While I know that is a problem, I have personally never actually seen it happen in-game. I think the armor/hp values of all of the buildings are at the right levels at the moment. They can melt away very quickly when you get a good assault / special off, and reducing them much further would make the game more sort of random.

Well, if you end up making a new version, my suggestion is that you should make the default mineral rate Double, not Regular. So if someone doesn't pick by accident, they won't have to remake the game.

I increasingly feel that Terran is too weak when facing Protoss, even though P doesn't use DJ.

Terran has no method to withstand this group:mass carriers and dragoons (and few corsairs,reavers,archons,HT).
I think the primary reason is that mass carriers are too powerfull.
Terran doesn't have any units to deal with carriers effectively.
valkyrie: almost can't attack at that time,
wraith: restrained by dragoons,archon and HT.
goliath: restrained by corsairs,dragoons, and so silly when attack carrier, they will desregard enemy's ground fire to move forward.
BC: usually attack interceptors, do few damage to carrier.

Considering in standard game BC's armor is 6 and interceptor's damage is 9, and you can manually controll BC to attack carrier substance.
I think it needs some changes for BC VS Carrier in this map:
such as incease BC's armor or reduce replenish speed of interceptor or both.

Zhuinden - sure, makes sense. I originally made it thinking that single rate is what people would mostly use, but basically it is hardly ever played that way. I put *so* much effort into getting the 2x mode working right too, when really I could've just made that the default and everyone would be happy.

For T vs P, probably I could go another +1 damage on wraiths. Valkyrie problem is unfixable. Interceptors in my map actually oscillate between being invincible and being vulnerable, and have quite low HP. I found this to work best, because when they are invincible enemies will completely ignore them, and so carriers end up being very strong, but the alternative is that when they're vulnerable the AI spends most of it's time attacking the interceptors and not the carrier bodies, and because of the long range of the carriers they simply move into range of the interceptors and attack them, while slowly being killed by the other interceptors (and units) on the battle field. By making interceptors alternate between invincible and vulnerable, it forces units to advance towards the carriers, while still being able to pick the interceptors off once in a while (and they're pretty weak so die quickly).

I think the ultimate problem with carriers is simply massing them, and the ultimate solution to massing is putting a limit on them as I've done with other overpowered spammy units like roaches, ghosts and queens. Probably a limit of 6, with a slight damage increase on the interceptors so they're more powerful in low numbers would be the right balance. I could knock the interceptor respawn rate down a tad too, but it is already fairly slow. I'm loathe to take away the +4 capacity upgrade though, because with only 4 interceptors they really aren't utilised by the AI very well at all. Ideally they would be 3 interceptors +3 from the upgrade, but I can't change that . I'd probably bring the carrier price down to $750-800 or so to help compensate for these changes.

Of course limiting the protoss air units like that is kinda unfair compared to the other races which have no such limits, but then again corsairs and scouts are fairly strong as they are anyway.

are defilers casting swarm in your last ver?

There's no reason that they shouldn't, apart from the usual AI intransigence of using spells. Dark Swarm does have quite a high energy cost though as it is very powerful, and defilers seem to be quite plague-happy. So if you research plague then you may seldom see dark swarms being cast as a result.

I asked this question, because 1 week ago I played DS fast (as I remember - v2.05) - and defilers there didnt cast swarm (even if i didnt do plague upgrade).

I haven't deliberately changed anything to prevent them from using swarm.

Lanthanide,

I found a reproducible bug in DS 2.06 and didn't want to post it on the open forum... Check your PM

Right, I can see how/why the bug happens. Not entirely sure if it's exploitable - your PM indicates it is, but in my brief reproduction test it appeared benign, but I can imagine that it could be exploitable.

Because it deals with building the building in a specific location, there is an easy fix that will prevent that location from being build-able, which will remove the bug. It's a result of a complex trigger system I put in to deal with a very minor corner case that most people probably won't run into, but when you do it is very frustrating. So there's a slight potential to crop up in other cases, although the more I think about it the more it seems to only be this specific special case that would cause the problem.

I'd like some general input here if possible - does anyone ever play 1x speed mode? There's quite a bit of complexity in the triggers just to accommodate having the 1x and 2x speed modes, but if no one ever players 1x then I might as well ditch it. It was on of the very early aims of this map, to have 1x and 2x mode, because I got sick of the endless mods of DS maps into Half cost (even a few quarter cost) modes where you'd have to download an entire new map just for something that could be easily handled in the map itself.

The first time I triggered the bug it actually hit the enemy team so it is exploitable, haven't really messed with the bug too much as the second attempt to reproduce fizzled and wasted all my money lol. Third attempt tonight was the same comedy of fail. Doing it once also bugs the race's special ability making it unusable for the remainder of the game.

