StarCraft: Inconsummate - fan campaign - Page 3

It gets a lot easier once you realize that the mission is "Find Gorn" and not "Kill everything". Also, Guardians are amazing against AIs

1st mission
I guess this one is meant more as warm up to familiarize players with the new heroes. I feel like the commando section could need some sort of difficulty spike towards the end, though.
I avoided safe-scumming, and this mission already had me regret that. The first time at the end of the commando section, one of the Marines ran back up the ramp and stayed there. out of sight range for the Lurkers, which caused the map to hang up. I guess the trigger to start the dialogue asks for no blue Terran units to be at that location.
So restart the Mission. All's fine, just until the same cutscene. This time a Firebat ran out of the location, causing the dialogue to start preemtively, and the FIrebat to kill one of the unburrowed Lurkers… I want my Lurkers, epsecially since the base has no gas. So I had to start from scratch a third time. This time everything worked (and I remembered to safe before the cutscene…). If you have triggers depending on unit deaths like this, you should probably also have a trigger that actually kills the units after some time, just to make sure it does not glitch out.
The rest of the mission also felt very easy. I am not sure if you really wanted players to have to take a gas base, but it turns out that the four initial Lurkers and Stroluum, with some Zerglings to consume for constant swarms, are more than enough to quickly finish off all the enemy bases.

2nd Mission
Dropping both Protoss bases seems to be the only way of getting a fast 2nd gas. Given the resource distribution, Hydralisks seem like an ideal strategy. But there are so many tight spots, especially on the entrance to the blue base, where it is basically impossible to not get stuck under Storm and lose half your army. On the other hand, the AI does not seem to react to Mutalisks at all. I suspect that none of them is even having any defensebuild/defenseuse lines in their AI scripts. Is this intended? Kind of reduces the whole challenge of the mission to "get one group of Mutalisks and micro away…"

3rd Mission
From the transmission I gather that you actually envisioned this to be run by ground, clockwise from the SW corner. However, I just took the mini base in that corner and the second gas base on the starting plateau in the SE, which was hardly even attacked by the AI, and that was enough to get a control group of Mutalisks to which, again, the AI seemed not at all to even respond. So again I Muta microed down the teal bases, took the resources and the whole thing felt like a giant sequence break once I had reached the NE corner and started to kill Starports.

4th Mission
Given my early lack of gas, I again decided to run this with Hydras. Can't ever go wrong with this. Again the AI seemed to hardly even react to attacks and it was mostly a smooth run-through from beginning to end. At no point did this feel challenging at all, apart from the fact that with 4+ control group of Hydras the long walking distances and claustrophobic pathways made me really wish I had switched to Mutas after 2nd gas. I once lost a base simply because my Hydras needed what felt like an hour to march all the way back to defend… I guess I should have just build Nydus Canals all over the place.

5th Mission
It can be a bit hard to cover against all the attacks at the beginning, but once you know what's coming the initial units are easily enough to get up the intial 2.5 bases (the few small mineral patches on the right side of the "main" really cannot be counted as a full expo) and get 2 or three control groups of Hydras. From there, and with help of Goska, it becomes pretty easy to just run around and take all the bases on the bottom half of the map. I had to get a control group of Mutas (later Kukulzas), just to be more mobile and be able to defend them all while my Hydras and Goska erratically tried to find their way to the next bases and mission objectives. For this kind of large-scale build and destroy missions I'd really rather see some actually big (even 256²), but more open map, rather than these frickin' mazes all the time. Had I just gone Guardian, Devourer, Kukulza, as any good campaign player ;D, I'd probably have completed this a lot faster. Having an AI ally is a nice touch, though, and something that I'd like to see use a lot more in campaigns (or alternatively coop missions, but not all campaign stories or potential mechanics involving allied AI are really suitable for co-op).

6th Mission
Hmm… Well, I obviously had to restart this a few times. It's obviously meant to be this way, I guess, and I personally like to min-max the hell out of the start of missions, so why did this still get so frustrating so quickly? It's not so much that a near-perfect build order is needed just to survive the first five minutes, but that the some aspects of the initial setup just seem like a "fuck you" to the player. The almost complete lack of building space, for example, but then, you don't actually need much, so it's workable and most buildings are best used to wallin the bottom choke and a bunker on the high ground, anyway.
But what really pissed me off is that mine on the low ground.
In one of my first trials the first Ling just dragged it right into the tank. Only went steeply down from there, as you can imagine. Next try, it was dragged into and killed both SCVs who were occupied walling the low ground choke with two depots. In the subsequent tries the first thing I did (after getting my SCVs to mine) was just to kill the bloody thing before it could hurt any one.…
The only major failure I had after that was because of my overcommitment to tanks, which for their huge price tag only managed to kill my own Marines all the time. So I went pure bio with a skeletal force of tanks, just to defend my back and clear the two Sunkens across the bridge just outside to the east of the base. Turns out that one or two control groups of M&M and Goska upgrades (detection, most of all!) is really all that's needed to finish the rest of the mission (killing the white Zerg first – damn, are those upgraded Sunkens hard to kill, though).
The no-liftoff for buildings felt more like a cheap cop-out and very much suspect that you just wanted to prevent the player from getting to the top left of the map at all costs ;P; that part would probably have fared better as a separate epilogue mission. With the nomadic playstyle this map forces unto the player, I feel like having to use lift-off would have felt more fitting, and as a bonus you could have adhered to the actual premise – why not make the AI produce a ton of Scourge (numbers depending on the number of Spires alive) and send them to immediately attack any lifted building that is detected?

