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The recently created topic in Tourneys of the Diplo Infinity got me thinking: are there any other "competitive" UMS that people used to play, or still do play?
Someone in that topic mentioned LotR, with the note that it wasn't the massing type...so I'm assuming it he was talking about LotRish? I'm wondering if there are any high-level LotRish players in TL! I never was one of the best during the "Golden Age" of LotR, but I'm probably one of the best remaining players on both U.S. servers. I heard that Asia server actually has a great following in it at one point, but I never I obviously never got into it given the lag. Granted, I haven't played since starting college, but I think I would still be fairly high up there among the in-house LotR crew that remains...although after the summer of last year, where we could actually get in-houses almost daily, when I just checked today, the channel and my whole f-list was dead.
There was another person talking about WW2: Death in Europe in the first Diplo Infinity topic! WW2: DIE (as it is/was called) is probably one of the oldest and popular WW2 maps that remain. I think I started playing it since sixth grade or so. I was also never very good at WW2: DIE during its prime years (I always seem to peak when everyone else fell off...), but there were also quite a number of games during last summer. I'm not really sure about how things are now: the two channels that exclusively played WW2 DIE has as of now, completely dried out as well, and my whole f-list for it also has no one on.
Diplo 7.7 and Infinity! I think this was the second "wave" of diplo that became extremely popular on BNet, after the first inception of Diplo Gold 5.3. This is probably the most popular diplo map right now, with its only rival being Diplo Infinity. I've only ever played Diplo casually with my brother, and we only played against pubs. Therefore, while we frequently stomped them, I don't think among the competitive seen we would be seen as anything more than noobs  .
There seems to also be quite a discussion that could be had about why Diplo 7.7 is better than Infinity, or vice versa. Since it is a bad idea to derail the Diplo Infinity tournament thread about such a topic, feel free to talk about it here. I am also quite interested in the debate myself, having played both versions often enough.
On that note, I'm also interested in what other UMS TL has played at a competitive level (although I use the term competitive fairly loosely). Post away!
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i remember playing "Naruto Ultimate Battle" a lot when it was new and was played sooooooo freaking often @ West. I seriously was a top 10 player easily. So many people claimed to be undefeatable it was a joke after a while.
edit: it was somewhat imba for 1v1 but me and a friend of mine never lost since we teamed up for 2v2s.
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On February 17 2010 14:20 xMiragex wrote:
i remember playing "Naruto Ultimate Battle" a lot when it was new and was played sooooooo freaking often @ West. I seriously was a top 10 player easily. So many people claimed to be undefeatable it was a joke after a while.
edit: it was somewhat imba for 1v1 but me and a friend of mine never lost since we teamed up for 2v2s.
Yeahh. I remember joining one of those games once, thinking it was a stupid spam micro game, only to get completely buttraped by someone everyone was calling a newb...-_-;;.
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On February 17 2010 14:24 DarkOptik wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2010 14:20 xMiragex wrote:
i remember playing "Naruto Ultimate Battle" a lot when it was new and was played sooooooo freaking often @ West. I seriously was a top 10 player easily. So many people claimed to be undefeatable it was a joke after a while.
edit: it was somewhat imba for 1v1 but me and a friend of mine never lost since we teamed up for 2v2s. Yeahh. I remember joining one of those games once, thinking it was a stupid spam micro game, only to get completely buttraped by someone everyone was calling a newb...-_-;;.
haha, most people who trash talked were pretty pathetic 95% of the time tbh but yeah it was a LOT more than just micro. I personally feel like i "solved" the game at one point and that is pretty much when i started winning left and right.
you get a HUGE advantage in most UMS games though when you actually know how to micro and most pubs dont
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Snipers was a great competitive UMS.
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SUNKEN DEFENCE 64325235 WAY!
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competitive UMS would be:
Temple Siege (still is #1 apparently) channels: op SEN@East
Desert Strike (i think) channels: creator is from op SEN but every newbie plays this
Diplo channels: i only know Clan Rome@East. lots of clans i knew went to war and drama and died.
