Yeah, in your previous posts. You tested and explained how it's easier to balance by toggling the invincibility of the Interceptors.

Also, is there any chance of removing the Valkyrie from Terran? It feels to be a useless unit almost to mid-game compared to other air units since it's one of the first units to freeze quickly. Maybe replace the Armory with a 1 Banshee, 1.33 Wraith or something? Just a suggestion.

Yeah, I've struggled with the valkyrie in the past due to the attack animation problem. I don't really want to get rid of it completely as it does perform a useful task for the terran. My solution was to turn the numbers down quite low (0.66) to make them less common, while beefing up the damage they do per bolt so they're quite effective units now. Terran players seem to mass banshees like there's no tomorrow anyway, so I don't think people are particularly relying on the valkyrie. Even if it doesn't attack, it's still a good HP sink.

2.42 is released. I'll type up a full change log tomorrow (quite long), approx 20-24 hours from now.

In brief:
- Instant-spawn powerup: pick it up with your worker and take it to the boom beacon to instantly spawn your units. Each players starts with 1. If an ally leaves and hasn't used theirs, it will be given to other player on their team. When starting a 1v1 or 2v2 game, each player receives only 1 powerup, not 2 or 3. Costs $2,000 minerals and must have 4 gas mines to use it.
- Nuke is changed, it now causes enemy units to JYD for 12 real-time seconds and sets HP to 5-10% (see earlier posts for more discussion)
- Fixed void ray spawn bug, marine spawn bug, special ops mineral exploit
- Improved lurker AI a little
- Fixed up flying hero AI when you had multiple (was completely screwed)
- Fixed a few bugs with top team booms (could double-boom)
- Improved more trigger systems behind the scenes, so should be less processing overhead so hopefully older PCs will handle it better without as much lag (impossible to really measure, though)
- LOTS of unit balance changes (about 25-30 items), will post this tomorrow.

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

2.42 Nuke Bug:
Since units are wandering around confused (and not destroyed) the Nuke BC will now fire upon any closest unit ignoring the temple unless it just happens to be closest...


Visual spam bug at the end:

For the nuke issue I was already aware of that and put some steps in place to try and prevent it. Have you seen for sure that the BC hit a unit and not the temple? Do you know what unit it killed (perhaps a scourge?).

For the "visual spam but at the end", can you tell me what the teams were in that game, eg 3v2 and you were on the 2 team etc?

Edit: I see it was 2v2, or at least it was at the end. It didn't start as 3v3 or 3v2 did it? Did any players use their instant-spawn powerups?

Confirmed this visually on 5 separate turns, the most recent was Vs an undamaged Night Defense - Nuked - Still undamaged. Never got a clear view of what the BC vaporizes in 1 shot... It turns in any random direction and fires.


Playing green mostly, never had a 2.42 game yet where the players didn't use it out of curiosity, but the one major commonality is that someone did leave early before the spam happened. The screenshot should be from a 2v2 with one leaving my team well before the game ended.


New bug? Used the Terran Instant Spawn right after the enemy used their MC but it just added my spawned units to their MC.

Ok thanks, I'll investigate these. I'll probably release 2.43 today or tomorrow with these issues fixed, as well as a couple of other small things (mothership seems to Attack units a lot now, so the killing power doesn't seem to get many units).

As for the spawn vs MC, essentially that's a bug, yes (uninteded behaviour). Thanks.

Full change list for 2.42 as it currently stands:

Bugs

• Spawning the prison cells at the start of the game could sill sometimes fail due to creep dropped by infestor hero. This is now fixed further and should hopefully never happen.
  
• Top team could experience erratic spawning behaviour when building in empty ally bases (depends on top team vs bottom team composition).
  
• Void rays spawned as if the building was 1.5 instead of the listed 1.2, but only for the first 2 buildings.
  
• Heroes held in the 'excess spawn box' could sometimes be killed by another trigger system (can't remember what exactly).
  
