no refund

in addition to the refund glitch for armories i have noticed that since the hyper updating of Shield batteries buildings near it can be hurt much easier even with the shield batteries. This is mainly when infested bombing runs are made.

It also has the side affect of reducing attacks made by infantry towards the shield battery as they will instead target cannons for that brief second. The cannons will not take damage as it is too brief to dent beyond their shields. So effectievly the shield has become more resiliant to troops and other buildings arround it more vulnerable to bombs.

If there is a way to elimate the brief interuption invincibility that would be best otherwise i would look for a longer update time as this will make it more balanced to attacks the way it use to be but shorter to be helpful enough to allow bombing runs to continue shortly after the first run has expired.

@darksnow: That would allow people to "scuttle" substantial amounts of equipment if their death is imminent.

@killer_sss: Thanks for the armory refund bug, at least its not MORE than the cost this time...
About the shield updating, yea I noticed that, I didn't think it was that big a deal but I'll play around with it.

sorry to give the wrong impression but it is more than the cost +5 minerals vs +2 from the other. i was trying to say plus as in net gain.


oh just curious how does the spawn on barracks work? I tried it with a few different vehicles and the time i built it with the overlord it never spawned ghosts. Not quite sure why. The game lasted about an hour too with about 4 barracks. I don't know if certain units are restricted based on which ship u select or what. just found it a little wierd.

Also someone mentioned earlier about maybe a switch or something that moved units inside ship to the unload spot. Idk about others but i see more and more reason to add this as it would save lots of time and unstuck units that are trapped alot.


something wierd with healing on the carrier also. I go to heal and it doesn't heal me it just pops up the heal message and then i still have to wait another minuit for heal.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 20 2009, 9:15 pm by killer_sss.

@killer_sss:
There is no restriction of which troop type you get. It is a randomized pair of switches designed to give equal probability to all 3 types. I suppose it's an extreme co-incidence to get no ghosts for a long time like that.

When unloading, if you click unload again immediately after, it auto-moves and auto-orders all troops to the bay until finished unloading.
However, this does not help SCV's. I could add a shuttle or like you said some kind of control to teleport men.

The carrier most likely had an interceptor fly over the HQ. Sigh... I'll make a trigger for every ship so that interceptors dont count.

1.49 is Out

-Minerals are now slightly restricted in how randomly they appear. The map is split into "two halves" by proximity to either team's HQ.
Minerals may not land on one side continously, there is a maximum "lead" of 16 minerals during which full randomness is still there. If one side gets ahead by 24 minerals, the next meteor must land on the opposite half of the map. Ofcourse, if you venture into enemy territory and get away with mining, that is still your reward.

-Minerals now spawn more "smoothly" and a bit faster overall, since in good games there alot of cheesy fighting over 1 mineral spot.
The old death count for mineral spawn subtraction chart:
Mineral Fields --------- DC Subtraction
0 or 1 -------------------- 8
2 or 3 -------------------- 4
4 to 7 -------------------- 2
8 to 15 ------------------- 1
The new death count for mineral spawn subtraction chart:
Mineral Fields --------- DC Subtraction
0 --------------------------- 8
1 --------------------------- 7
2 --------------------------- 6
3 --------------------------- 5
4 or 5 --------------------- 4
6 or 7 --------------------- 3
8 to 11 ------------------- 2
12 to 15 ------------------ 1

-Carrier's interceptors will no longer trigger the heal, interfering with the carrier's healing due to the cooldown.

-Fixed the Neutronium Bomb Bay (Terran Armory) refund for building outside of ship. (thanks, killer_sss)

-The stacked "display" buildings will no longer become targetable when a player leaves (thanks, azala)

-Added a protoss shuttle named "Turbolift (for stuck men)" for those who have been frustrated by stuck SCV's and troops.
It will spawn only after you pick a ship, and explode if you die.

-Added zerg cocoons in player's ship equipment areas labelled "Do NOT Lift Buildings"

-Added neutral arbiters to the unit buffer area. Bombs and troops now "fade in". This is trivial right now but is a sort of pre-experiment for potential changes in 1.50

-Changed build times for terran structures. They are now all proportional to cost, at a rate of 1 mineral = 1 second.

-Updated values in old error messages if over 5 Extra Fuel Tanks or over 5 Compression Fuel Tanks were built.