Snipers channels: Clan 3oD@East is all i know of theres alot more im sure of
Narutard maps (MOST ARE RIGGED only like 2 are balanced) Channel Clan xMSx@East (be warned they are immature dicks)
LotR too i guess. i got a couple of LoTR friends. channels: clan lotr (lol)
Cat n Mouse (lol.) everywhere
Individual Defenses like Lurker Individual Defense. everywhere
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On February 17 2010 14:38 Saracen wrote:
Snipers was a great competitive UMS.
Oh yeahh. I remember reading about it on TL as well: something about setting traps and whatnot, but that somehow the invention of Bald Locks changed everything, for the worse? Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me could describe it better.
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a lot of people at staredit.net used to compete in uhhh Temple Siege it was like the dota of starcraft
it was pretty ez and imbalanced.... but you would get the crazy game every once in awhile was pretty fun
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Siege of Gondor: Random Heroes
I would say Phantom but thats like a Melee/UMS
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On February 17 2010 14:21 sob3k wrote:
sexypics?
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Hello you were probably referring to my post :D The "Golden Age of LotR" was from like around 4-5 years ago when U.S east had the channels "op mordor" and "op beleriand" active. These days on east the only LotR channel with good players is "op la-" and for lesser skill players "clan lotr."
I myself have not been playing for a while, in favor of laddering to get my apm/mechanics up for SC2, however I would love to play with you. I encourage ALL TL members to try these maps out, they take ALOT of skill, mostly micro, but is VERY VERY multitask heavy.
Maps being played that are good(And yes most are LotRish): Wheel of Time : War of Power, Unholy Crusade, Rage and Wrath, and a decent amount of older maps that just aren't played.
Most popular map: LotR - Rise of Sauron RH [Personally this map is very luck oriented, but the better player/team will almost always win anyways]
Maps to avoid, just mass attack : Last Alliance, Siege of Gondor, Catastrophe
My US East ID is "Frodo"
Btw did you happen to idle : "tce" ?
edit: Oh and these days, high APM koreans also play, and they are good. Sadly its also pretty obvious that a good amount of the LotR community maphack making the game pretty gay at times.
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Competitive UMS is what I do on starcraft, even though most of the communities have died off over the years. I still play Diplo Infinity, though, and hopefully my guide will inspire more people to join that community so it doesn't die as well.
There have been several other significantly competitive UMS communities that I have been a part of over the years:
Civilization, op MGGL on USWest
Spawn Defense
Storm the Fort (channel stf on USEast, mostly dead now)
Nexus D Chaos (op nde on USEast)
I do not like Temple Siege very much, even though it is very popular currently. Storm the Fort is more balanced, has better terrain, and has less gimmicky gameplay, in my opinion.
I was briefly affiliated with the Diplo Gold community, and was friends with AdZ for a time when he was at the top of the community, but I never really got into it like I got into Infinity. I was pretty good though.
There seems to also be quite a discussion that could be had about why Diplo 7.7 is better than Infinity, or vice versa. Since it is a bad idea to derail the Diplo Infinity tournament thread about such a topic, feel free to talk about it here. I am also quite interested in the debate myself, having played both versions often enough.
I can speak to that. In fact, I just did, and was requested to post in this thread what I wrote in the PM, so here it is:
I have played and enjoy both Diplo Infinity and Diplo 7.7, and defend both from attacks by the two communities. Diplo 7.7 had a larger competitive base at its most active than Infinity ever has, and that popularity was a significant reason for the top 7.7 players being as skilled as they are today. Infinity has, in my opinion, reached a similar level of map understanding at the top, but not the same way -- the effort was more collaborative than competitive. At least partially as a result, most of the top infinity players are actually surprisingly lacking in a few basic skills, and I tend to dominate.