Right, so new version is out, 2.08. http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/

2.07 was skipped because it was almost exactly the same as 2.08, except I had a typo and accidentally made the observatory cost $4120, instead of $410 like I wanted (used to be $420). That, and the leaderboard got screwed up (see map making assistance forum).

There were quite a lot of changes, and a surprising number of bug fixes:

• Fixed Rivalz potential special exploit
  
• Found and fixed bugs when spawning BCs, Wraiths, Immortals and Reapers - sometimes these would spawn more, or fewer, units than you should have compared to the # of buildings you had.
  
• Fixed map-max problem when nuking, where apparently a lot of the time mines wouldn't be created at the enemy spawn spot. I will refine this a bit further in the next version, 2.10.
  
• Reavers and carriers now initially spawn empty, which should alleviate map-max on spawning a little. Reavers now have maximum capacity of 5 instead of 10, which was a waste because they automatically regen scarabs anyway.
  
• -$10 void ray
  
• -$20 observer
  
• +10 hp, +10 shields for both types of dark templar
  
• 1.25 dragoons per building, 17 damage, +$10, max of 20 (from 1.33/building and 18 dmg)
  
• 1.25 immortals per building (from 1)
  
• Additional soft-nerf to corsair spawns; 2 extra units (#8 and #9) now spawn without enough energy to immediately cast dweb (see earlier posts discussing this mechanic)
  
• -$10 for helion/marauders
  
• 2.25 reapers per building (from 2)
  
• 2.5 wraiths per building, +20 hp, -1 armor (from 2 per building)
  
• +50 HP battlecrusiers, damage to 27/27, 50% of them spawn as Hyperion base units (instead of Norad II) and therefore have cooldown of 22 instead of 30, so shoot approx 26.6% faster = higher DPS, and better against devourers which increase cooldown time for attacks
  
• Nuke now has a slightly bigger radius, and center is offset a little from the temple, so should get most attacking Guardians (no guarantee to get 100% of them, but should be stronger).
  
• Infestor nerfed: slightly smaller radius for main AoE, secondary 'center' AoE now does not heal units stolen to 100% HP, and only has a 50% chance of firing. Activation cycle dropped to 27 DCs from 26 (3.8% longer).
  
• Banelings (infested terrans) HP dropped to 80, and shields to 0 (from 160/10). Now banelings are invincible for 2.5 seconds, then vulnerable for 0.75 seconds, and it cycles. This way they do not distract enemy units as much, and can get close enough to detonate, but when vulnerable also have a reasonable chance of being killed due to lower HP and armor. 86 damage, down from 106.
  
• Night Fortress renamed Night Temple
  
• Silo armor dropped to 7 from 10, Night Temple armor dropped to 12 from 15.
  
• Silo HP dropped to 22,500 from 25,000.
  
• Default speed is now 2x - if P1 isn't in the game, or quits/drops, or doesn't select a speed, it will pick 2x
  
• Added arch doodads to attempt to improve unit pathing from southern spawn - does seem to be a bit better. Tanks still like to siege along the edge of map and never move, though.
  

So, main balance changes were to try and nerf dragoons further, and hopefully make immortals more attractive. Bumped up the strength of some supporting protoss units as well, hopefully we'll see some more varied armies. Also considerable buffs to Terran air should make them a bit more useful now. Considering making 0.75 valkyries and giving them 10 or 11 damage, up from 9 - valks tend to freeze and fail to attack due to sprite limit, but increasing their damage too much will make them very deadly if numbered aren't kept in check. Infestor and baneling changes are after I ran into a 'pro' player that only plays DS maps, who as Zerg built up to these heroes ASAP, because the combination of them was pretty much unstoppable due to tanking banelings drawing aggro from all enemy units, while the infestor floated around and stole them all - this should put a significant dent in that tactic.

In 2.10 I intend to introduce a new mechanic - there will be 2 stasis cells in the centre of the map, owned by each CPU player. They'll have something like 1500-2000 hp. First team to destroy the enemy stasis cell will be rewarded with $200-300 per player, and unleash a Tal'darim Heretic (Fenix zealot) that has something like 400 shields, 100 hp, and do about 45 damage per hit - this will attempt to rush to the enemy silo and start attacking it. The idea here is to strongly encourage early aggression, instead of people just building up gas and skipping the low-tier units and going straight to massed mid-late tier units. The stasis cells will be close to the center (maybe 3-4 tiles away from the crysalis max) but on the enemies side of the map, so each teams' units will be forced to walk past the other team's to get to their cell, ensuring that there is a bit of tug-of-war here.

I'm also looking at changing the unbalanced team mechanic, but still strongly do not like the default refund system present in most DS maps. I've got an idea around this, which I'll post in the DS improvements thread sometime later this week to get some feedback on it.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 18 2011, 10:16 am by Lanthanide.

