What's new about this?
- Infinate mana upgrade system
- Infinate leveling system
- Advanced hero kills to cash system
- Unit priority system (allows summons to target specific units)
- Allied spells system (option to allow allies to target you)
- Aim specific hero system (manual control over spell direction)
Why else play?
- 9 heroes and 45 unique spells
- Spells interact with each other
- Spells use an accurate chance system (1-100%)
- Unique passive abilities
- All spells use sound FX
- Cool password system (unlocks secret hero)
- Complex vision and range system
- Immaculate presentation
Gameplay
Like all the other AoS maps, the idea is to kill as many units and buildings as possible in order to upgrade your hero and eventually destroy the enemy base. Most of the fun is about combining spells and using them at the right time in the right situation to kill the enemy players. Work out the best combos and learn the counters for each hero.
Axe
Blink Strike: Teleports to an allied or enemy hero and staggers them for 1 second.
Inner Spirit: Uses his strength to restore his shields (+1000)
Psi Blade: Impels enemy heroes to fight him and gives a +10% chance to reincarnate.
Projection: Generates an image of an allied or enemy hero.
Reincarnation: Gives a 23% chance to reincarnate if he dies.
Phantom
Switch: Switches positions between you and an allied or enemy hero.
Division: Generates 2 images and gives a +11% chance to conjure image.
Transit: Switches positions between you and an image.
Oversight: Summons a powerful air unit.
Conjure Image: Gives an 6% chance every second to generate an image
Trueblade
True Strike: Teleports to an enemy hero and summons an air unit for 3 seconds.
Ghost Walk: Renders the substance of his body and goes out of sight.
Time Walk: Teleports and transforms his body into the location of an image and increases allied spell timers by 25%.
Blade Fury: Summons powerful images near enemy heroes anywhere on the map.
Prosperous: Gives +60 armor.
Slayer
Spellbind: Teleports enemy heroes to your location.
Violate: Destroys an allied spawn unit and uses the energy from the dead spirit to gain +75 energy points.
Firestorm: Summons 3 ground units.
Eliminate: Summons a powerful air unit and gives a 15% chance to transfer his remaining energy points into gold.
Estates: Improves generated gold by 50%.
Techie
Remain: Surrounds his vehicle in a defensive energy and obstructs targeted damage.
Rewire: Uses advanced machinery to reprogram the mind of an enemy hero and staggers them for 3.5 seconds.
Silence: Targets enemy heroes and prohibits their use of spell conjuring.
Reform: Adjusts his vehicle structure and transforms into a transit bomb.
Reset: Gives a 63% chance to reform again.
Destroyer
Gateway: Teleports his vehicle and other allied heroes to his Temple.
Trueshot: Summons an air unit.
Spell Shield: Surrounds his vehicle in a defensive energy and obstructs targeted spells.
Siren: Uses advanced machinery to resonate an intrusive siren and staggers enemy heroes for 5 seconds.
Cripple: Destroys surrounding weak units. Uses 50 energy points for each kill.
Bandit
Metamorphosis: Transforms into a Queen (ensnare active)
Destroy: Kills 3 spawn units.
Ruination: Targets enemy heroes and steals 50% of their gold. Also reverts their energy points. Lasts 15 seconds.
True Form: Morphs into his true form.
Languish: Weakens enemy passive abilities by 50%.
Beastmaster
Conversion: Convinces a spawn unit to join his army.
Unify: Teleports converted units to an enemy hero.
Sacrifice: Destroys 5 of his spawn units and uses the energy from the spirit world to summon a powerful being.
Vitality: Uses his inner powers to heal his entire army.
Retaliate: Gives a 23% chance to summon an air unit every time his army suffers a death.
Sorcerer (secret hero)
Defend: Teleport to an allied Defensive Tower.
Motion: Summons 7 ground units. Lasts 6.5 seconds.
Impel: Targets enemy heroes and assigns them to their current locations in 5 seconds.
Starfall: Summons an air unit and staggers enemy heroes.
Restore: Gives +150 energy points and gives a 26% chance to triple his energy gain.

Picture of map layout please?
Sounds fun, I'll give it a go.

As usual, your spells fail. There's no real theme to any of your heroes. Also, too many repeated spells.

I'll give it a try.

It looks pretty fun to start with. And despite what TZ said, it does seem as though most of your heroes have a theme.

What i dont like is the secret pass system. In a game like this, giving someone an edge just because they know more about a little part of it is just wrong. Take out the secret hero, and it will be fun to play.

I agree. However, if the secret hero isn't more powerful than any other hero (if it's balanced), then it should be all right...

just leave the topic alone i dont want emos in here.. theres no repeated spells and the characters are themed.. im not going to waste my time explaining.
the secret hero is balanced.. therefore its not really an advantage.. just a bonus hero for fun? besides its quite hard to get a score good enough to find out the password anyway.

Anyway.. im currently working on version 1.5 and that will be the final version.. theres a glitch ive got to fix and a few other balances then its done!

