So after playing last night, I feel that it is very well done and fun under the right conditions. There's a lot I like about it, the terrain is well done, the EUDs are well implemented so that it feels like you're playing more than just a map, a true game of its own. The balance seems reasonably good when the teams are balanced to have similar experience levels.
Thank you, this is the culmination of a month straight of work and a small number of people are starting to recognize not just the effort but that there's something here. I appreciate that immensely.
I see the required players as a major issue with the current state of Battle.net. Have you considered making it so only one of the town factions is required for each team? This would allow you to play with as few as 2 players and I think could make for more interesting team combinations. It might even be cool to change it so that one of the heroes belongs to the undead faction to give the teams a more even balance of player numbers, although I understand that would be a significant change that you probably don't want to do.
This is a tough one to be sure. We have to be realistic about the state of Bnet at current but at the same time, if the vision is two separate teams of multiple individuals coming together to complete different objectives, there are realities there too. That being said, I feel like the map is as low-player as it could be. I was actually toying with the idea at one point to make Nemesis his own player-controlled hero and give Park something else, but I think I'd be hard pressed finding an 8th for some of these lobbies with 7 already being an issue. On top of that I feel like each faction player has a TON of stuff they can be doing/assessing at any given moment and so just combining slots doesn't solve for our human limits of maximum posible inputs. Bottom line is I hear you, but this is probably not changing.
The medic healing system feels limiting, I don't feel like you should have to sit around waiting to heal as long as you do for hero units, it slows down the gameplay in a way that didn't feel that fun to me. Maybe this is just my inexperience with the game speaking, but I would prefer to see a heal system that could heal units faster/instantly with the expense of being on a timer of some sort so you can only do it at whatever rate you set. I know there was some discussion of speeding up medic healing via EUDs, and maybe you can get that system to work well, but in my experience, EUD unit loops to do things like healing come at the expense of major trigger lag, particularly for those on crappy systems, but regardless of system, too many unit looping EUD triggers will cause you problems. Having to run your hero to a specific location and wait ~30s or however long you want to set for balance for a heal seems like a great alternative to me.
So at one time the Undead did have a time-based healer that would go on CD every time it was used for ~2 minutes. It didn't work as well as I would've liked but it was pre-EUD so we have more options now. I know people get bent out of shape worrying about loops with EUDs but I've done a few while working with Mil and Doodler, and it seems like you absolutely can use them in a non-performance impacting way if done smartly. I think this is something I'll look into but I'd be lying if I said this was high-priority at this moment.
The balance of the hero force felt weird, collecting civs and getting piddly non-upgradeable units didn't feel very rewarding to me. I think it would be cool if heroes could slowly upgrade their units maybe based on completing some sort of objectives so they experienced a power gain over time (more than just collecting the few weapons scattered around the map which don't improve their squad units at all, only the heroes). Again maybe it's just my inexperience speaking or a different vision of what would be fun than you, but I personally would like to see the hero squads have more relevance than they do currently which I believe upgrades would be a good solution for without having to change anything too substantially. Probably would need to buff undead a bit to compensate.
I like the idea in spirit but in practice this is going to be hard to do at a level that doesn't imbalance the map. Games do go on for a good awhile (A good match is typically 45mins - 1.5hr in my experience.) and so its hard to judge how exactly to implement the scale for this. One idea I like and that I think will help with some problems we've had with idle heroes is giving them rewards for number of kills. This could be in resources they can use for upgrades, or it could directly translate into recruited units rather than the current civ system. I don't know exactly what I want yet, but I do want to add some hero scaling, just without ruining the faction balance, which is a tall order.
Have you considered giving the hero units spells (it would be incredibly easy to do for the ghost units since it's built into their AI)? I know I suggested stim while playing, but there's a ton of other spells which as far as I can tell are completely unused which could give the heroes more diversity. Maybe one has DMatrix while another has irradiate or ensnare or plague. Tons of options and I think worth considering. Since DWeb and Dark Swarm are completely unused you could even make targeting spells which detected the DWeb or swarm and replaced them with some trigger effect.
Thought about this for the first time last night, and I have ideas for sure, but nothing concrete yet. I'm also toying with the idea of switching Carlos to an infantry unit like Jill and Brad to make them more uniform. It'd also make it less work to switch his weapons since I need to do an extra step for the goliath turret every time. I think escape or utility spells would be my focus since the worst part of being a hero at current is when you get surrounded. I'll probably need some help figuring out what I can feasibly do for these.
Thanks for the feedback and thanks for playing!!