Personally I like 1x mode better, probably b/c i'm more used to Queen's maps, but it does seem more intuative and stratagy based rather then the goon masses and instant gasing (which by the way, still fails in 1v1's or when your team is coordinated )

1x is still available, it's just that 90%+ of people prefer 2x. I have been in games where P1 dropped before they could make the selection, and everyone quit because they wanted 2x mode.

Really no one seems to read this thread, but it's useful having a complete changelog somewhere I think.

So I published 2.10 last weekend, rather quickly followed up by 2.11, 2.12 to fix various stupid bugs. But I wasn't terribly happy with 2.12, and the Sentry hero was broken anyway, so I did some more work and released 2.13, which had a stupid scoreboard bug, so released 2.14. So the changelogs are below:

2.10 -> 2.12
New features

• Added new Hybrid Prison Cell Mechanic: 2 prison cells are created at the start of the game in the center of the map, 1 for each team, 2500 HP and 7 armor. The team that kills the enemy prison cell first unleashes a Hybrid unit (Fenix Zealot or hero Archon) that goes directly to the enemy silo and does 34 damage per hit to it. They have 200/200 hp/shields, so are fairly hefty to take out, but not impossible. The winning team also gets $200 bonus cash each and the next players unit's spawn as reinforcements (similar to night defense going down). The losing team's prison cell is destroyed. Triggers exist so if both cells are destroyed simultaneously, each team should get the benefits, however I've never actually tested it.
  
• Removed the crystals/power generator blocking buildings, as they served no real gameplay purpose. In older versions of DS, the gas cooldown was so extreme that you delayed building them as long as possible, so space was at a premium. That was never really a concern in this version, so there was no need for them. This also reduces the number of units on the map, helping to reduce map-max problems.
  
• Removed 4 of the "this player spawns next" beacons, to help alleviate map-max. However I also created 2 new map revealers where they were missing, so net gain was only 2 units.
  
• Improved behaviour when Map Max occurs: previously the bottom team always spawned first, so sometimes top team units would not spawn. Now the team that goes first alternates, so in really bad games it should 'swap' which team gets penalised. This is a very basic system, but still took 2 hours to implement and bug fix. There are more elaborate systems that would be more fair (guaranteeing each team spawned 1/2 or 2/3 or whatever), but these would take significantly more time to implement and test.
  
• Protoss unit revamps: Pylon now gives 2 probes, Cyber core now gives 1.25 Stalkers (dragoon base), Forge gives 1.75 immortals (tassadar base), Cannon gives new protoss hero, Sentry.
  
• Sentry hero is Fenix Dragoon that does 38 damage per hit, 7 armor, 350 hp/350 shields, every few seconds it will create hallucinated units that have max 150hp or shields. Note that the hallucination effect was actually broken in all 2.10-2.12, so this never works in any released maps.
  

Bug fixes:

• Using Boom would remove the enemy units that had just spawned in their spawning pen. Fixed this. Also made Boom reduce enemy units in the center of the map down to 20% hp/shields, as well as still destroying all units on your side. This means it covers about 55-60% of the map in total, so you don't have to wait until all units are past the chrysalis in the center to use it.
  
• Possible bug: 1/6 of all siege tanks are supposed to spawn pre-sieged, it looks like there may have been a bug where sometimes you wouldn't get the proper number siegeing. Unsure if it was a real bug or not, found via trigger inspection & remedied.
  
• When both teams used nuke, the team the nukes last should clean up all enemy nukes in their territory, but that wasn't happening, so fixed it.
  
• Nuke spawned an archon to deal damage to the temple. However an unlucky placement of a disruption web would result in the archon failing to fire, which was unfair. Replaced with Norad II hero BC which is a flying unit and therefore not affected by dweb. The BC fires almost instantly after being created, so no practical to use a boom after enemy nukes in order to destroy the archon before it fired.
  
• Nuke mine placement logic was not great, so often mines would not be placed at enemy start point, due to map max. Sometimes the nuke Archon wouldn't spawn either. Tidied up the spawn logic considerably so Norad II unit spawns first, followed by mines at the starting spot and silo spot, then by the remainder of the mines.
  
• Nuke now damages enemy units on your side of the field to 15% HP / 5% shields, instead of previous 10%/0% (so it is slightly weaker now).
  

Balance and misc changes:

• You start with $360 instead of $400
  
• Gas build timeouts increased from 15/30/45 to 20/35/50, but remaining 3 at 60/70/80 unchanged.
  
• Silo Torrasque renamed to Brutalisk to better fit SC2 theme
  
• Pylon $70, 2 probes, 60 hp/20 shields, 2 armor, 9 dmg.
  
• Cyber core $180, 1.25 Stalker, Max 20, 70/80 hp/s, 3 armor, 20 dmg. Uses dragoon base unit, so does not have Fenix fast firing rate. Dragoon range is now researchable upgrade for $240 (fairly expensive).
  
