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Good job with the map! Just a couple of points,
- Have you fixed the bug with the searing arrows?
- During the same game, I thought I built an arbiter tribunal, but I looked later and it had disappeared. Is it a bug, or is my memory just bad?
- The map isn't very newb friendly, not a lot of rush defence, quite complicatedto a starcraft player who doesn't regularly do triggers or know how they work, but I guess Warcraft III is like that anyway.
-Also things are a bit expensive, it took three mines to barely get a decent income. You could tweak the prices down slightly.
-On the other hand, I had too much ore/lumber to do anything with it. I ended up only looking at gas prices and completely ignoring the mineral prices altogether. Can you make minerals/lumber a more integral part of the economy?
-WC3:ROC has an upkeep system that you could incorporate, restricting gas in geysers if they are above a certain supply limit, but this would mean that gold mines never run out.
-Moon Wells in Warcraft heal units, and that is a big advantage for Night Elves, but the lose that ability in Starcraft.
-Lumber for night elves still runs out, although it doesn't in WC3:ROC. Sprites are good, because they don't restrict building space that much. I think its hard to use trees to defend yourself anyway because they don't form a cohesive wall, so having sprites doesn't remove a huge defensive obstacle. If you wanted trees to be a defensive element, you could have less minerals in each patch, say 50 and have 'forests' of mineral patches which you could mine through. Then you could remove the sprites altogether but this would also remove the aesthetics of the game. Another problem is that town hall placement would be severely restricted, whereas in WC3:ROC, town halls are only restricted by gold, not lumber.
To have the Tree of eternity (arbiter trib) you must have the Tree of ages (robo fac)
No the map is not very newb friendly.. it takes a few plays to get used to it. Also the first building you should make is your altar so everybody will have their hero to play with within a minute or so. Early hero rushes with good micro can set the pace of the game.
We decided to keep unit prices a little on the high side so there would be more focus on less units and better micromanagement of them, and also to make the game's 'casters' more useful.
With 3 expos you should have plenty of income.
The upkeep system is a good idea-but then yes the geysers would have to be infinite. Its something for us to think about.
About the moonwells.. we had them but then we decided not to go with having shields at all. We know some races have no way to heal and that came into play with balancing, also in future versions we may have ways to heal units for all races.
When we first started work on the map pears had the lumber system the way you described. 50 min per patch and there were like 500 on the map. It lagged so bad it was unplayable. It looks good with the sprites and less mineral fields and also I didnt spend too much time on it-i am working on the terrain for an ice tileset of the map, where the sections of forest will be thicker and the map generally neater and also 192^2 instead of 128^2.