Speaking of min-maxing mission starts:
A lot of the missions start with workers already mining. By canceling the intro cutscenes at the right moment, it is possible to start those missions with each worker holding a chunk of minerals, meaning you only need to select them and press C the moment you gain control and they'll start mining and immediately give you some extra starting bank. This is especially useful in the final mission, obviously.

I personally feel like the first 4 maps are generally too easy for what I want them to be, but the vast majority of players complain that all maps are too difficult, so there's probably no happy medium for this project. I've cobbled together a difficulty selection plugin for future campaigns, though.

Out of curiosity, was your run of the first map done on the latest update? I thought I had fixed an issue regarding this early on in the project's lifespan, and I haven't encountered it in any of my recent tests. I'll work on a more definitive fix either way.

Yeah, it's intended that you can win with the starting gas and some micro. I wanted to encourage players to go for early action against the AI, but maybe they fall over too quickly with little investment, so I can look into ways of beefing them up a bit. At the moment, the raider base expands to the gas expo on the high ground early on, so if you don't take it yourself you'll be in for a much tougher time (their attack and defense forces get beefed up after the CC completes).

I'm sort of conflicted on how to update this mission since Goska is much more ideal to combat protoss, but I want to give players more alone time with Stroluum before map 3. The ideal fix is probably just a few extra mineral nodes and maybe lowering the number of zealots on the map to make hydras a bit more cost efficient without neutering the protoss' ability to counter them with reavers or storm. I'll think more on this.

Definitely not the intention, but the AI for Inconsummate's first few maps (and in general) was designed when I had a very poor understanding of aiscript, so it's quite possible that I put in the wrong opcode for air defense or forgot it altogether. Thanks for the heads up.

The triggers for this map are not great for the dialogue, since it does assume that the player will take a standard ground path in the early game. I will overhaul the conditions to better reflect the number of starports that have been destroyed, but I don't plan on recording new voice acting so it's likely that some awkwardness would still exist.

My favorite thing about this map is that you can do it any way you want, in any order you want. It's more open-ended than the previous missions since the objectives take far less time to destroy than proper protoss bases from map 2 or the main raider base from map 1. But the AI shouldn't ignore air units, obviously, so I'll run some tests at some point and make some changes.

I'm starting to suspect the AI bugged out or you ran the maps without an updated mod file. The white base definitely responds to attacks, but with 4+ control groups of hydras you can wipe anything besides maybe Gorn's base. I'll probably add some more gas to the bases you can expand to while beefing up the hostiles to make the mission feel more involved.

As the magnum opus of Inconsummate, this mission is getting the largest and most significant update. Tuzor will train the same hero units you can requisition from him and will inform you of where he plans to attack thanks to some new tech, and all the AI will be far more involved. Similar to the previous map's proposed changes, more resources will be available in most cases, but you'll have to bleed for the land you take, because the AI will target expansions as they are taken, and will seek to expand out themselves (something that unfortunately is pretty absent). I'm actually glad you didn't make a billion air units since it allowed you to talk to me a bit about the mazes. I'll see what can be done about opening up the terrain, but keep in mind the AI would use this to their advantage as well, and you'd catch their armies out of position less often than you're able to now.

This mission had been updated a few times to add more starting build space and resources, so it used to be even worse! But I agree that it's challenging in a way that none of the other maps had prepared you for, so it could stand to have more of a warm-up period (though you'd probably stomp the AI now that you know what to expect, but you know what they say about first impressions).

Yeah, a lot of people just killed the mines, so I'll probably remove them completely, or move them further up. It's not really worth the headache for players since they won't think about them as often as they would had they laid them down themselves.

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with the detection upgrade, though obviously it comes out of left field. I think it's pretty important for this mission though. Lurkers are impossible to deal with otherwise, since you have no comsat (I wonder why that is...)