• Building barracks in ally bases could lead to excess marine spawns.
  
• When top team used boom, the boom barracks graphics would appear on the left side of the field, instead of the right.
  
• When top team used boom, the multiple-boom prevention did not properly stop allies or the same playing using multiple booms within 3 seconds.
  
• Covert ops lift-off exploit fixed.
  

New features / substantial changes:

• Mineral rate changed. The previous displayed rates didn't actually match the rates in practice, eg it said 16/22/28/34 but in practice it was 16/22/26/34, meaning that going from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 changes were smaller and bigger than expected. The 2 to 3 change in particular would mean the winning team were significantly ahead of the losing team. The rates have now been changed to 16/21/27/33/37/41/46, with all rates except the first and last reduced by 1. The bonus for full mining is now $1,000 instead of $100. This means that going from 5 gas mines to 6 is now mathematically advantageous because after 10 minutes and 6 seconds you will be earning $5/second more than you would otherwise have had. With the previous numbers, it would take 17 minutes 7 seconds to reach this positive balance and it would only be an extra $4/second, which was generally not worth it as games didn't tend to last long enough for this to make an appreciable difference. Mineral rate for 1x speed changed slightly as well although I don't have the numbers written down.
  
• Build in ally's base requires 2 gas mines instead of 3, this should encourage more use of this feature (more powerful earlier in the game).
  
• Warp prism and hybrid destroyer have swapped their graphical effects (purely graphical).
  
• Flying hero AI (excluding mothership) was seriously screwed up when you had more than 1 on the field per team, particularly the warp prism. This has been fixed.
  
• Lurker AI improved, particularly at the start of the game with prison cells. Lurkers will still stupidly unburrow themselves when new enemy units approach them - unfortunately no way to stop this. Lurkers -1 dmg to help account for the improved AI.
  
• Various systems have streamlined/improved triggering which should result in less trigger lag for slower computers.
  
• Brutalisk explosion now has a smaller kill radius, but an added larger radius that will injure enemy units. These explosion radii are used for Night Defense and Nuke explosions also.
  
• Computer players are now allied with all human players, so computers should no longer kill player buildings with units like tanks (affects Green and Yellow the most).
  
• New instant-spawn powerup mechanic requiring $2,000 + 4 gas mines to use. Each player starts with 1 and will receive any un-used ones from allies that leave the game. If a game starts unbalanced, eg 2v3 or 1v3 at the start, if the balance is restored before the intro is finished, then the excess powerups will be removed (eg 1v3 going to 1v1, each player will receive only 1 powerup).
  
• Nuke changed effects:
  - mines do 30 less damage and have 0 armor, so other units will be more able to kill them.
  - Set all enemy units to 5% HP / 5% shields and cause them to scatter using JYD. Steals a few units attacking your temple. Kills enemy units at enemy temple. Still places mines in the enemy territory, but now as their units are not killed out-right most of the mines will trigger and kill off the ground units.
  
• Divine Judgement will now kill a slightly more basic units
  
• Infestation will now kill slighter fewer units.
  

General/unit balance changes:

• Mutalisk +10hp to 140
  
• Corruptor (devourer) -10 hp, -1 dmg
  
• Roach +1 armor
  
• Ultralisk +$15, +1 dmg to 35, -$100 for armor upgrade
  
• Lurker -1 dmg to 23
  
• Infestor -111 hp to 333
  
• EMP energy cost increased by 15 to 160 (should help ensure 1 cast per sci vessal per spawn now).
  
• Reaper -10 hp to 100
  
• Marines spawn 5 from 5.5. +$60 for stim and range upgrades
  
• Ghost -1 dmg, energu upgrade -$60
  
• Banshee -1 armor to 4, -1 air damage, +$10 to $505
  
• Wraith +1 armor to 4, -10 hp to 200, -$10 to $545
  
• War Pig merc compound -$10
  
• Supply Depot: 2 marauders from 1.5, 0.75 warpigs for $245 from $255
  
• Marauder +5 hp
  
• Medivac -$200
  
• Thor -$150. Thor now spawns 5 fixed tanks and 4 mobile ones, and now only spawns them when enemies are in proximity and at a faster rate than it used to. This should make the thor more useful.
  
