Hey guys, this is both a request for information and interest. One of the best missions i have found in rts games is the solo mission, from C&C to SC2 theres something very satisfying about using judgement, timing and having so little to work with to achieve some big goals. Moreso than this i loved the grinding aspect of it, challenging myself to kill everything without myself being killed, working out timings where i could kill buildings or units that you have to usually avoid, ive no idea why this is interesting to me but it was. When sc2 came out i found out about a community map, actually released in beta called "Impossible Scenarios" a map which specialised to this love of grinding by providing a multitude of levels where the objective was to kill every unit in the level without losing all of yours. You were often tasked with a very small band of units, far outmatched by the opponent and so using correct unit composition, correct timing and a bit of blind luck you had to grind your way though them, needless to say some missions literally took 6 hours or so to complete. Now i understand this formula will be seen as pretty terrible to most people, i myself have no idea why i like it but i do and id love to see more and with greater depth to them and the strategy. So my thread is two fold, firstly as an inquest to see if any of you guys know of any more of these types of maps for sc2 and secondly as a state of intention to begin creating such maps and releasing them for some playtesting here on tl.net, to see if i can make some challenging micro intensive maps for the tl.net community

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The maps im currently aware of are:

Impossible Scenarios
Impossible Scenarios (F)
Impossible Quantum

Sufficiency

Canada23833 Posts

November 01 2010 11:21 GMT

Do you want to make it like Impossible Bosses in WC? Or something like Uther's Party?

I think a SC2 version of Impossible Bosses will be interesting.

-Erik-

115 Posts

November 01 2010 11:29 GMT

Not sure im too familiar with that mode, wasnt a WC player, i would make it more akin to a micro based strategy map, using the micro your units have along with good technique, timing and composition to minimise loss while maximise damage. The key is to use the abilities, especially the regen abilities, of the units to prevent losses and give you an advantage while luring enemies away into a focuse area. Such examples are using burrow, ff, infested terrans, auto turrets, pdds, queen heal and drops.

Ill take a look at the Impossible bosses mode though

Sufficiency

Canada23833 Posts

November 01 2010 11:35 GMT

In Impossible bosses, each player (8 in total) controls only one unit each, with many different abilities. The goal is to kill the "impossible boss", which typically does a lot of damage and has a lot of life. The key to victory is to:

1) know the bosses' attack sequence
2) perfect positioning to avoid attacks, while
3) aggressively doing damage.

Salivanth

Australia1071 Posts

November 01 2010 12:05 GMT

So was this like a really, really difficult version of, say, the first Protoss mission, where you needed to use abilities and micro to get through various scenarios, each self-contained, or would the enemy react if you attacked one portion of it?

-Erik-

115 Posts

November 01 2010 12:14 GMT

On November 01 2010 20:35 Sufficiency wrote:
In Impossible bosses, each player (8 in total) controls only one unit each, with many different abilities. The goal is to kill the "impossible boss", which typically does a lot of damage and has a lot of life. The key to victory is to:

1) know the bosses' attack sequence
2) perfect positioning to avoid attacks, while
3) aggressively doing damage.

Kind of but since ive no real design skills i could only use units from the sc2 game, adding/removing things to them as regards health id look into sure, its an interesting dynamic. As regards multiple players it would effect the gameplay hugely having it multiplayer because obviously id have to scale the difficulty to make it alot easier than for someone contorlling all the units with a single mind, but its not something im averse too.

TheFinalWord

Australia790 Posts

November 01 2010 12:41 GMT

Would you consider special forces an impossible senario map? Maybe with a bit of tweaking?

-Erik-

115 Posts

November 01 2010 13:38 GMT

On November 01 2010 21:41 TheFinalWord wrote:
Would you consider special forces an impossible senario map? Maybe with a bit of tweaking?

In a sense but the issue with special forces is how much of a clusterf*ck it is,at least in the version i played. I would suggest downloading the ones in the title to get a gist of what im talking about in regards to what i will be producing, the best examples from impossible scenarios are the first 2 missions with the zealot/marauder combo and the reaper/viking/marine combo. Both of those missions are really well balanced, really challenging and require some skill and micro to complete, losing one unit can often cause the difficulty to rise significantly, but if you keep them together the level is easier, though still difficult.

Here is a description of the first mission in impossible scenario, which is a good introduction to the ethos of what im getting at;

You start with 3 zealots and 3 marauders and you have to make your way to end of this linear path, first in your way is 3 zealots, easy enough, but difficult in the sense that losing units is really not a possibility, even losing health is a very real issue given the later units to face.

Next comes some zerglings, now you have stim on your bio units but again losing the health is really a bad idea

Finally there is a mass mass of banelings and lings, with careful stim use and well placed zealots you can complete this mission, but you need all of them in the final battle to win and you need the stim to kite the banelings so taking early damage to the bio units significantly shunts your later options.

So that is the theory behind what im going to be creating, though oft on a larger scale :=

Sufficiency

Canada23833 Posts

November 01 2010 13:51 GMT

Here's a gameplay video.

EDIT: here's another one, showing how crazy this game is.

I think this is one of the most popular of "impossible" genre custom games on WC3. It's *REALLY* hard.

I believe there are about 7 bosses in total? If you just assemble a random team, you'd be lucky to get pass the first one.

Very few, if any, has beaten the last boss. In fact, few has beaten the first four bosses.