However, as long as I am the standard by which the top Infinity players are judged, saying 7.7 requires more skill is a gross exaggeration. The maps are simply different and require different skills. Multitasking is more important in 7.7 due to the large number of free cities and multiple drop routes. The lucrative nature of these drop routes relative to the amount of investment required to perform them makes expansion somewhat of a fast-clicking no-brainer. The challenge comes in fighting the other player over these routes, which places a lot of emphasis on drop warring.
Another major difference is that in 7.7 almost every city is worth more, while costs are roughly the same, so armies are significantly larger and country defenses are relatively less powerful. The poorest country in 7.7 earns several times more than the richest country in infinity. Macro and army positioning are significantly more important skills to have than micro, as there are very, very few small scale battles.
The last major difference, that I'm going to talk about, anyway, is that 7.7's units are less balanced relative to each other. Infantry is extremely powerful in 7.7, +2 damage upgrades for infantry is crazy. While every unit has a legitimate use in infinity (for both expansion and warring), there are so many problems with 7.7's balance that a number of units are completely unusable. ALL air units get utterly, utterly raped by Norwegians, Polish dragoons are completely unusable, normal goliaths are relatively weak, French are unusable for pretty much everything, turkish are laughable, crimeans have virtually no warring application outside of Crimea vs Romania, and on and on. If anything, some of infinity's units have the opposite problem, and are TOO useful.
Both are playable in their own ways, but I prefer Infinity in almost every respect. I do enjoy a lot of the proximity matchups in 7.7, but massing a ton of units and dropfighting isn't my preferred gameplay style.
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I hate temple siege, very unexciting doesn't even compare to DotA. Spawn Defense is an AWESOME map when I used to play, but really doesn't require skill, just experience. After mastering Cowing and knowing where to place defense it gets quite repetitive, not to mention how gay it is for cannons to freeze up when late game arrives.
Diplo Gold is more of a "macro ghost and marines all day, while building supply depots everywhere" type of game. It's easy to learn and be good at, but strategy is very limited(though I've seen some guy play Italy and take the entire south ridiculously fast). The main reason why it sucks is because how imbalanced ghosts are. The fact that the upgrade rates for almost all of the units are the same really make ghosts way too cost efficient. Not to mention the fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE to macro against people who use oblivion. 20 Rax's, + 200 units flooding towards you without hotkeys >.>
I honestly believe(with 6+ years of mass UMS experience) that LotR maps take the MOST skill and benefit good starcraft players in general. For example if Nony played for one week he would automatically be the best player because he would be able to do ridiculous things such as triple opping while defending himself from ops.
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@ superbabosheki
Yup. That was the time period I was talking about :S Glad someone else knows the history :D.
I mainly played on West, with Cirion, Elysiu, Shai-tan, back in the day. I think Shai moved to East a while back, although I don't even know if he plays anymore. I never idled much on East: tbh, I hated the East LotR scene a crapton. People were crazy bm all the time, and especially because back then I wasn't nearly as good as some of the high-level players, I got flamed ridiculous amounts, even when I played less important kingdoms such as Mar Ruois/Nym/V'sain in WoP. As a result, I stuck on West for almost the majority of my LotR days, and by the time I felt good enough to compete with the top players on East (since almost certainly LotRish on East>West) almost all of them were all gone >.>.
I do remember just raping Anarion once 1v1 as Wolfkin against Shadow, though, since he thought I was a no name scrub and focused the entire game on killing Paaran, only to have 4 spawns down in around five minutes and his main down to a ridiculous op that even a newb could've seen coming. lol. And then he bragged about how all the times he played with his korean friends while his arb was stasis'd and his main was going down. -_-;;
I idled on op tol-sirion on West, and op anarion and clan vex. Don't believe it was "tce" though...but like I said, I was never really into the East LotRish scene until it went really small scale as it is now. Maybe if I played Floaters Unleashed (dunno if you remember that map, but it's the one that bases all the kingdoms on the clans of East LotRish  ) I could remember more.