I like the idea of scourge fucking with you if you lift off as an alternative to disabling liftoff, so maybe I will do that. The problem with allowing liftoff at all is that you can easily aggro units and such that are pre-placed in Stroluum's area, and I'm pretty sure I'm at the string cap for this level, so I can't make new locations to create them. I could use the create_unit aiscript opcode if I were so inclined, I suppose.

That's pretty clever, I probably would never have thought of that. I leave it to the melee specialists at TL to find ways to make the most out of my silly shit.

One thing I might be able to do is run an aiscript for the player that makes their workers continue to harvest after they take control. It's always bothered me that the drones stop working, so I'll see what I can come up with.

Well, the tight bases were not such a huge problem this time as most of the time you are playing as Zerg anyways and in the Terran mission two barracks is really all you need in terms of macro. However, usually it is hard to even place a macro Hatch (though I used them to wall-in most of the time, anyway). You could at least forgo using so much unbuildable terrain in base locations next time. And if you ever do a Terran or Protoss campaign, please make sure that in a macro-heavy mission there is actually a space where a nice matrix of Gates or Factories can be set up.

I missed out on those Map Revealers, I guess, because I used Mutas all the time. Still. if I had gone for Hydras the miss chance would have been really annoying, at best.

Yes, static defenses are crazy strong with upgrades in these missions. But I hated that I needed to invest a few hundred minerals into colonies to be able to hold all the bases when they all yielded so little resources to begin with. I find an expansion design that favours a fast, nomadic playstyle and a map layout that hinders mobility don't make a good combination together. Separating structure upgrades would definitely be better, as it helps differentiate playstyles and choices for players; and Sunkens profiting from melee upgrades does not make a whole lot of sense, anyway.
If I play these maps again, I'll probably run everything on Muta-Ling, just for the mobility it gives.

It's not just the cyan colour. All the colours seem off in the score screen. For example, the player is playing as green Zerg most of the time, but the score screen shows them as red.

As for general map difficulty, the best way to go about this is probably to have two versions of each map, one in easy and one in hard difficulty. I looked into a playthrough on youtube, and the guy's not even using control groups most of the time, it seems. So the difficulty is basically self-made…

As for the map version: I guess I was using the newest ones, as I just downloaded them a few days ago from the SEN link you provided here on TL. Is there a version numbering somewhere in the map file so I can check? Terran does not expand to the high ground gas in this version, though, as that is occupied by Protoss at the beginning. Or maybe I was just to quick, that is where I took my gas (which I then never really made any use of, except for additional upgrades).

In the second mission I actually lost twice due to Stroluum dying off-screen to some Reavers, because I left him as a front line defense. But he's a great one-man-army to defend some back expansion against any stray Scouts and whatnot, where he then spent a happy game burrowed for my Muta stacks.

As for catching opponent armies off-guard in more open maps: I am pretty certain coordinated army movements, besides sending X units to attack or pulling y units for defense, is among the things AI scripts cannot do. So it would probably make no difference.

Is there actually a way to run Ai scripts for human players to make workers mine? Without modding that's definitely not working.

Noted. With some new aiscript plugins I can make the AI allies/enemies play nicer with larger maps, so more open designs shouldn't be as cumbersome to implement in future projects.

Right. These kinds of things will always be able to be improved upon in the future, and as this was my first campaign I don't doubt I'll be changing a lot about the design paradigms.

I thought this was just a bug with SC in general. I'll look into what in the mod is causing this issue and attempt to resolve it.

Easy to do if maps aren't 100mb+ each. I'd much rather have the current solution, which is to add a plugin that allows users to select between easy/normal/hard in the map selection screen. I'll show that off in a few months, probably.

I'll stress test the issue and see if I can narrow it down, then. That is indeed the latest version (older links wouldn't work since I removed the older files). The readme should include some note that says "this is to be the final update" in the patch history section.

There are new plugins that have been developed for another one of my projects that make for much more varied AI behaviors. I'm hoping to get a plugin developed that will allow spellcasting behavior to be set on a script level, for example giving the AI a list of units to prioritize when casting lockdown/broodling/mind control. New code already exists to have AI land buildings (see here) as well as all other orders (e.g. a floating barracks could build a command center, since the plugin overrides tech reqs), which is the same tech that would be used to order drones to do the harvest order on mineral fields. AI scripts are hardcoded to not run for players except for the share vision scripts, which can be modified to detect death counters as a sort of map-side variable, which would then jump to a new block that contains appropriate commands. So, short answer: yeah, it's very possible.

There is a very fast way to beat mission 4: get ovi speed asap, fly an ovi over the water, in between the purple Zerg, to the dead Cerebrate location, then use the Mutas and Guardians you get to kill the Protoss and any stray Protoss buildings on the map while getting Goska to the beacon via Nydus and ovi transport.

What final threat? The Protoss? I thought that was basically a dummy base to be walked over. Templar haven't even got Storm.