying to kill an overlord, and this'll help them do the job much quicker. Broodling change is to try and make these a bit more attractive to build as I never really see them built at all - they have 5 armor so add a bit of backbone to the zerg's early army which is often lings and lurkers - with 70 hp it will take zealots 6 slices to kill them fully compared to 3 for a zergling. Spawn size is increased by 25% while price has only gone up 12.3%.

I'm considering adding a sort of 'fade' ability to Reapers (doesn't really match anything in SC2), which is effectively giving them only a tiny bit of energy that is regularly reset so they can cloak for 1/2 a second or so. The AI uses cloak when it's under attack, so for example when a zealot goes up to attack one of them they'll temporarily cloak, and the zealot will pick a new target. Could be interesting?

Actually I might drop the immortals that spawn with Reavers down to 1 or 1.25, as they are a lot more effective units than zealots in the mid-late game, so having 1.5 immortals might be a bit OP for this building at $650. Let me know what you think.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Dec 25 2011, 10:43 pm by Lanthanide.

Yea probably 1 immortal is gonna be better. And it's science vessEl, not vessAl.

Good to see Protoss gets a boost for their ground units, and Terran Goliath's get a boost too. They needed the ground attack anyways. The Fade ability for Reapers sounds like a great idea too. Try it! For Immortals/Reavers, I think 1.25 Immortal per Reaver is fine. If not, you can change it later on. Are you going to add Vultures in?

No plan to add vultures back at this stage, I simply can't see a real use for them. The firebat has really only been added back in with greater strength etc because it does splash damage under dark swarm. Vultures don't really have anything offer except speed and IMO that's either useless in most cases (rush out the front and die quickly) or overpowered (rush out the front and delay the enemy army while the rest of your army catches up).

When we resume talk of Vultures, 3FFA comes.

Ideas (Not necessarily balanced just creative(sorta) :

-Vultures spawn with a special

◊ Nuke(Before confusion etc. change) where the units were destroyed give an army of 40 vultures and 30 wraiths in their place instead of the mind control that currently happens.

◊MC (sorry, but the other name will never catch on) give 10 vultures to compensate for destroyed units. Spawning at the back of the opponent's temple.

◊Infestation no idea that wouldn't just be a gimmick etc.

-A building giving Hellions/Flame (vulture/firebat)

-Secretly giving it to the protoss shuttle.

-Giving it to replace valkyries. Valkyries become useless in-game anyways and it makes the armory be primarily an anti-ground building and the star port the main anti-air. (My favorite idea, makes it so that some players go bio-> mech air some go pure mech air)

-Giving vulture to the turret

Unrelated to vulture(IT IS POSSIBLE?)

Medivac-Love the idea.

Thor-Meh. Don't care for it honestly.

Mutalisk pure- Who wins in pure spire vs pure greater spire? Does it change with more/less units? I've always gone muta/ling as my main combo of units in ZvZ because cracklings/speedlings will race past any mass muta army of opponent or make them stack causing my army of mutas to be more effective(splash) or will own hydras followed by mutas shortly after. Koreans do it right.(Referencing low money tournaments by Koreans ex: Jaedong zvz) Rarely went for any mass of guardian/devourer.

My goal for terran is for them to become a race where going for a mech air/tank route is just as effective as going for a more bio centered route. I hope you can achieve that goal instead of trying to shift it towards one or the other.

-Just my 2 candy canes.

ZvZ really is a race to muta match-up. They're small sized air units, so they are pretty effective against hydras and other anti-air units that use explosive damage. Although I've found devourers to be rather effective against large groups of air units, with back up, anyway. Hydras would make a good back-up unit for muta/devourer, I'd imagine, since they're not affected by pesky acid spores.

Naturally I find the best strategies the ones that make liberal use of spells. P seem to have the easiest time with this, since most of their spells are explicitly for shutting down enemies (maelstrom, stasis, d-web). Coupled with reavers (colossus) and storm/archon, it's quite a force to be reckoned with, Especially PvZ. It can really shut down opponents who pile on units. The only exception is battle cruisers, which I have yet to find an effective strategy against. Carriers, perhaps. I did make use of dragoons in one match-up, but it was end-game, and all it did was drain resources needed for specials.

