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On January 26 2013 15:41 EatThePath wrote:ahaha, would be nice, but it'd break the engine, so you might want to swallow that particular dream. 
It actually is possible, but I'm not sure if it's worth the amount of work it requires
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On January 26 2013 17:15 ScorpSCII wrote:Show nested quote +On January 26 2013 15:41 EatThePath wrote:ahaha, would be nice, but it'd break the engine, so you might want to swallow that particular dream.  It actually is possible, but I'm not sure if it's worth the amount of work it requires I'm not sure that you could get it to work without buggy unit AI
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On January 26 2013 05:14 Barrin wrote:Show nested quote +On January 26 2013 04:03 [F_]aths wrote:On January 26 2013 01:20 AmericanUmlaut wrote:On January 25 2013 20:00 [F_]aths wrote: Dawn of War never made it successfully into big esports. You cannot just copy something to make a different thing better. For two sentences, you've managed to cram quite a lot of sentiments into your post that I think are idiotic, but let's go with this one for starters: At what point did making SC2 a fun game to play and watch become a lower priority than "ESPORTS!"? Followup question: How many games have "made it successfully into big esports"? Enough that you feel confident in making very broad generalizations about what is and is not possible in that area? I agree that this posting of mine lacks content. I should have explained my statement. Dawn of War 2 was casted by Take in a sponsored ESL league, but it never was a big esports title. Dawn of War has quite nice graphics and good gameplay, but we have to ask why it isn't an esports title. I think, the graphics of DoW tries to be realistic up to a point where it is a bit confusing to follow. And while the campaign setting is very good of course, the multiplayer feels a bit like an addition to the campaign. The SC2 multiplayer feels like a seperate product from the campain. Is is rather easy to follow the action. I saw complete noobs, which most recent RTS experience was WC2 (yes WC2, not even WC3) and they were able to get a rough picture of what is going on. I believe that DoW lacks those qualities. A second point: Chess is an incredible deep strategy game. Incredibly deep! Even though the board on it is played is rather boring. There were many attempts to make chess more interesting, but most of the world champions still play the classic chess. What if you make the board bigger and twice as many pieces? Two moves per turn and maybe nerf each piece? ... /patent I am not able to follow you here. Chess has a certain amount of complexity which seems to fit the needs.
Making SC2 more complex with different highground advantages could hurt the watchability.
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If you meant 'twice as many pieces' as 'double the supply' to 400, then I have no idea how the worker : army ratio will work out. Would endless tides of zerg units be super-imba off of 140 drones? Would a pure 400/400 terran army be actually unstoppable? 50 warp-gate replenish off of 5 saturated bases?
Also, more units + bigger map = more CPU performance needed to be lagless if that's a factor to consider.
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If you mean 'double the number of different units' then it's possible the amount of variability would make the game even more more rock-paper-scissory.
I know from doing my own melee modding that having tripled the number of units in the game, from a casual / casual spectator point it's more 'exciting'. But as a player, it's much worse since you can't properly react to seeing this or that and you have to play super safe as a result (or maybe I'm just terrible at it).
I'm not sure what the number is, or if HotS has reached it, but there is some limit to the number of unique units you should have in the game.
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Wouldn't bridges with pathable terrain underneath cause a UI problem? I remember some interview where Blizzard was saying one of the reasons burrowed units can't go 'under' buildings is because it would be impossible to see them / re-select them if they ever got 'lost' underneath the building.
I wonder, if you had to, could you approximate a 'space bridge' by using a teleport region/trigger kind of idea? Like the beacons you see in the campaign that spirit you around the map. No idea if sending 100 zerglings across would cause the trigger to cause performance issues though.
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On January 27 2013 02:16 The_Frozen_Inferno wrote: Would a pure 400/400 terran army be actually unstoppable?
I am going to have nightmares...
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Wouldn't bridges with pathable terrain underneath cause a UI problem? I remember some interview where Blizzard was saying one of the reasons burrowed units can't go 'under' buildings is because it would be impossible to see them / re-select them if they ever got 'lost' underneath the building. That's one of the tricky bits. As long as it was done correctly, you could get around it with correct positioning and use of the isometric view, with the camera rotation as backup. It'd still be wack when trying to select units on the fly when you have them above and below the bridge.