Yeah...maphacking is pretty prevalent, unfortunately =/. But no one really takes it seriously enough to kick people that do anymore, since it's hard to even get enough people to play an inhouse these days....sigh. Those idyllic days.
I'll take you up on your offer sometime...in the future. lol. I don't find the motivation to play much these days: it's just so hard to find a game, and HoN takes at most 2 minutes to find some pubs you can stomp or get stomped with :D.
EDIT: Wow, people post fast in the time it took me to write all of that. I'm reading integral's post now.
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On February 17 2010 16:03 superbabosheki wrote:
I hate temple siege, very unexciting doesn't even compare to DotA. Spawn Defense is an AWESOME map when I used to play, but really doesn't require skill, just experience. After mastering Cowing and knowing where to place defense it gets quite repetitive, not to mention how gay it is for cannons to freeze up when late game arrives.
Diplo Gold is more of a "macro ghost and marines all day, while building supply depots everywhere" type of game. It's easy to learn and be good at, but strategy is very limited(though I've seen some guy play Italy and take the entire south ridiculously fast). The main reason why it sucks is because how imbalanced ghosts are. The fact that the upgrade rates for almost all of the units are the same really make ghosts way too cost efficient. Not to mention the fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE to macro against people who use oblivion. 20 Rax's, + 200 units flooding towards you without hotkeys >.>
I honestly believe(with 6+ years of mass UMS experience) that LotR maps take the MOST skill and benefit good starcraft players in general. For example if Nony played for one week he would automatically be the best player because he would be able to do ridiculous things such as triple opping while defending himself from ops.
While I mostly agree with your points about each map -- spawn d certainly is repetitive, though mastering it is pretty hard and arguably only AntiSleep[01] (the mapmaker) and myself have done it -- Gold 7.7 takes more skill than you seem to give it credit for, and I definitely disagree with the "play for one week" bit about LotR maps. Performing an op requires a tremendous amount of finesse and map knowledge, something you cannot gain without lots and lots of experience.
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I also have no more interest playing on battle.net. Hacking, lag, and general bm(although iccup is no better for this), gets quite annoying. I myself live in California but played on U.S east just because the general skill and population was higher.
Floaters Unleashed! Recently Fu2 and Fu3 were released and are quite hilarious. Fu3 is based on how the Koreans invaded the East server, but you would have to know the names to find the humour. Those last two versions were made by Mat-Cauthon from Clan Vex, which is now dead >.<
WoP is by far the best map ever made :D I love being M'jinn to practice my multitask. Having to defend from both white and oj on opposite sides of the base, while being responsible for killing off Orange is too much fun. Ah.. I feel nostalgic
edit: @ intergral: Yeah, I probably was overexaggerating some of my points. I guess I have LotR so well engraved into my brain that I forgot how hard it can be for those who do not play it naturally. For example, if I'm going to shuttle op someone, I ALWAYS time it nearly perfectly. This means that I'll wait for that player to try an op me, I'll defend with a statis, then op his base when his statis is about to run out. This makes it very hard for him to recall and defend at the same time. Against better players I let my team know when a timing for an op is open, and if they aren't retarded, they usually attack accordingly. That's just one of the basics of the map.
What I love about the map is the fact that it even forces you to hotkey just like you would in a regular ladder game. For me its : 1 arb 2 arb 3 fast airs 4 deflier 5 main ground opper 6 shield bat 7-8 melee. F2 main, F3-F5 other bases.
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Yeahh. I have played FU2 and I thouht it was hilarious given how true some of the hero death messages were. I am proud to say I was a hero on the NyCe Westies.
I haven't played FU3 though...probably wouldn't know anyone though lol.
Man. Hotkeys. Mines are so fucked up due to my days as a noob. And I still haven't changed! :S
To get an idea...
1 Arb, 2 op hero, 3 arb, 4 filer/corsair, 5 sair...lol. In other words, I rehotkey everytime I have to switch between filer and said, or change hero that is oping. Hella inefficient lol.
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EPT