• Forge: $240, 1.75 immortal, 150/150 hp/s, 4 armor, 25 dmg, Tassadar base. Damage is concussive. Particularly good against ghost-happy terran as they aren't affected by lockdown.\\
  
• Cannon, $1200, Sentry hero as above in new features.
  
• Gateway; $250, 3.5 zealots, from $270/4
  
• Citadel of Adun: $550 from $570, leg speed +$30, mind control +$20
  
• Templar archives: $690 from $710, Archon 325 shields/25 hp from 350/25, 40 dmg from 42
  
• Fleet Beacon: +$10
  
• Robotics Support Bay (reaver): $900 from $950, upgrades $120/140/160/180 from 125/175/225/275, damage now 30 + 15*4 (90 max), from 40 + 15*4 (100 max). -5 hp and -5 shields.
  
• Mothership: $1700 from $1800. +10hp, -3 armor (14 from 17), central spot under mothership used to set enemy shields to 0%, no longer does. There was a trigger that reduces the attack time when it is surrounded by many units, however this used [Any unit] check instead of [men], so being near the silo or especially the Night Defense(defense + 4 cannons + temple) would count to speed up attack time - changed this to [Men], so now buildings are ignored.
  
• Marine range upgrade +$30
  
• Science vessal: -$50
  
• Armory: 0.66 valkyrie instead of 1 valkyrie. +2 dmg, -10 hp, banshee -2 armor
  
• Battlecruisers -$50
  
• Medivac: -$50
  
• Thor: +20 hp, -1 armor, spawn tanks every 2.5 seconds instead of 2 - should mean tanks are more spread out, rather than clumped, so hopefully a bit more useful.
  
• Queen -$20
  
• Hive (unlocked from queen's nest, needed for lurker + overseer) +$20
  
• Lurker +10 hp
  
• Nydus worm: fires baneling every 2 seconds, instead of 1.75. Trigger comment actually said it was 2 seconds, so evidently I changed it in the past without changing the comment.
  

Right, so the main impetus behind these changes was a big shakeup for the protoss. I found that playing as protoss, it was simply too hard to mass enough HP on the field, unless you focussed on Dragoons as a base for your army. This was boring, and meant that trying to throw in Archons, DA's or reavers was often to expensive to get more than a couple. So the big re-work was to encourage more diverse protoss armies. I now see a lot more zealots, archons and dark archons on the field, so that's good. Probes are also a nice buff as they move much faster than the old Immortal Crusader (tassadars) did, and because they're worker units they are often ignored by the enemy AI and can sneak in and get kills. They also can act as HP sinks for more expensive units, and soak up ghost lockdowns nicely. Immortals, off the forge, solve the problem of having Dragoons (fenix base) + Immortals (dragoon base) that were never really properly balanced because of overlapping function. Immortals now provide a big swag of HP on the field for pretty cheap price, as well as help to counter enemy zealots, zerglings or marines due to concussive damage while not being too strong against other units, and also work well vs ghosts as they cannot be locked-down like stalkers, but still have enough HP to be able to go through tank fire.

The hybrid prison cell is a new mechanic to encourage early aggression. Previously the best strategy was to simply build 1-2 gas right off the bat, and if the enemy team did and you team didn't, you were at a big disadvantage. Now, the team that gets units out early to attack the cell can end up with a an advantage, and puts pressure on the enemy team to also attack back. Reducing starting minerals and lengthening mine shutdown length also helps discourage early mine building.

2.13 / 2.14 changes:

• The Sentry hero triggers were completely broken, so I had to release a new version to fix this anyway. Another problem is that the Sentry was not very visible on the field - it looked just like any other dragoon, except for the puffs of hallucination when new units spawned. The Thor already suffers from this invisibility, and I also figured it was lame that the Infestor stole enemy units, but the sentry only made hallucinated ones. So I replaced it with the Warp Prism, which is the Protoss Shuttle, using a copy of the Medivac AI movement routines, making it much more visible. Every ~7 seconds it spawns gateway units from a random selection: 1-2 zealots, 1-2 stalkers, 1 zealot/1 stalker, 1 dark templar, 1 dark archon, 1 archon or 1 high templar. The more powerful units have lower chances of spawning, and the less powerful units reduce the time until the next spawn by up to 1.25 seconds. The spawn graphic kills the Bengalaas unit for the blue flame + sound effect.
  
• Roach +$30 - these turned out to be pretty cost effective at destroying the prison very early, and really they're pretty powerful units any way.
  
• Lurker -1 dmg - with the extra +10 hp, these guys were starting to be a little overpowered. This is just a small nerf for them.
  
• Silo: 10 armor, up from 7. I had reduced this in 2.08 in order to encourage early aggression, but now it just went down a bit too fast, and several people asked for it to go back up to 10. With the prison cell, there was already an early-game target to take down, and the hybrid itself was unleashed to dish out extra damage to the silo, so having such low armor score of 7 was now no longer required.
  