I wonder, if you had to, could you approximate a 'space bridge' by using a teleport region/trigger kind of idea? Like the beacons you see in the campaign that spirit you around the map. No idea if sending 100 zerglings across would cause the trigger to cause performance issues though. At that point you might as well just make it appear as teleportation, not a bridge/tunnel/etc. But in theory it could work. I think if you devised the right setup, it wouldn't have a problem handling large amounts of units, since it's a simple thing (in theory). I've actually designed two maps that use this but I never went through with it because I couldn't decide how exactly I wanted the teleporter to work.
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I think waygates would let you do something like bridges, or even way more. However, I think it wouldn't have the visual and pathing issues. It could be a bit hard to wrap your brain around, though, which for pro players I think is fine but it might be confusing for spectators. Would need testing.
By waygates I mean a pair of gates on the map, where units sent to one gate would teleport to the other.
I also want something that would give a passive advantage (like economy advantage,) to players who hold it but unlike a base can be passed back and forth instantly and it will always be beneficial to hold it even for the shortest amount of time. With the right placement and the proper number balance you could really encourage a lot more action.
These two things I like but... I'm not sure if it doesn't feel enough like Starcraft anymore with them. For custom maps, though, worth a try.
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Waiting for the day we see waygate micro, where units 'blink' back and forth between gates to avoid missiles.
I don't know how it would fit in lore-wise, or if it would be un-Starcrafty and too warcrafty or gimmicky, but maybe you could make like a 'resource fountain.'
If you have unit holding it, it'll periodically spawn resource items (those on-map units that you see in the campaign) that can be picked up and will add a direct, immediate boost to your economy. Perhaps you could even require a greater-than-one number of worker units to activate it if you want greater risk vs reward.
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Something that might feel a bit more comfortable would be the scrap robots from the campaign that periodically created scrap you could collect.
I'm not sure about an unlimited source of resources... But maybe if they kept going until the 25 minute mark or something.
For something significant it might be smart to block them with rocks or something so it doesn't disrupt things in the early game too much... Unless you want it to be pretty crazy. For the scrap robots... I guess you could have them be idle for the first 5 minutes and then start producing scrap.
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Yeah waygates would be amazing and would also increase the # of possible viable map layouts by a lot. They already introduced healing shrines which is something that was from wc3, so I don't see why not. Just give them a protoss-y skin and call them "Psi Gates" or something like that. The protoss already have warp technology so it's not exactly far-fetched.
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Neutral sentries with a bajillion HP that randomly cast forcefield on chokes - effectively making a gate that opens and closes. Just an idea that can already be implemented (I think).
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I've always wanted to put down neutral force fields on a map, which would put more of an emphasis on massive ground units. Since Ultralisks are much more viable in HotS, this idea seems like it could be balanced. I am not sure how neutral force fields would affect pathing though.
Since there isn't much of a high ground advantage in SC2, we create defender's advantage through the use of really really small choke points. So far, I think it's working. People need to think a bit outside of the box. Height advantage makes sense, but it isn't as good anymore, so let's just focus on what we can do, like creating bottlenecks that players really don't want to attack into.
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On January 27 2013 12:41 Antares777 wrote: I've always wanted to put down neutral force fields on a map, which would put more of an emphasis on massive ground units. Since Ultralisks are much more viable in HotS, this idea seems like it could be balanced. I am not sure how neutral force fields would affect pathing though.
You already can, they're in the units tab. An early draft of one of my maps had some, but I ended up getting rid of them b/c I was worried about balance, since protoss gets massive ground units like 4x more often than terran or zerg do. I'm not really sure what the "correct" place to put them on a map is, but there might be one where it works well.
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The waygates idea is what I meant by teleporters. The question is whether you want them to connect to each other exactly, with some kind of cooldown, or a step out and back in thing, or a "landing platform" nearby to the "sending platform" so that you don't get stupid teleporter shenanigans. I'd also worry about cramming too many units into the receiver area, so I tend to lean towards the separate platforms idea, with the landing platform being a large space. Of course you can add all sorts of funny with random destinations etc. It definitely opens up way more layout possibilities.
A long time ago before WoL beta came out, I thought they had said that they would have wrap-around maps. How fucking cool would that be.
A basic thing that is never used but should be: destructible barriers that have a trigger that is separate from the barrier itself. I have used this in a couple maps, where the barrier protects a 2nd entrance to the natural, or something, but to open it you must destroy the command structure, which is deep in the natural, so protected from aggression unless they break in the normal way. This allows you to make more aggressive or defensive "rocks", which changes everything.
