Warlords and Merchants Discussion

[Ricky_Honejasi]

I could remove the footprints and all. Although it's kind of low priority for me to make pathing work well in Sandbox mode while not screwing training merchant units over water and such.

I have zero intention to make W&M into a premium map and my map don't have enough addictiveness, professionalism, etc for Blizzard to care or enforce premiumship on it without my consent.

Even in the best scenario, I mostly expect Blizzard to only give chump change anyway. I still find it a bit fishy that they still didn't announce ANYTHING in terms of numbers (% profit for mapmaker, any real rules, etc.) as far mapmakers are concerned.

Now for any future map, I tested last FFS for 5000 integers with 8 players. Unfortunately, I think the bank triggers are a bit odd (only the last player was fully "loaded" according to the test). Logic-wise I am fairly sure I did it right but either I screwed up or it's the bank triggers that requires very precise usage.

However with all that delay we had, I guess it's reasonable that either 1) All 8 players' banks had 5000 or somehow 2) a single player's bank had 40000. But the most important I guess is that there wasn't a timeout. While I still have some doubts, at least I am satisfied that the whole thing can actually go somewhere. Some other maps did it right bank-wise so I cannot have doubts that banks don't work.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

And so after many tests, it seems banks are still not reliable for multiplayer (except possibly the very last one by the last player or something).

So as a last ditch effort, I tried 2 tests with 10 banks with 100 integers per player. Did it with EVTest. It seems to randomly glitch. Here's the results below (under spoiler) :

Spoiler

[Ricky_Honejasi]

So, I did some final changes for a considerable while to W&M.

Other than adding new units from others (ex : from Q and EVWeb) and doing critical fixes or critical balancing, I really intend to put W&M aside in favor of developing that battleship map. Otherwise, I will feel stuck on still updating W&M which did held me tremendously when I tried to do new maps before.

Also, I am updating all terrains (instead of just Exotic's for the last month or so).

Latest changes for FFS :
1) Combo - Bike can no longer be loaded into transports.
2) Combo - Omega Bike (Lv5) added.
3) ComboNeo - Maraubat Marine (Lv3) added.
4) Merchant Re-train icon should no longer be hidden after researching Adv.R Medivac Double Heal Beam.
5) Merchants can queue up to 30 items at once instead of 10 even if after 8th item is invisible. (forgot to write that out)
6) Hopefully fixed the Dragoon sounds for real.
7) Added icons about available Adv.Researches on more units.
8) Some tooltip fixes.

[IskatuMesk]

I bet your changes to dragoons made them invulnerable.

Actually, I hope that.

I should note that because I am pretty burned out on sc2 I probably won't come tonight. I want to finish Black Sun as soon as possible and will be focusing entirely on that.

[Xenon]

Didn't you try giving transport abilities the "has no cargo" validator? Loading bikes into transports is harmless when the bikes are empty. Not sure if there's any way to get units to load into a bike that's already in a transport though.

And you think you fixed the disappearing auto-retrain button?

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Didn't you try giving transport abilities the "has no cargo" validator? Loading bikes into transports is harmless when the bikes are empty. Not sure if there's any way to get units to load into a bike that's already in a transport though.

And you think you fixed the disappearing auto-retrain button?

I preferred to go the very simple route since it would be damn rare you would want to transport only the bikes themselves in the first place. Also, I did try to fix it the "clean" way (as in trying to disable attacks if loaded bikes are into transports) before and I only spent hours to no results.

As for the auto-retrain, it was because it had a silly requirement that hid the ability's execute button if you researched said upgrade. Now I removed the requirement off the ability. Probably a very old mistake as I didn't expect to add that specific upgrade when I first made W&M and when I was much more ignorant of the editor in general.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Only on Exotic Garden and now currently uploaded on the b.net servers.

Latest changes :
A) Carriers' interceptors no longer cost minerals.
B) Carriers uses less interceptors but are rebalanced.
C) Fleet Beacon now only costs 200m/150g.
D) Elite - Yggdrasil had some interceptor changes.
E) Atomic Crusader no longer nuke on death but split into 3 small blimps instead.
F) Combo workers no longer fly. Half-Supply is now Combo Lv2.
G) Tier 3 Combo workers can use a Marine gun instead.
H) Hercules now have a "Load All" ability.
I) Combo - Maraubat Marine now properly gain armor upgrades.

Old Changes :
+) Combo - Omega Bikes are now fully considered flying units.

So with all the stuff about the Carrier removal in HotS. I felt like buffing the carrier in W&M.

Here's the full changes :
1) Interceptors no longer cost minerals.
2) Interceptors has doubled movement speed.
3) 4 Interceptors max but attacks 2x faster.
4) Carrier starts with all 4 Interceptors.
5) Interceptors has Doubled life/Shields/Shields Regen.
6) Carriers costs +100 minerals. (unchanged from last version)
7) Interceptors takes 300% time to rebuild. (thus 24 seconds, 12 with Adv.r Half-Time Interceptors).

While the main idea was to greatly reduce or eliminate the mineral cost of interceptors (at the cost of pumping the rebuild time), I also reduced the number of interceptors to minimize lag from mass carriers.

[Krazy]

Carriers sound terrible now. The attack speed doesn't matter, the point of having 8 is their survivability.

Also, still no nerf to end-game building armor makes void rays / carriers junk regardless. They're only there to keep the pressure off yggdrassils which are the only thing even capable of doing damage in any sort of cost efficient manner.

[EVWeb]

What about Siege Cruisers or Atomic Crusaders? =P

[IskatuMesk]

You NERFED carriers? wtf? As if lightspeed scourge, void rays, bcs, goliaths, thors, cacti, stalkers, storm, wraiths, planet cracker, any given elite, ect. wasn't enough?

[Lavarinth]

He's planning for the upcoming Tempest!

[Krazy]

Siege cruisers are casters (and as a side note on them, I'm not sure how I feel about them working as ANTI-AIR casters). Yes, they do work as anti-ground but they're just sort of awkward to keep moving with a fleet and annoying to micro as part of a larger assault.

Atomic Crusaders absolutely cannot work with other units as upon death they will blow your army up, and aren't cost effective against turrets. You basically need every atomic crusader to kill something like 12 turrets, and that's not going to happen.

So both of the air-to-ground endgame heroes are sort of junk in terms of moving with an army, which is ultimately what you need. Which is why Yggdrasils end up being so much better at clearing multiple expansions in a decent time frame than crusaders/cruisers, even though both cruisers and crusaders are needed for certain situations.

[Mucky]

What's everybody complaining about? The changes to the carriers aren't bad, except for the 300% rebuild times.

Either bring that down to 200%, or remove the delay on interceptor's shield regen.

I'm just crossing my fingers that many of the changes/additions shown at BlizzCon are not going to make it to retail. Last thing this game needs is more fucking gimmicks.

EDIT: Keep in mind that turrets are usually going to be upgraded to 3x, which is 300 minerals each. So actually, an AC only needs to kill 4 turrets to pay for itself. Gas cost is still unaccounted for, but whatever. In a game where you can sit on 500k/400k min/gas, the only thing you're going to be concerned about is getting the most out of your 300 supply cap.

[EVWeb]

As stated in Ricky's post. I made a change to the AC. It no longer nukes on death. Now it splits into 3 small blimps which absorb damage for the rest of the ACs. And it takes less supply.

[Vetraeus]

Give Carrier Interceptors immortal shields with 1 HP and make them cost money and have 8 again, Done, GG!