• Prison cell: 3500 hp, up from 2500, and 8 armor, from 7. Similar to above, the prison cell was just a bit too easy to take down - I want it to be a bit more of a tug-of-war, and it was dying too soon, especially to hordes of cheap marines.
  
• Found a small bug with the infestor's movement AI, this really wouldn't be practically noticable by any players, but I fixed it any way. It will now home in on valuable enemy units a bit more readily.
  
• EMP energy cost changed from 145 energy from 135. This may have actually encouraged the AI to use it a bit more often, hard to say. When you now have 4 max science vessals, the last one only spawns with 60% energy, which isn't enough to cast EMP right away unless you get the energy upgrade (similar system in place for DA, high templar, ghosts and corsairs already), but it means it they cast irradiate (75nrg) or defense matrix (80nrg) then it won't also be able to cast emp.
  
• Mothership: +$50. The detector units have AI that makes them fly towards cloaked units (instead of suiciding on the enemy defense/temple), including the mothership itself. In turn, the mothership had triggers to make sure it didn't always kill every overseer/observer/science vessal that flew around it, as this would make it far too powerful. However this often appeared a bit strange, and made the cloaking field pretty useless as the detectors would simply follow the mothership around. So I added a system that has a small random chance of destroying a detector around the mothership each time it attacks. There's also an alternative random outcome that sets enemy shields to 0% directly under the mothership, which was originally removed in 2.10 above - now it only happens in 12.5% of all attack rounds, instead of 100% of them. These to changes were worth putting the price up by $50.
  

Now I think terran air might be a bit overpowered. Protoss air certainly has a hard time competing, but I don't really want to reduce it's price much. I think I'll increase corsair damage from 6 to 7, and possibly reduce valkyrie HP down from 170 to 160 or 165. I might reduce wraith AA damage from 23 to 22, and probably reduce BC HP by 25 down to 350, and maybe damage from 27 to 26. 50% of all battlecruisers actually spawn as Hyperion (to protect them from protoss Mind Control, which used to completely rape terran BC fleets), which has a faster attack rate than usual, so their damage is actually still pretty good - and they have yamato of course.

I've spotted a few spawn bugs related to Thor and Warp Prism that I'll need to fix, as well as the mysterious 'frozen unit' bug I've posted about in mapmaking assistance - hopefully I'll be able to get to the bottom of that, or never ever see the bug again so I can ignore it. I'm tempted to increase immortals armor from 4 to 5, or possibly put it's HP/shields up, or reduce the price to $220. Might also reduce stalker range upgrade cost a little. I'll probably make the Warp Prism movement AI quite a bit more defensive, at the moment it hangs around on the front lines a bit too much and is easily chased away by valkyries; may also increase HP/shields/armor. I may do something about the medivac, it seems like it might just be a bit overpowered now with terran air - at the moment it heals all friendly units within AoE to 100% health every 1.9 seconds, but I might make this a bit more random like the mothership, and split the unit classes into 4 triggers that are then activated by randomised switches: so only a 1/16 chance of healing all units, or 1/16 chance of healing no units, with other ranges in between for healing 'some' units. If I did this, I'd make the AoE a bit bigger. Might increase the prison cell HP to 3750 from 3500, as at the moment in a 3v3 game it is often dead by the time the 1st player has their 2nd spawn.

http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on May 20 2011, 12:36 pm by Lanthanide.

So the latest version, 2.15 has been out for quite a while

Changes:

• Removed max 20 limit on stalkers
  
• -$20 on stalker range ($220)
  
• Remove observer & overlord sight upgrades as they only made 1 tile difference to detection radius (now researched by default). Both speed upgrades now cost $40 more.
  
• Warp prism AI now more defensive (shouldn't suicide as badly)
  
• Scout +1 ground damage
  
• Corsair +1 damage, 1.33 per building down from 1.5
  
• -$30 dweb upgrade ($270), reduced energy penalty on mass corsairs a little (see previous posts for explanation)
  
• -$20 Stargate ($660)
  
• -$30 carrier capacity upgrade
  
• Probe heavily nerfed: 1.5 per pylon from 2, shields/hp reduced to 40/10 from 60/20. Fixed AI bug that sometimes made all units for 1 player freeze on the map (related to probes).
  
• More units can be MC'd by DA's now: observer, ghost, viking, marine, hydra, guardian, muta, stalker, archon. This is a bit of a mixed bag as to whether it strengthens or weakens MC, I think overall it's probably weakened as units like hydra, marine and mutalisk tend to die very quickly once MC'd.
  