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About the "eSports" talk from last page.
SC2 is not nearly as mainstream enough to be considered a sport or anything (even an 'eSport'). It's still #1 a video game, and a video game played for fun (there are much better activities that require more skill and/or talent than SC2; I think people should view SC2 as more of a video game and less as an "eSport", this includes all video games in general).
(Besides maybe BW, which was a really special case, nearly all cases of people watching competitive video game tournaments are by people who play the games themselves or have played it a decent amount in the past. In actual sports, there are plenty of people who don't play the sport at all, but yet still watch the sport.)
Speaking of changes, Dota 2 changes often (every patch which comes out every few months) and is way more popular than SC2 already. People don't watch Dota 2 because they find the game fun to watch on its own, it's very likely they play the game too (considering Dota 2 is the most popular game played according to steam stats, that's no surprise).
(Honestly, most video games are boring to watch on their own. The only exception is BW and that's because of the huge foundation built from South Korea + the fact that BW is best competitive video game ever accidentally made.)
Experimenting should be definitely be welcomed.
One of the main problems with SC2 is that there's too many things that may break the game easily (unlike BW which had a bit more solid foundation thanks to the game being more gradual and less random).
In BW, like Idra and Artosis said, there are a million different ways to win in BW (the last SotG for example, Artosis said some players were good off of Mutalisk micro alone). Also BW, is a much more gradual game and less random than SC2 (there's a ton of topics on this already).
tl;dr - SC2 needs a ton of work to be as good as BW. Experimentation should be welcomed, but due to the design of SC2, small things break the game.
Anyway, just my thoughts. I think the throwing around "SC2 is eSports!" thing is what's ironically what's ruining eSports (IMO). BW is probably the greatest exception (but even BW itself, the best competitive video game ever made IMO, couldn't prevent viewer loss).
Video game tournament gain views solely by people who play the game (again, the exception being maybe BW), so the first step to making it better is to make the game better. (And again, Dota 2 changes a ton and often, and it's way more popular than SC2.)
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How would you do this in the date editor though? I want to try it? One assumes you can just make a doodat/unit which is a blinding cloud which you can just place everywhere? How?
Edit: One assumes you just want to make an invulernable unselectable unit with the blinding cloud model that has a behaviour/ability that makes everything around it have range 0.1, but how do you make that behaviour/ability?
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I don't have the beta client / editor, so I'm making a couple assumptions about what already exists in the HotS editor. I'm assuming that blinding cloud works like most other abilities like it. As usual, there is also more than one way to do it:
The viper has an ability that creates a 'persistent effect' that will periodically 'search area' and 'apply behaviour' to all viable targets. These kinds of abilities usually last for like 0.5 a second but the periodic search is equal to that duration and would re-apply the behaviour as long as the unit is in the AoE. (that's why when you leave, the unit is instantly restored, since the applied behaviour wears off).
A model actor is then probably connected to the persistent effect's creation/destruction to make it pretty.
So, all you have to do is create a new behaviour: buff with infinite duration. Its periodic effect will be set to fire off blinding cloud's 'search area' effect. You just need to match the period stats with that of the original 'create persistent' effect.
Stick this new behaviour on the unselectable unit you make by adding it to the 'Behavior: Behaviors - Behavior' field (the same field that the immortal's hardened shield is on, for reference).
Then you need to fiddle with model actors to make sure everything looks pretty. The simplest way is to duplicate the blinding cloud model actor, and change its events to:
Unit birth. cloud unit = create Unit death. cloud unit = destroy Actor creation = AnimPlay. (whatever asset name is normally played for blinding cloud) Actor creation = SetTintColor. (If you want to give it a visual indicator that it's a non-standard blinding cloud)
-> Now that I think about it, you could also just change the Unit Model to the blinding cloud model. But that method has a few other disadvantages and is marginally more complex to set up. Though both methods should work.
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You could also do it with triggers/regions and a noninteractive doodad just to indicate where the effect is. Might be simpler this way, but less data gosu.
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Elevators and doors that open/close periodically. Same for bridges that appear and disappear.
Also moving platforms. Like imagine the metropolis islands floating in between the main bases. You build a Nydus, connect it with the island. Once it docks with the opponents main, all your army goes through the docking choke point
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