Your Input Needed...
-There is now an issue of the shuttle potentially providing extra troop storage if you kind of.. micro it.
Load ship, load shuttle, load ship, unload ship, unload shuttle, unload ship.
The location I use for troop capacity can't include air because of the shuttle and zerg cocoons I've added in. The cocoons were terrible, They semi-count as units! I would stop loading but not get the "full" message. fail.

-With the arbiters fading in units, I now feel more prepared to create new items. There are two "ways" I see. I can do both.
The first way is to turn the fuel refinery into a robotics facility. Control is given when a ship touches it, and you build a unit for fuel at the same price of 1 mineral to 1000 fuel. This frees up the Zerg Drone from "Covert Ore To Fuel" to a new item. These could be missile turrets and could be say, the hero corsair shooting once for each fire.

The second way is to eradicate the photon torpedo rapid reload upgrade. Instead, make photon torpedoes a more expensive engineering bay. The current shield generators would be the starport+control tower. The science facility, covert ops, and physics labs could then be 3 types of 'Cannons' with a single "Fire Cannons" command for them in the dropship. They could be any air unit and would fade in from the buffer. For example a basic cannon could be hero corsair, while ops/lab add-ons make devourers and BC's. The cooldowns or damages would be changed for the fact you would now be able to fit less Devourers on a ship.

Post has been edited 8 time(s), last time on Aug 22 2009, 9:50 pm by Tank_7.

1.49b

Just an emergency fix, when copy-pasting the new healing triggers for touching the HQ, i didnt notice the "Planetsmasher" trigger said men so PS couldnt heal. Now fixed. My bad.

Edit: I had someone say they really wanted to see a "warp drive" which brings me back to the possibility of Robo Facility being warp instead of fuel in 1.50... I could still have 2 new weapons with Science Facility / Addon scenario, and zerg drone stays as the fuel thing. What do you guys think?

All I can say is...Awesome looking! so far

I have yet to play a game but I have always loved your games tank, mostly because your fetish with customizing ships. One of my favorites was playing that chess like ship game with you. I havn't played it in a while mostly because I have to teach the noobs how to play, and it's boring, and then I never play with them again, and then the cycle repeats. Any chance of making a tutorial for that game?

Anyways, can't wait to play this, and maybe I'll write up a review for you when i'm done

Do you mean Spaceship Combat?

honestly i think the warp drive would mess things up a bit but changin the torpedos out isn't my favorite idea either. idk what to do. This is kinda why ive been quite since i suggested the change to fuel. I would like to see it happen but i'm not sure what new abilities to implement once the fuel is changed.

Okay, ws-Tank_7!
Usually random people don't know what they want. They are going to support anything you propose (like: "WOW! Teleport along the map! Of course, of course we want it!"). However, your main goal of changes is improving gameplay. Don't let random people influence your well-thought design decisions. Alright, this is not probably the case, but just to express my opinion.

Robotics Bay sounds okay. However, I think it won't change much in gameplay or user friendliness. Both variants seem the same to me. Go on and add this if you up to experimenting.

But what I like the most is the second variant:
My balance idea here is to have some kind of basic weapon for Science Facility and mutually complementary weapons for addons. For example having a Devourer for Physics Lab and a Corsair for Covert Ops. The balance should be built the way that using these weapons in combination grants a super advantage. However a ship (except probably a Planetsmasher) should not be able to build both of these in such quantities that gives such an advantage, so the teamwork and specialization is not the must but encouraged there.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 24 2009, 7:23 am by Wormer.

I agree with the removal of Rapid Reload. It is still too slow even if you get the upgrades, and it takes up enormous amounts of space. Also if you make Devourers harder to get, then some ships will be harder to use for ship combat...

I like having rapid reload in the game; from a balance point of view, missiles with rapid reload are a very different weapon from slow missiles, since they focus on dealing more damage over time, while an equivalent space-worth of slow missiles focuses on the amount of damage that can be done in a single salvo.

The change to fuel is an interesting idea. The one problem I see is that only one person can control the building at a time, so if you have a teammate who is afk, reading the tutorial, or sitting in base unresponsively for whatever reason, you won't be able to refuel. One system you might consider is giving each players two terrain squares (and a selector unit) somewhere near their interior or dropship, with one square corresponding to automatically fueling to capacity and the other corresponding to not fueling. Start out the selector unit on autorefuel and the procedure will be very much simplified for new players (since they just need to go to the forge) while at the same time freeing up a key. Not wanting to refuel is suitably rare that the fueling system doesn't really need its own place in the dropship.