• Scout +1 ground damage
  
• Scout now uses Artanis base. Removed scout speed upgrade. Void rays use normal Scout unit base, so they move at slow speed. Heroes cannot be MC'd, so this now means that Void Rays can be MC'd from the enemy whereas previously they could not.
  
• Void rays healing speed decreased by 1 tick (0.083 seconds), shield pulse goes to 12/36 instead of 9/12, +1 armor. These + speed change should overall nerf the void ray but make it a bit better vs massed marines and other low damage units like hydra. +$10 to $430. Max 6 at 1 per building instead of 1.2 at max 5.
  
• Phoenix (corsair) -10 shields +20 hp
  
• Mothership +10 hp
  
• Interceptors changed to 15 hp / 15 shields from 25 / 10.
  
• Storm back to 112dmg instead of 120, archons spawn at 1.25 instead of 1.33. -$20 templar archives
  
• Immortals spawn at 1.66 from 1.75, +25 hp, -25 shields, -1 armor to 3 and -$10
  
• Stalkers now spawn at 0.5 as fenix dragoon (16 dmg, 22 cooldown = 17.31 DPS) and 0.75 regular dragoons (20 dmg, 30 cooldown = 15.87 DPS). Fenix dragoons start with the range upgrade. +$10 to $210.
  
• Zealot +15 hp -15 shields
  
• 2 Zealots that spawn with reavers are now fenix zealots, which have +30 hp -30 shields compared to 2.33 zealots and 24 dmg instead of 22. Start with leg upgrade.
  
• Collosus (reavers) now start with 60 damage and have only a single damage upgrade to 80 costing $250. Previously they started at 40 with two +20 upgrades costing a total of $300, so this is a buff in that without the damage upgrade they will be more useful (since explosive is 50% vs small units like marines and lings) and the upgrade itself now costs less.
  
• Warp Prism can spawn the new fenix dragoons and zealots, replacing a few old zealot/stalker spawns but now have longer cooldowns (not hugely longer - only about 0.5 seconds)
  

General balance changes are aimed at reducing 'marine spam' where terrans just build heaps of marines or also reapers. Attempted to make marauders and war pigs a bit more useful. Banshees have long been most terran players go-to unit for air despite not intending to be air units, I think this was largely due to their high armor at 5 and their HP, so reducing this while improving wraiths should see a lot more wraiths being built. In exchange for this, mutalisk and scout/corsair were improved. Devourers were nerfed as they still seemed a bit overpowered. Archons and high templars nerfed back a bit as they were a bit too cost effective, meanwhile the price reduce by $20 should make them a bit more accessible early in the game. Ultralisks should now be a bit more feasible in smaller numbers as the armor upgrade is a bit cheaper so not as much of an outlay. Void rays generally nerfed although should be a bit more effective vs small fast firing units like hydralisks and marines, and stalkers have higher DPS so should have a little bit of an easier time against them. Immortals changed to help encourage use, although I'm not sure these changes will be enough - their real problem is that they just move so incredibly slowly and massed marines tear them to bits.

Nuke should be more 'interesting' to use although it now might be a bit weak compared to the others. Infestation and MC should now be a little closer in terms of units killed/converted, although infestation will still mostly result in swarm guardians, brood lords and banelings/broodlings being spawned.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 14 2011, 7:46 am by Lanthanide.

Here is a replay, Green purple and yellow are all Terran, couldn't rewind to review it very easily...