I'm quite pleased to see the handicap increase. I nearly won a few 1v3s, until specials came around, and my mineral income simply couldn't last. It's rather disadvantageous to have your teammates leave at the beginning if they fail to destroy the stasis chamber first or whatever (god people are dumb).

I have an idea to un-clutter your message system. I'll work on it.

Good feedback, thanks. I don't really like the protoss over-reliance on Maelstrom but I just can't see what else to do with it at the moment. Once I implement the EUD upgrade system though I'll be making it so DAs start with Feedback only and you'll have to research maelstrom, which should at least make it fairer.

And yes, it seems that protoss have the hardest time countering BC's now. The old (old! <2.00) strategy was DAs because they'd MC all the BC's and you'd win that way. But things have changed a lot since then, particularly there's a wider range of targets that DAs will use MC against and 50% of BC's spawn as raynor hero's which the DAs will never MC. Big balls of BC's, particularly with the heroes thrown in, simply have such a high DPS and range that protoss air tends to just melt under it - zerg can use acid spores and that evens it out a lot more. Protoss are pretty much forced to use carriers because the interceptors act as a decoys/hp sinks for the BCs and it lets ground units get closer as well, and carriers have about the same range as BCs so they actually have a chance of taking them on.

I'm toying with giving dragoons an extra 10 hp, they just don't seem to work very well in the mid to late game, just die way too fast.

Also I will change goliaths to 130 hp 4 armor, as this protects the more vs small units like lings and zealots, but comparatively weakens them vs stronger units, in particular guardians. I recently savagely reduced the guardians down to 22 hp, so dropping goliath HP while raising armor by 1 point will weaken the goliath back down again when it goes up against a guardian.

Zerg air is already weak...
Protoss Storm = pretty much kills mutalisks
raise the life on mutalisks and lower the armor on it please.

Looks like I didn't mention zerg air at all.

I had a look at it after 3FFA suggested I do a pure spire vs greater spire test. Spires are far superior. In a real game of course there would be lots of ground units like hydralisks etc, but it essentially becomes devourers vs mutalisks and scourge, and the muta + scourge simply have too much DPS compared to the devourers.

So I came up with these potential changes:

• Spire +$30
  
• Greater spire -$40
  
• 0.875 devourer per GS instead of 0.75
  
• 1.20 scourge per spire instead of 1.33
  

I hadn't considered making any changes to mutalisk aside from price increase. My intention for zerg air has always been that 2/3 devourer 1/3 mutalisk should be the ideal combination, for the acid spores + muta splash damage.

Just did some synthetic experiments with $12,500 spent on protoss air vs zerg. Initially 10 g.spires + 21 spires vs 19 stargates, and the protoss wiped the floor. Added 10 hp to mutas and 20 to devourers and protoss still wiped the floor. Replaced 7 of the spires with 8 hydra dens (with upgrades) and the zerg wiped the floor (due to acid). Gave the protoss dweb and they went back to wiping the floor because the hydras couldn't hit.

Now the interesting thing in doing this is that it really shows the difference between these races. I very seldom see any protoss players actually getting 19 stargates, whereas zerg getting 30 spires of various types is quite common. I think the reason for this is that protoss ground units that you use for early to mid game are more expensive and less effective than zerg ones, and zerg has an easier transition to air (1-2 spires are useful, but 1-2 stargates aren't). So comparing $ for $ isn't really a fair matchup because usually zerg will spend significantly more on air than the other races will. So if you just look it at as a pure unit to unit comparison, yes mutalisks and devourers don't really cut it vs the other races' air but that's not how it usually works in-game.

Anyway, considering doing +10 hp to devourer, +5 hp mutalisk, +1 dmg to guardian and +13 dmg to scourge (up to 99) along with the price/spawn changes above.

Did some test with terran, 23 wraiths: same story. Adding in 8 hydra dens completely flipped it, but otherwise the terran walked over the zerg.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Dec 26 2011, 10:03 pm by Lanthanide.

Suggestion to resolve stuck SCVs, Drones, Probes:

Why not have everyone start out with a Dropship/Shuttle/Overloard upgrade?

They would all have the hero unit names of course. Also I think it's really only probes that get stuck. New probes cost $10 each. If you're careful you won't get probes stuck - minor props to you!