EPT![[image loading]](http://highper.ch/p/tmpostpic2.jpg)
Up to seven players control each force -- how will you allocate your commanders? Perhaps a Captain to call the shots? A scouting scoundrel? A medivac master? A hydralisk hooligan? Multiple macro machines? A dedicated DT director? A weedly warpgate wizard? Think of the possibilities! Gnarly!
Team Melee was a fun and relaxing "mode" in the original Starcraft: up to four players each control one players' worth of units. Usually a Team Melee Team would have a dedicated Macro Dude, and the rest of the players would divide up the micro into main army, drops, tanks, reavers, whatever.
In a "Live Developer Chat", Dustin Browder told us that there's no plan to officially implement Team Melee. This is unfortunate! We've been playing Ghetto Team Melee since the beta by playing on a 2v2 map and having a T on each team that just lifted off and microed, but this doesn't allow 1v1 maps, only allows for two on each team, and since you can't spend allies' resources it forces the non-lifter to macro. There are already Team Melee custom maps out there, but they're all pretty bad, using infoboards instead of just showing your resources, only allowing 2v2, not respecting teams from lobby, sometimes spawning more than two forces, not having random start positions, bla bla bla.
After many months of procrastinating, I got to work and made a Team Melee mod and library! If you want to convert your own maps, you can find the mod with your editor by searching "Team Melee", it's "BEARAND's Team Melee 1.1". The trigger library is here. It's well-commented, but let me know if you need help! Also please leave maps using these libs unlocked unless you're a jerk (map locking is weak DRM and doesn't stop anyone who wants to spend 45 seconds). Thanks
The maps allow for 7v7, the most possible with SC2, but 3v3 or 4v4 are much more reasonable sizes. I feel like 7v7 would be a disaster without using some form of voice chat or at least decent planning beforehand, but it's doable! You could do all sorts of crazy stuff. I think there was a thread here where a bad player would play a good player with some kind of crazy limitation like mouse-only or whatever, I think it would be fun to watch four silver players take on someone good.
Just like regular team games, when a player leaves his resources are split up between his allies. This is weird because everyone on a team shares the same resource pool...resulting in magic free sources based on how many players are on the team. Until Blizzard lets us disable this behavior, I'm pretending it's a feature that is meant to offset the loss of a microer. It shouldn't be an issue.
Computers work, but depending on the random seed Zerg computers might send every single one of their overlords to your base to die all game (overlord behavior seems to be hardcoded, and the AI is blind to custom random spawn code). I haven't noticed any issues with T or P but I also haven't tested them thoroughly so who knows. Also don't bother trying to make a team with 7 insane computers, bnet2 issues have forced me to discard all but one computer on a team. The extras wouldn't do anything anyway.
Right now I've made Team Melee versions of four ladder and two iCCup maps. Here's the list:
Jungle Basin TM
Scrap Station TM
Delta Quadrant TM
Metalopolis TM
Orbital Divide TM
Enigma TM
They're up on NA and EU. Because map names are global even though maps are regional (????), they have different names on EU:
Jungle Basin Team Melee
Scrap Station Team Melee
Delta Quadrant Team Melee
Metalopolis Team Melee
Orbital Divide Team Melee
Enigma Team Melee
These will probably never be high on the Popularity charts, so find them by searching! Because of Blizzard's horrible choice in search algorithm, you should search for full map names without spaces (junglebasintm, enigmatm, etc).
Thanks to Seiken for coding help, and Tim G., DNK, Mata, Ontongard, and Whale Story for testing! Enjoy!!!