1st nuke at:
24:24 by yellow - Did only 1 bar of damage? (Might of been the regular units damaging it instead)
25:55 Green - Direct hit
26:35 Yellow - Hit
27:32 Yellow - No apparent damage
27:33 Purple - No damage?
28:00 Green direct hit
29:39 Yellow - the BC flies off no damage seen
32:15 Purple - Hit
32:44
33:15 Green - Too many units to see clearly

Attachments:

Thanks, very useful. Replay seems to work better than last time I tried to use one on this map. I ran in x16 speed but eventually it seems that it stops registering new buildings by most players (red seemed to keep building, though) so it got out of sync and didn't do the nuke at the right time. Now running it again on 1x mode (sigh) and I'll see what happens.

Anyway I've had a look at the map and fixed a bunch of issues. I'll be releasing 2.43 tomorrow most likely:

• Fix powerup/ally spam at the end
  
• Prevent recently used special from stomping on instant-spawn powerup (haven't tested but should work)
  
• Fixed Hero: Infestor typo when Zerg gets 5 gas
  
• Changed insta-spawn powerup used by other player sound to be more distinct compared to battle sounds (archon summon sound)
  
• Immortals +1 armor
  
• Fixed bug where all units constantly had invulnerability removed: affected infested terrans, interceptors, stasis'd units and armageddon dreadnaught.
  
• Fixed bug where mines were not properly placed by nuke
  

The last two look to be the nuke bugs. The dreadnaught was supposed to be created as Invincible, but it was removed by the bugged trigger and so the defense cannons or other enemy units could easily kill it as it only has 100 hp and 0 armor. The mines bug was just a simple mistake on my part - I did a lot of dicking around with them, making the triggers more efficient and testing different things out, and on my last lot of changes I accidentally set an action to create the mines in the wrong storage location, so all the rest of the actions didn't work properly, and then I never re-tested.

I also tried to have a look at what looked like the mothership being silly in the couple of games I played last night, but I couldn't replicate it. So I'll have to watch out for this and see if it's 'real' or not, but what I was seeing was the mothership stopping still and actually using it's weapon to attack a lot, so it didn't fly around and kill many enemy units at all. It's nice for it to be attacking, but it's main power comes in decimating the enemy units, so if it just sits still it can't really do that. It's possible this weird behaviour was a side-effect of the invincibility trigger above (mothership goes to attack stasis'd units?).

Ok, I've watched your replay (pretty epic!) and can confirm that the nukes at 27:32 and 27:33 dealing no damage was due to the BCs being killed by other units before they could do any damage. Although it's actually possible that Yellow's at :32 was killed by Purple's at :33. Didn't manage to catch what happened at 24:24. The tip for watching these is to put it down to Slowest to watch what happens.

An idea I've just had is to make the broodlings that spawn from the Silo Brutalisk invincible, but with the normal 135 tick broodling death timer on them. At the moment it spawns 10, but 10 invincible broodlings would probably be too much. So maybe 4-5 invincible, not sure if it'd be sensible to throw in regular ones as well as people might think it's a bit strange that some could die and others couldn't. What do you think about that idea?

Also, what do you think about the new nuke (provided the mines were fixed up...)? Interesting? Too weak? It used to set enemy units on your side of the map to 15% HP 5% shields, so now 5/5 is a bit weaker overall, although it doesn't kill all enemy units on enemy side of map, but it should kill a few more units that are attacking your temple as well as steal some of them from the enemy (which are healed to 100% HP/shields).

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 14 2011, 11:04 am by Lanthanide.

Just had a thoroughly fun game of PTT vs TZT with nukes flying left and right. Got down to a photo finish - 1 red cell left on our temple and nuke took their's out, just as they started building their own nuke. The insta-spawn also spiced things up a bit, although I'm not sure if it truly made much strategic difference in the end.

The confuse on nuke is really quite interesting. A lot of people think nuke is too weak now, but in that game there were 2 or 3 of them that completely and utterly neutralised the enemy infest/MC. I think if I make it steal all enemy units directly attacking your temple + put mines on the whole battlefield, that'll make it properly worthy of the other specials.