• Wraith -1 air damage, 2.33 per starport instead of 2.5
  
• Battlecruisers -25 HP (250)
  
• Hellion +1 armor (2)
  
• Added 2 Devil Dog Mercenaries to the Engineering Bay, which is now $315 to build. They are called "mercs" because Eng Bay is still max 1. They are Gui Montag heroes, with 100 hp, 4 armor and 30 damage, so a fair buff on the base marauder stats, but not earth-shattering.
  
• Medic maximum increased to 8, however medic #6 and #8 now spawn with 60% of max energy. This means that 6 medics is weaker than before (1 spawns at 60% energy), while 7 medics is same as before but 1 with 60% energy, and 8 gives 2 with 60% energy.
  
• Medivac healing tweaked - the radius has increased, and the default speed is faster (dropped from 23 DC to 21 DC). But instead of healing all units around it to 100% on each pulse, there are now 4 switches randomized and the results tied to separate triggers. The first 3 triggers heal All of 1/3rd of the units in the radius (eg trigger 1 heals marine/zergling/zealot, trigger 2 heals firebat/hydralisk/dragoon) and the 4th trigger heals 1 of each unit type and sets shields of ally units directly under the medivac to 100%. Each trigger adds 1 to the DC count. This means that on an unlucky (6.25%) cycle, 0 units will actually be healed but the delay until the next cycle will be only 21 DC. On the most likely outcome (37.5% of the time) 2 of the 4 healing triggers will fire, and the next cycle will be pushed back by 2 DC to 23. On the most lucky outcome (6.25%), all 4 of the triggers will fire (effectively same results as old medivac effect) but it will be 25 DCs until the next cycle. Overall this is a nerf to the medivac, but it is still strong. It simply got a bit ridiculous with this thing hovering around BCs effectively making them immortal - now it will not always heal all of the units it is around, only some of them.
  
• Timer on the nuclear armageddon BC is increased, just to ensure that it will shoot the temple before dying (not sure if it ever really didn't, but this will help ensure it does).
  
• Mutalisk increased to 1.33 per spire, from 1.25. Spire price +$9, greater spire -$9
  
• Several unit spawning buildings didn't actually spawn the proper amounts (usually 16+ of a specific type, eg 16 gateways didn't spawn proper number of zealots). Probably these bugs were never actually seen during play due to the large number of buildings required that were probably seldom seen, but I fixed it any way.
  
• Research time for upgrades is now instant
  
• Remove geysers for players that never started, or players that leave during the game - helps to alleviate Map Max slightly.
  
• Sometimes during the cinematic battle at the start, an Infestor would place creep where the prison cells were to spawn, causing them to error on creation and completely bugging the movement scripts up, essentially making the map unplayable. Prevented creep from being dropped in these locations, and even if the prisons aren't created properly, the movement scripts should now work properly.
  

So the main driver behind this version was to rebalance air, because Terran became really overpowered with the recent wraith, valkyrie and battlecruiser buffs. Protoss was starting to feel weak, because their air units all do low amounts of damage (scout has 2 missiles so doubly affected by armor) that are stung harshly by armor. Corsair damage going from 6 to 7 means that against units with 3 armor they now do 4 dmg, units with 4 they do 3, and units with 5 they do 2, which are effective buffs of 33%, 50% and 100%, which makes a *big* difference to their strength. Having fewer of them on the field also helps to weaken dweb a bit, hence the cheaper price. The stargate reduction now lets protoss keep up a bit better against other races' air. Probes were also strongly nerfed, as they effectively acted like very large damage soakers due to high shields and their 'small' size (most protoss units are Medium or Large).

Further ideas for next version (probably a few weeks away):
- Increase immortals to $260, decrease Zealots to $240. Zealots are very vulnerable to mass marines and simply melt like butter.
- Immortals are currently 150/150 shields/hp, change this to 200/75 as they take 100% damage on shields
- Possibly reduce immortal damage from 25 to 20, will have to investigate how this changes their efficacy. They should still 2-shot zerglings which is good, but don't want to weaken them too much vs hydras or marines.
- Potential changes to Warp Prism - not really sure it's strong enough, possibly increase unit spawn rate, maybe increase HP, tweak AI a bit more so it is more defensive (currently just running a modified infestor/medivac AI routine)
- Investigate a way to make Dark Swarm occur less often in 1v1 games as it is very punishing for Terrans to deal with. Don't want to remove it from the game totally, though.
- Potential idea to let players buy a set group of units from other races once they get to 4 gas for a large sum. Something like $1200-1500 to let you select 1 package of units from the other 2 races. These would generally be spell-casting units, eg as protoss you could pick terran and get 3 medics, 5 ghosts and 2 vikings, or pick zerg and get 3 ultralisks, 3 defilers, 3 devourers and 3 scourge. If playing as zerg or terran you could choose protoss for 2 archons, 3 DAs and 3 high templar. These units would come with all the spells and upgrades.
- Possibly do something about zerg income prior to prison cell being destroyed. Zerg can mass zerglings and hydras very easily and take down the cell with ease. However the other two races do have strong and cheap massers as well: immortals and hellions/marauders. It's not really my problem if no one builds hellions/marauders - anyone who starts rolling that out as an early-game strategy deserves the benefit they get from it.

http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 8 2011, 11:15 am by Lanthanide.