As for the shuttle and its issues, to be honest, I never really saw the need for it in the first place. If someone gets an SCV stuck, that's a fault with their planning. But if you really want to keep it, you'll just need a long air location covering all the interiors; then all you need is a set of triggers that creates a number of trigger-immobilized "placeholder" units in the bay, in an un-disruptive spot, equal to the combined number of probes, scvs, marines, ghosts, and firebats in the air (no, you don't have to make a specific trigger for each combination...just handle the placeholder creation and removal for each unit type individually). The units inside the shuttle may not count towards your maximum, but the placeholder units will.

In terms of implementing new weapons, there are a few ways you can do it. You can get a new spot in the dropship as described above, which I'd favor over losing the rapid reload upgrade. You could swap missiles with shields and let the unused science facility add-on represent another type of upgraded missile; a new missile would be much more interesting than yet another variation on the "fill them up with acid spores and hit them with fast-attacking units" theme. If you want even more space in the dropship, things will have to change a little bit; you might have to change to a system where only the control units that are used by the player are loaded, which (with the fuel mod) would limit each player to 6 weapon types (unless you allowed a second dropship to spring into existence only when they have more than 6 weapon types), but the game itself would not be so limited, since there could be different combinations of 6 weapons. As for buildings to represent a vast number of weapons, you could imitate Sand Castle Wars: allow buildings (though probably not the barracks) to build (not for free), and when they do, remove the unit, give away the building (so that it can't build again) and mark it with a burrowed unit under it (cycle through these periodically and remove ones without buildings on them) to designate a type. Then, for instance, factory-that-has-built-vulture, factory-that-has-built-tank, factory-with-machine-shop-that-has-built-vulture, etc. would all be different weapons. Using a system like that, you would have enough options for dozens of new weapons with all sorts of effects.

Support this, had the same ideas here. Only I thought of a siege tank as a switch between two modes: autofuel ON and autofuel OFF.

@FoxWolf1: Your suggestion for fixing the shuttle issue is pro, thanks. Burrowed zerg on the ground given/taken to equal with the men loaded in the shuttle will work.

As for more missiles, well... I would but I just intended to have only normal SC units/abilities and no like... 'triggered projectiles'.
Someone else can make a map with those.

@Wormer: I like the suggestion of a siege tank because it can be controlled with just a hotkey, and while something like a civilian could probably be ordered with a click on the minimap, it is inevitable many noobs would feel its necessary to look at the unit to move it.
A burrowed zerg would probably work well too.

I also agree with your point of an Afk/Noob sitting on the fuel refinery. I never thought of that being a problem.

could we do another unload function maybe idk? Tank will be what auto fuel not auto? this leads to no fuel if not on auto and maybe 2 much if fuel on. I don't see how this will actually improve the situation besides save a silly function in the transport. As for one person hoggin here is a solution to that if you want that too: the fuel take it away when they are on for too long. Then they must move then come back to turn it back on.

I know its annoying but at the same time I don't wana waste mins buying fuel when i have 5500 and go to 6k and i don't really wana stand and wait for fuel to poor in at intervals. If you make it so they can't buy extra well then you get ships running on 4k fuel that need that extra boost and wont be able to buy it. Idk so many things

a auto-non auto seige tank, then maybe a civ or something that will move and act as a switch to get more gas if you're on non-auto

I finally played this, and just finished a 50-minute long game. Very, very fun. I got my ass handed to me (and I'm sure I gave my teammate a heart attack due to noobieness), but it was a great ass-handing.

This map should be played more often, especially now that the anti hack protection is obsolete.

I have no idea if this was mentioned, but it is impossible for planet smasher or Bc's to get minerals :C

A suggestion I have (if this wasn't fixed) is a building that allows a constant but slow income of resources automatically. This can happen all the time, or if the ship is just above a mineral patch. So instead of mining they can just camp over it.. something similar to Astrogears. All other ships would not have this function. This option could be added so planet smasher and the Bc's can have a base-supplying unit. Dunno if that makes sense.