Nuke has always been a bit of an odd-ball in that it is not as mindless fire-and-forget as MC and infest are, but at the same time it does direct unavoidable damage to the enemy temple and so can end up being quite powerful.

That "Unit unplaceable (2 Reapers)" message popped up again last night only this time it happened to Blue when the CC was lifted off of a comsat although I don't think it gave any additional money. The CC was placed in blue's base to the extreme top-right near Purple's gas. If this has anything to do with it there was also 1 row of (6) medics lined up vertically near the gas right below the CC and to the left was a matching vertical row of supply depots.

I was Green Toss, Blue had Terran, Red Terran and Orange Zerg. Blue lifted his CC right around the 0:00/1:00 spawn timer reset and neither team had any Reapers in play.

Thanks very much for the detailed report. I'll have a look and see if I can see anything untoward. Even if it is another mineral glitch, it is very unlikely it'll be anywhere near as bad as the previous one that gave you $900 for nothing.

Any comment on the usefulness/balance of Nuke?

Not really a big deal, but I found a 1x1 tile that's unbuildable on below where you put the insta-spawn transmitter. Since I usually like to play 1v1 or 2v2 more. I tend to build in the empty ally bases early on starting from the top left where the geysers are removed. Like I said, not such a problem but I just like being neat when it comes to placing my buildings.

Heh, I hadn't actually considered that. Normally it's not a problem because it's nestled in between the two gas geysers.

That unplacable building tile is deliberate. Powerups have really weird spawning and placement behaviours compared to other units. They don't pack nicely in the grid. I've got a lot of triggers in place to prevent the player from moving the powerup outside of the cracked earth area, which means I had to force the powerup to always spawn within the cracked earth area. Doing that necessitated the use of the unbuildable tile because powerups apparently are affected by this when it comes to placement. Weird eh?


Rivalz: Found and fixed the lift-off issue. Not 100% sure I reproduced exactly the issue you saw, but basically there could be a stray SCV (or some other impediment) standing next to the comsat that caused the building placement error. Funnily enough, when I looked at these triggers now, they didn't even need to use the 2 Reapers at all. The 2 Reapers is of course the missile turret, which is one of the few 2x2 buildings in the game that isn't an add-on. I believe when I first implemented the new add-on refund system, it operated over two trigger cycles and I have another trigger that runs all the time that removes neutral units and buildings (from players that have left the game). When a building is lifted off, the add-on is automatically given to the neutral player and this other trigger would clean it up, so there'd be no explosion when the player lifted their building, the add-on would just disappear. I apparently cobbled together some unwieldy system to cope with this because I didn't want to change the trigger to remove neutral buildings from players that left. That meant I had to create a missile turret in place of the add-on and then blow that up to get the explosion graphic that I wanted.

Now that I've just looked at the triggers, it's all done in a single cycle and in fact relies on the neutral add-on still being in the players base (so the neutral building cleanup trigger must not have yet fired). This means I don't need to create a missile turret to blow it up for the graphical effect, I can just blow the neutral add-on up instead. So that's what I do now.

Good thing I kept that old system though because the 2 reapers error let us know when someone was exploiting the mineral bug, so it came in handy after all.

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Nov 17 2011, 10:50 am by Lanthanide.

The old nuke left some nice armageddon waste at the enemy base which helped the Terran team further push at respawn, the nuked units now swarm all around the map triggering most of the mines and leaving almost nothing for the respawn. It just seemed to work more balanced the old way.


Thanks again for all the complicated work you put into this epic map!

New version 2.44:

• Fixed brood lord / swarm guardian AI after nuke: they could get stuck in an endless patrol loop between the edge of the map and the team's temple. Now after nuke finishes, they will attack towards enemy temple
  
• Removed potential add-on error as noted by Rivalz. This bug didn't cause any problems but given the previous lift-off mineral exploit, could make others in the game think someone was cheating.
  