I'd have to agree with TZ for now, unfortunately.. There is a weird.. staleness.. about the descriptions of your heroes and spell. Could be that they're all one word spells... could be that there's a lot of numbers involved.. could be that nothing stands out.. I don't know...

But I will not comment on this anymore until I've played this...

btw ..
F-
or what purpose do y-
ou type like this? Th-
ere IS a grammatical r-
ule for using hyphens t-
o connect words.

(a very small and funny detail .. ..don't have to do anything to it...[it does make it a lil harder to read])

I am not emo, but even if I was, that his not germane to this discussion.

"No repeated spells"? There's about fifty spells which summon Hallucinations, which could be okay except that you do nothing with them, and a motherload of direct damage spells (such as "summons a powerful air unit"). Not to mention all the teleports. Also, most of your spells have secondary effects which have nothing to do with the primary effect, which is annoying.

My main problem, though, is that despite your opinions to the contrary, none of your characters have themes. A few have rudimentary themes that could be developed, but all have some spells outside the theme and none have original themes. To show you what I mean, I will give you an example of how to design a character WITH a theme.

To start with, I'll take a Goliath and name him "Reality Hacker". His first spell will summon a Science Vessel, or heal and recharge it if he already has one. (Max of one Vessel.) The Vessel can move freely around the map. Spell two will summon a Disruption Web under the Vessel. Spell three gives bonus mana to all heroes standing under a Disruption Web. His final spell teleports him to a Disruption Web of his choice. (ComSat aiming system.) The passive spell would be to let all Disruption Webs act as spawn points. If you had more spells per player (by using a Templar Archives or transport for casting, for example), you could use the Disruption Webs/Vessel in more interesting ways.

Unlike certain people, I have actually played this map and am basing the following comments on actual experience, rather than on supposition and prejudice. Surely what determines the quality of a map is the map itself, not how the descriptions happen to be written up on its SEN thread, after all...

First, some good points:
-Congratulations on creating a game with decent pacing. Fights seem to be just the right speed; fast enough to be exciting and to have a real chance of someone getting killed, while not too fast to maneuver and use tactics. It's not a trivial thing to pull off.
-It's an easy game to learn, which should not be underestimated as a map virtue. The quality of the games that you actually get, after all, are going to be determined to a large extent by what opponents you can get, so a map that can easily adopt new players, in practice, will wind up having better games than maps with a lot of complicated and "original" features. Not that this map doesn't have some original features; it just has enough familiarity and virtuous simplicity to be easy to pick up.
-Despite what people say based only on the thread text, I find the characters fairly interesting, with definite differences in play style between them. It's fun to try and figure out how to get kills with different heroes. Even in just a couple of games, I've seen people think of some pretty clever things, like pulling me into hostile sunkens using the ghost's L1, or getting behind me on my running path with a siege-moded tank to take an opportunity shot while I was at low HP, then warping away so that my side couldn't retaliate.

Now, a few issues:
-Some of the spells are buggy. When I was Beastmaster, an enemy Beastmaster's L3 ultras kept spawning at my hero, enabling me to kill them on the spot. I heard some other players talking about things not working as well.
-I don't know whether or not this is intentional, but some of your bridges aren't actually passable.
-Is there a life limit? People seemed to respawn indefinitely when I played. Unfortunately, if there's no final death, then it becomes nearly impossible to defeat a player who is in the lead, because even if you kill him, he'll just come back. In my two games as Beastmaster, I basically dominated the entire time, because even when I was new at the hero, it was instantly obvious to me that I could use my converted spawn and vision from the allied comp to feed at multiple lanes simultaneously. As a result, I was always the strongest hero on the field, and even though the enemy was occasionally able to find ways to kill me, those deaths did very little to reduce my overall supremacy. Of the issues that I'm raising, I'd say that this one is probably the most serious, since it relates to the basic dynamic of the game.
-I haven't played enough times and with enough heroes to comment definitively on the balance, since one side or other has got to lose, and whoever is losing is going to complain that their characters are weaker. That said, sometimes I did seem to have an easy time of things. For instance, I can see how the tank is meant to be good at "run and gun"-style fighting, with its turret and wraith spell, but it didn't seem too difficult for me to simply assert myself over it with the ultralisk's speed and converted summons.
-The vision system "skips" occasionally, causing the hero to become deselected. You can get it back in an instant using its hotkey, but if that instant is in the middle of a fight, it can be bad news.

All in all, it's a pretty nice map, though not a perfect one, and I'm interested to see how it develops with future versions.

Totally disagree. And yes, I have now played this map.

While I'd agree that some heroes have certain spells that are quite unique and help develope gameplay mechanics and strategies... Many spells have no niche and are far far too unpolished and/or limited to have any effect. Many spells are not useful, and most spells are uncreative and uninspired.

For example, The Bandit is riddled with boring spells and misplaced niche.
1. Metamorphesis

• Queen hardly spawns long enough to act as a teleporting spell OR at most times even an ensnare spell. Give it more time so players can use this spell to move into the battle area and use ensnare.
  