I'm starting to wonder, is 2.19 your creation even?

Yes. I just haven't posted here about it because no one ever replies to this thread so there doesn't seem to be much point. I'll post about the changes later today (there were lots and lots).

New version: 2.19

• New mode: Disabled specials. When you select this, the Temple is set to 60% of the total HP (to prevent the game dragging on forever).
  
• Moved the gas vents for players 1-3 (south) slightly, as there was a pathing issue when building the gas vent in the corner as protoss - ordering your probe it would just sit there and not build. This change seems to have affected the two top geysers in a similarly bad way however, so I may make further tweaks to try to solve that.
  
• Changed the mine cooldown time in single rate mining mode. I don't know if anyone ever plays this mode so probably no one will ever notice, but now the gas cooldown is 1/2 what you get in 2x mineral mode. I mapped out the effective cost of the cooldown (foregone mineral mining time) and with the new system, single mining mode actually has slightly less cost than in 2x mining mode. This effectively means that single mining mode is not as punishing as it was, and will now be much more strategic (lower income = unit choice matters more) without being tedious. But again, no one ever plays this anyway.
  
• Shortened the intro text to be less annoying, and changed the outro text to Dr Narud.
  
• If you started a game without P1 present, it would auto-choose 2x mineral mode, but would also print out a message about teams being balanced and mining bonuses removed. Fixed - the erroneous message no longer displays.
  
• During the initial prison battle, the attack destinations for each team now focuses directly on the enemy prison, instead of slightly next to it. This means probes and other melee units will directly go to attack the prison and the behaviour should be more sensible in general during this phase of the game.
  
• When infestation/nuke/MC/boom were activated, the enemy mothership would be instantly killed wherever it was. The mothership has a residual "last gasp" attack and I found that this was screwing up nukes because the location that was put in place when the mothership died could sometimes persist longer than it should have (hard to explain). The end result is that when nuking vs a protoss with a mothership, sometimes the Armageddon Dreadnought would never spawn properly and therefore not damage the temple (saw this 3x in a row in one game I played). This has been fixed by handling the location more intelligently, and also explicitely preventing the mothership from being able to kill the Dreadnought.
  
• Tanks spawned by Thor were not cleaned up properly from the spawning pen, which could potentially cause issues in a long/unlucky game.
  
• If a silo was killed late-game when a mothership was around, it could cast Stasis on the Silo Brutalisk, meaning that the enemy army wouldn't attack it, and robbing it of a lot of it's power. Brutalisks in stasis are now vulnerable to attack.
  
• Immortals nerfed severely: +$20 to $260, +50 shields to 200, -75 HP to 75, 13 damage from 25.
  
• Zealot +5 hp, -$10 to $240, legs cost $200 to research (from $220?)
  
• Dragoon range upgrade -$40 to $180
  
• Probe spawns capped at 12 pylons / 18 probes. You can still build additional pylons after that point, but no more probes will spawn.
  
• Dark Archon Mind Control: energy cost has been revamped (thanks to Heinermann's info) so DA should cast Maelstrom more often now and MC slightly less often. Removed ability to MC marines and observers, as these gimped MC just a bit much.
  
• Khaydarin amulet (HT mana upgrade) -$30 to $320
  
• Hallucination costs 50 mana (down from 75-80) and $80 to research. Hardly anyone ever gets this, but now if they do it should be used a lot more.
  
• Warp Prism unit spawn is now slighter faster. Should be much more defensive and keep away from the front lines, so not die as much. -$250 to $950
  
• Corsair damage +1 to 7, from 6. This changed was supposed to have been made several times by now (see 2.15 notes above), but flaky behaviour in Scmdraft re: Raszagal hero unit kept screwing it up.
  
• Interceptor respawn rate on carriers is now tied to the total number of interceptors alive for that team (which obviously tracks the total number of carriers). More interceptors = slower respawn rate when interceptors die. Also died the invulnerability timer to this, so more interceptors = longer periods when interceptors are vulnerable. Gave interceptors something like +5 shields and +10 hp to help compensate. In my testing, this makes carriers noticably weaker, which is good because when you get 15+ for one team they could become very difficult to kill. They are still powerful, but just less so. -$10 on fleet beacon so now cost $850 to build. As the only protoss air unit to do Normal damage (rest do Explosive) they are actually quite important and I find myself building them most games.
  