• Corrected refunds for medicvac dropship and thor - were higher than the intended 66%
  
• If players from each team exited the game before the intro battle finished (due to lag, or just leaving), then the insta spawn powerups were not properly cleaned up. Extra ones would be given to P1/P5, when they should have been removed.
  
• Upgrade sharing was screwed up, where the enemy team of the same race would receive the upgrades too. This made 1v1 your mirror race kind of lame: I research mind control to get an edge against my enemy, and they get it for free...
  
• Mothership AI seemed out of whack with it attacking much more than intended and not flying around and suiciding as much. This was somewhat unintended, although I had wanted it to attack a bit more and suicide less, but not that much.
  
• Nuke improved: it now places mines over the entire map. Mines do 210 dmg again up from 180 (makes a big difference in splash damage). Nuke now steals enemy units that are directly attacking your temple, so it is much more of a counter vs infest and divine judgement/MC. Nuke kills enemy units around the enemy temple, it already did this but the location has been moved a little closer to the enemy spawn point, so it will get more enemies. Note that all specials kill all enemy units waiting in the spawn box, so for nuke in particular it's best to go ASAP after spawn, while for infest and divine judgement is best to wait until the units have been moved to the field.
  
• Mothership +1 armor, +10 dmg to 60.
  
• Immortal +50 hp, -75 shields (150/100), +1 armor to 5.
  
• Marauder +10 hp to 80.
  

One other thing I was thinking about but forgot: the broodlings that spawn after the brutalisk, currently is 12 but was thinking I could drop it lower, to like 6, and make them invincible but automatically die after the 135 broodling tick timer. This could be interesting?

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

Looks like I never actually uploaded 2.43 here, oh well.

New version 2.45:

• Fixed boom spawn bug (introduced 2.44): when players used boom just as enemy spawned, it would give the units in the spawning area to Neutral and they'd remain there stuck for the rest of the game.
  
• Tried, once again, to fix bugs with spawned units from Warp Prism and Nydus Worm from cluttering up the spawn box. Hopefully got it this time, 5th time lucky!
  
• Reavers and immortals now spawn in the same spot that Terran tanks do, slightly above/below the temple away from the rest of the units. They won't slow your army down as much now.
  
• Warp Prism changed to 44/44 hp/shields and 4 armor, from 40/120. This thing flies around in the back of the army so much that it was quite difficult to kill. May potentially nerf this further or tweak AI in future.
  
• Guardians -2mg. They did 26, which is the same as a void ray, but obviously have huge range, can be massed and have devourers for protection. This should help make them a smidgen fairer.
  

I had a look at the idea I presented above with the broodlings, but unfortunately their default timer lasts for a very long time - about 110 seconds on the ingame spawn clock. That's almost 2 full spawn cycles, which is way too long. I was hoping they'd last for about 30, but it's not to be. Unfortunately there's no way to force them to last for a shorter time.

In my play tests of this and 2.44, the nuke is indeed a lot more powerful now. Possibly overpowered. Although it's still situational so sometimes it'll be awesome and other times it'll be meh.

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

Found a minor bug in all the 2.4x versions so far: no roar sound is played when the silo brutalisk dies.

Anyone found any other bugs?

I'm wondering what to do with the Immortal. At the moment it just doesn't seem to be worth building most of the time. I think it's the kind of marginal unit that if you try to improve it too much, it becomes a must-build unit, and I don't want that. Also the marauder may be suffering from the same problem - perhaps bumping that up to 5 or maybe even 6 armor (with lower HP) would work?

Hmm, for some reason, I just assumed you removed the roar sound or something. I haven't seen any other bugs so far. I do see the Immortal being built but people use it mostly in the beginning. Good when you combine them with Archons or reavers most of the time, or sometimes Dragoons. As for marauder, I doubt it'll ever become useful as it would only be best more against zerglings and zealots. Though as for Zerg, people always make Ultralisks instead, and Protoss never really makes that many zealots.