I started playing with Ex/Dem0n/Heinermann and did actually play this to completion. They died and/or crashed and/or raged, so I was using saves by the end, so it was essentially solo play. My elapsed time was over 5 hours, though by the end most of it was not active playing and I ground out way more upgrades than I needed.
1. One word to describe this map: Tedious. All of the manual gathering is tedious. The unit pathing is awful pretty much everywhere and fighting with it is tedious. Moving even medium size groups of units through the areas is tedious. I couldn't recommend playing this map in anything less than double speed.
2. There should be some handling of a player's stuff when people crash or quit. (or at least just remove it) Currently, you have to kill their stuff manually to get it out of the way and fight against the auto-ally hypers, and sometimes build turrets to be able to see it to fight against the auto-ally hypers.
3. Never figured out what the Witch Hut in the Sticky Swamp did, if it even does anything.
3a. Same for the Fleet Beacon, but I couldn't click on it, so I can't tell you its name.
4. At least two of the spawn triggers for Sticky Swamp are bad because they eventually lead to an unplacable mess like this:
https://i.imgur.com/gpLCiu0.png (Displayed text not chosen intentionally but appropriately captures my feelings as a player.)
4a. The whole Sticky Swamp area is a pathing nightmare that should be avoided in general. So I just dealt with getting two unplacable errors every morning and moved on with my life.
5. More on pathing: Say you buy an SCV in the first town and then want your Probe to leave back through the exit you came in, back to the forest. Better make sure you click around the beacons otherwise you're going to step on the other beacons.
6. More pathing/movement related: Moving any large group of units through the passages is a pain. You could do it one at a time but that will take forever, center view will drive you crazy, and stuff will probably attack you. (especially in later areas where bunkers will just die) You could do multiple units, but you might end up putting through too many and getting stuck because units that go through will already be in the exit. So you get an endless warping around until you manage to click some units out. This gets really bad if you have any Ultralisks.
7. Speaking of towns, why is one player able to buy more than one preplaced Factory or Nexus? Sure, you can build them, but space is at a premium in towns. I was the only one in the game by the end, so I accidentally ended up walking over more purchase beacons than would be useful.
8. Related, I'm hoping each player can buy their own second garden. I was the only one in the game by that point, so I never got to find out.
8a. It would be nice if you could fast travel to the second garden, too.
9. 12 HP is not a meaningful amount for the Probe, especially when two deaths means you lose. (is this supposed to be a casual game or what?) 12 HP means you never, ever use your Probe to explore there until you know you have enough armor that everything in the area does 0.5 damage.
9a. If you die (for the first time) during the boss fight, I don't see any real way to participate in the game again.
10. I didn't really explore too many of the late-game areas, so maybe there's more to the game, but I just farmed minerals (literally) every couple of minutes to get a ton of upgrades instead of actually playing.
10a. There wasn't really enough outside the towns to make me care about anything besides reaching the last town, getting all the garden level ups, and grinding upgrades until I could fight the boss.
10b. Before the boss, a character tells me to get 60+ upgrades, 10+ SCVs and Drones, and 10000+ gas. The map may as well just give it to me because really that just translated to "go mostly AFK and check in every morning to gather plants and repair bunkers near geysers", since there's not enough to keep exploring fun.
11. A cap on upgrades would be helpful when more is no longer useful. Even if the cap were 100 upgrades after they stopped doing anything, it would've saved me some minerals (equivalent to time, in this map).
11a. 255 zerg armor upgrades + 2 bonus armor for Ultralisk = 257 % 256 = 1 armor upgrade for Ultralisks. Oops.
12. Can the torch light more than a two tile radius? Especially when you have limited torches and can't really predict where it's going to place in relation to you. Maybe have an upgrade to get a light and torches with a larger vision range.
13. To rehash what Ex said, you say this map was worked on on-and-off for 15+ years, so I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume most of the text and story was from when you were a lot younger. I'll leave it to you if you want to have a bunch of "jokes" about a trans character in 2019 as well as all of the other silly shit, but can it at least be funny? Ass Dick Town and that kind of stuff wears thin after the first minute, and to emphasize the point of how tedious this map is, this map takes a lot of minutes.
14. As Heinermann said, the cost of a lot of things is not always obvious but the buying is not optional once you touch that beacon if you have enough.
14a. Raw materials exchange (minerals to gas) is an absolute trap since minerals will end up being the bottleneck once you secure some geysers. (ie, gas mines automatically, minerals are all manual.) Combine this with bad pathing for more frustration.
15. The boss fight was actually kind of cool. There, I said something nice.
15a. Actually, once I lost and reloaded, I knew how to set up for it in an optimal way, which was, you guessed it, very tedious.
Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 26 2019, 2:33 am by Moose. Reason: Cleaned up a little