• Protoss Divine Judgement has been weakened vs Terran. Keen-eyed players will note that DJ and Infestation both kill a portion of the enemies units before stealing them, making multiple chained DJs/Infestations weaker. I've expanded the list of terran units that DJ kills when it is cast, so this means that when used against a terran army it will kill a handful more units than it used to. This helps better balance DJ vs nuke.
  
• Medics were supposed to have cap raised up to 8 in 2.15 and the text said this, but actually it still prevented you building more than 6. This is fixed and you can build 8 now.
  
• Buffed engineering bay devil dogs: 3 instead of 2, and 5 armor instead of 4.
  
• Plague +$100 to research
  
• Ensnare +$50 to research.
  

I also actually made 2.16, 2.17 and 2.18 which had pretty much all the above changes, but had a few stupid bugs in them too. So once I found the various bugs I fixed them and released new versions. 2.17 in particular had a huge money exploit. Don't play those old versions if you see them.

Known bugs:

• P1 can fly their mineral rate selector away from the starting zone. When the 30 second timer expires, nothing happens (previously would force 2x mineral mode), and unless they fly the mineral rate selector back, the game must be abandoned.
  
• I intended to extend the Brutalisk/stasis fix to cover all of the heroes, but forgot to.
  
• Sometimes warp prism units can end up clogging up the unit spawning pen, as per the Thor fix I did. No idea how this is happening as it should be cleaned up already, but for some reason it isn't.
  

Immortals were never supposed to be as powerful as they were - a site I went to said they did Concussive damage (25% to large, 50% to medium), but actually they did Normal damage, which obviously threw my intentions for them completely off track. It's a pity they don't do concussive because it would fill a hole that I've now found with Protoss - they have a very hard time countering masses of enemy units such as marines, reapers, ghosts and zerglings. Currently they really have to get reavers to deal with them to any sensible degree, which is very expensive but also often dramatically changes the flow of the game - 1 team is losing under a mass of small units, and when they get reavers it suddenly reverses.

Disabling specials was only done because a lot of people kept whinging about it. I've repeatedly told them that it wasn't actually any fun with specials disabled, but they didn't believe me. So I just put it in. It's hugely unbalanced if anyone plays zerg, because their buildings are so much smaller they can keep building long after protoss and terran run out of space. As they tend to spawn more weaker units anyway, they ultimately end up with the upper hand because 1 unit with 1000 HP is weaker than 10 units with 100, simply because of AI unit targetting and wasted damage (unit with 1 HP that you attack with 30 damage wastes 29 damage, but unit with 100 HP would take full 30 damage). Similarly for protoss you can just spam carriers which are hard for the enemy to deal with.

Probable future changes:

• Reduce hyralisk spawn from 3.5 to 3, reduce damage from 13 to 12, and make slightly cheaper. They just seem a bit too strong when massed. Possibly give them +5 HP or something.
  
• Zealots still seem to not be built much. Maybe increase spawn back to 4 per gateway but keep at $240 cost (need to compare to marine/zergling cost effectiveness). Maybe make legs cost $150, or possibly start with legs as free upgrade? Zealots simply melt under ranged attacks like massed marines and hydralisks before they can do any damage anyway.
  
• Buff Warp prism a bit further to spawn more powerful units, probably reduce cost a little further too.
  
• Make citadel spawn 1.33 Dark Templars instead of 1. Make Archives spawn 1.25 archons instead of 1. Protoss has a big mass problem in that most of their buildings only generate a 1 or 2 units, and they tend to suffer from enemy mass a lot. I also don't see citadels or archives built much. More dark templars and archons would help defend vs massed units more easily.
  
• Possibly do something with reavers. At the moment they have 4 separate damage upgrades for a total of +60 which costs $600 minerals, might just change this to 2 or 3 upgrades that cost a total of $600 and total to +60. Alternatively I could reduce the spawn from 2 to 1, drop the price to $700-750 and increase their HP significantly. As mentioned above, as soon as you build reavers at the moment there is often a big turning point in the game, simply from their fast damage output. Reducing it to 1 unit per bay would halve the damage output, but they'd need to be cheaper and stronger in return.
  
• Re-jig Terran units: rename Reaper to War Pig. Remove Devil Dogs mercs. Use Sarah Kerrigan ghost as Reapers (disable cloak) - give them like 26 damage or so (concussive) and 100+ HP. Remove Helions as buildable units (too much overlap with new reapers/marauders) and make supply depots 1.5 marauder / 0.75 War Pig, and Eng Bay 3 War Pig. Possibly spawn Helions when Nuke is cast, as per DS Night Final (used to do this back in 1.76 or so anyway). Buff Nuke dreadnought damage a little to make nuke a bit more threatening again.
  

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jul 3 2011, 12:20 am by Lanthanide.

Great job on this map, Its one of my favorites to play , Love getting the new versions .

Any feedback on my proposed changes? Have you got any suggestions for things I could change or add?