• Metamorphesis itself does NOT fit with a bandit.. what the fuck kinda bandit "metamorphesize"? This is excusable.. except...
  
• The name does not fit with the ensnare properties of the spell. Metamorphesis denotes changing into something indefinately or temporarily... not for like 2 seconds to slow down others. "Entangle" would've worked better
  

2. Destroy

• HO HO.. Hooboy.. "Destroy".. what a FASCINATING spell!!!! [/sarcasm]
  
• Kills 3 enemy spawns.. wtf does that do... and How does this fit with being a Bandit at all? Bandits are theives.. They can steal things and yes.. kill things for money.. but any heroes can kill things...
  

3. Ruination

• Name makes no sense, and does not relate to what the spell does at all....
  
• This is probably the only spell that fits the hero's niche. Altho u can argue metamorphesis and true form fits together... it doesn't fit with a "Bandit" theme... Maybe u can name it the "Skeleton Theif" .. but we all know how u hate anything with more than one words..
  
• Effect is not explicit enough. Afflicted heroes wouldn't know what happened.. and there is no pre-spell effect, i.e. no way to dodge or predict. I.e. Boring.
  

4. TrueForm

• Boring... Not enough effects, and doesn't fit with being a Bandit. Tho this is probably the ONLY spell for the bandit that has ANY destructive value.
  

.. Another example is the tank...
Since when does a tank teleport back to base..... but okay let's ignore that.
we'll say that it is a highly modern machine with teleporting capabilities....
Why the hell would it want to teleport back to base? It ought to be an offensive or even a situational one.. such as spawn a corsair, and move tank to d-web.... Or transform into a wraith temporarily.. allowing fast movements. This can be tied with the tank's siege mode.

The wraith spell itself is boring too. U can add some explosive events or replace the wraiths so it looks more like a spell. You can also spawn the wraiths cloaked...

lastly.. WHYYY the F*CK are ALL the spells One Word ?!?!?!?
There's nothing wrong with "Heroic Strike" or "Food for Thought" or even "Curse of the Swarm" .. Nothing...

All in all, after THREE tries... you are STILL having troubles on the same things... The problem is that you are way, way, WAY too methodical. Games are made to be fun, not a big mindfuck, frustrating map...
If you ask me, I srsly think you'd excel in maps that are not as dynamic as AoS's. Maps such as Defense or Puzzle maps such as the Puzzling, Mafia, and etc.... Because i truly feel you have your own style, and your professionalism is way beyond me. AoS is just not your cup of tea.

Okay. I played this today and i have to say that your terrain is huge and quite boring. It was basically just a race for people to kill sunkens. I was Axe and i don't know if it's supposed to be this way but It was freaking impossible to kill techie with axe, i only killed him once because he had 98 hp from sunkens.

Also half of the time people had no idea if their spell did anything even if they did read the mission objectives. Most of the spells were very boring and mostly defensive.

I did think you laid everything out quite nicely though. It wasn't messy it was just boring and unbalanced in some places.

Here is an anology of what you've done wrong...

You have an apple...
You want to eat the goodies that's inside it, but you need to shave off the skin.
What you did wrong was that you spent so much time trying to polish and shave every little bit of the skin
that before you know it.. you've already shaved the apple to the core.

Edit: To add to this analogy. The skin of the apple does give the apple texture when eating. It is also an antioxidant, so skin (i.e. imperfection) is not necessarily a bad thing.

Some maps require true professionalism, (i.e. Puzzle maps, as I've said).. It's not really your fault that you're uncreative. What you lack you excel in other areas... so I highly recommend you try something else.

who peels the skin off apples before they eat them...?

*raises hand*

weirdo

I kinda like this map... I'll have to play it more tho
good so far

pfft.. you like HS...

my feedback:
terrain is mostly unused. There is almost no need for the terrain between 3 paths except for base rushing.
its rediciously easy to base camp and farm
many spells are unclear of EXACTLY what they do
medics are a bad choice for stat points (especially since they can wall). Use a scv and mienrals so you can mine through units
Unclear that double MC is choose your hero
do not use sunkens.. they do explosive damage, and give small units a huge advantage... unless you already accounted for this...
fast units have a significant advantage on this map
for many heroes, using 5 civs on the passive ability is a very good idea (at the start of game). Choosing anything else is kinda wasteful
Although you have an infinite upgrade system, it's wasted when you don't need infinite mana. Most spells (from what I've seen) have cooldowns.
Could you maybe run a zerg ai script, and have the zerling/hydra spawn upgrade as time goes by. Maybe attack, or ling speed, etc.

Overall, I leik the map.
@UU: yes, yes I do. AND I'M PROUD OF IT!

Err...don't photon cannons do explosive damage? Nevermind, was thinking of the dragoon for some reason. I just need to go find someone to play with, only reason I don't play AoS more, because I need at least 5 other people. D:

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Feb 3 2010, 4:42 am by Taylor Swift.