Maps I could make on my future free time

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Relatively soon, ill have some serious free time and I do have some map ideas.

So far, I have 3 main maps I could be making and I would like some suggestions or know what you might prefer. Note that I am very likely to pick the one that I ultimately care in the end. Still want some input nonetheless.

The main map ideas are :

FIGHTERS AND BUILDERS

A decent Fighters and Builders map. Perfectly playable from 2 to 14 players. Either 4v4, 5v5 or 6v6 as standard. Max 7v7.

Highlights :

- The income is shared between Builders and the team supply (200 by default) is split between Fighters.
- Because of the above, the player can pick the Builder or Fighter with no drawback. Requires 1 Builder and 1 Fighter minimum per team.
- Game starts at Tier 1.5 (ex : Marines, Marauders, Reapers, Stalkers, Hydralisks as 1.5, Roaches, etc.) and add +0.5 max tier until Tier 5. By comparison , tiers will be similar to melee and Warlords and Merchants' Elite units.
- At each +0.5 tier, income is also increased for builders. *Maybe* even beyond.
- Reserve system to keep extra units above your Fighter's supply. Units in reserve regenerate at 1 life/shield/energy per second.
- Fighters can easily store units in their reserve then draw other available units (as long it doesn't go above his own max supply). Ultimately adding more weight to choosing the right units and healing damaged ones.
- Map control with locations to hold for team bonuses. Ideally to avoid just an 1-shot deathballing the other team.

Likely extensions :

- Customize brand new units (Tier 1 to 5) to bring to battle. Can use allies' schematics. Saved in your bank file for future games.
- Allow dual Fighter/Builder role play for players with 3 games as Builder and 3 games as Fighter. Likely for fighters that want some control of units built.
- Pick Fighter, Builder or Dual in lobby in advance.
- Likely to add Warlords and Merchants' Elite units and liked Combo units as the initial extra units.

Possible extra extensions :

- Choose your team income and team supply at game start.
- Side trick so I can get unit schematics off players' banks to hardcode them into the map as additional extra units with credits to them.
- "Unit data sheets" where you could customize existing units' stats (within reason) for your own private games. Storable in bank file.



SPACE EXPLORATION RPG

A space exploration RPG. Likely to be named "Infinite Space". Playable from 1 to 15 players.

Highlights :

- Involves a special trick to allow to explore potentially infinitely (as long I extend the map's triggers/data) thus allowing any number of galaxies with sectors (likely 15x15 to 25x25 sectors per galaxy).
- The above can also allow specific area instances of quests or quest-specific sectors.
- Explore the galaxies as you encounter friendly ones to hellfiend ones or even clearly batshit crazy ones (yes, French-on-the-heavy-drugs crazy).
- Various towns and quests. Find rare ones in the lost corners of the galaxies.
- Auto-pilot feature (auto-movement from sector-to-sector) and Warp (much faster but consumes tons of energy) to known sectors/galaxies, towns or allied players.

Likely extensions :
- Trading ships and merchandise aspect where there are varying prices to buy/sell goods from location to location.
- Level up as a captain. Level does determine which ships you can use (maybe along with other special prerequisites).
- PvP and PK'ing can be enabled yet can be 100% avoided for anti-PK players.
- If you PK a low level player, the Space Justice League will come hunt with no mercy to avenge him/her. Quitting a game won't save you from it.
- "Warp Escape" button to flee if threaten but not if not in direct fire. Allies can use "Warp Assist" to come. Would-be PKer can use "Warp Pursue" vs warping out victims. Different warp speeds depending on ship/equipment.
- Light/Explorer ships are much more likely to fully Warp Escape from slow battle-centric ships.

Possible extra extensions :

- Build "wish/dream" enemy units to confront in "dream" special galaxies (most likely to be most batshit insane with all players' creations). Could even extend to equipment and quests.
- Allow players to have a town ship to make a town, provide player support and do researches instead of using a normal ship.
- Holodeck in towns for battle simulations with stuff you didn't even get or you custom built in the holodeck.



TACTICS SCENARIO MAKER

A Tactics scenario player/builder. Playable from 1 to 15 players but 3 is standard.

Most similar to Impossible Scenario maps but with important scenario making support. In short, you control smaller armies vs larger standing enemy ones then you must win by your superior tactics.

Highlights :

- Build your own Tactics scenarios to play with other players.
- Base map will have my own Tactics scenarios hardcoded and will add more over time.
- Base customization would include unit placement (even facing) and basic stat modifications.
- Allow to place structures and possibly doodads.
- Can auto-transfer scenarios between players in their bank file.
- Side trick so I can get scenarios off players' banks to hardcode them into the map. Thus freeing creators' bank file to make even more. With credit to the original authors. With version control as well.

Likely extensions :

- Deep unit customization including lots of stats, choosing model, modified weapons, writing unit name/descriptions, etc.
- Ability to reuse sets of unit data and such to minimize bank usage. For example, you could pick "0 build speed for all Zerg units" to avoid using 10x-20x of bank space by doing it manually and doing the extra work. Other examples would be "No Lift/Land for all Terran structures", "Instant 100% regeneration if not in combat for 20 seconds" and countless of practical cases.

Possible extra extensions :

- Full support for making scenarios in multiplayer with friends.
- Setup specific objectives, player teams, resources (to train/build), maximum supply and so on.
- Could allow camera and cinematics support along with text for custom stories.
- Cortex command support for scenario making.
- Option to make a randomized scenario which place enemy units in a reasonable and winnable fashion.
- Could potentially further extend into customizing units/settings for a melee setting, a defense map setting, a survival setting, etc.

[tipereth]

you must win by your superior tactics.

Do this one.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

you must win by your superior tactics.

Do this one.

I do consider it although it's the least favorable out of all 3 for the FFS event, especially when we tend to have 8+ players lately. Also depends heavily if other players will bother to make their own scenarios on it. It does have the most flexibility since people can always make new scenarios over time even if I don't lift a finger in a long time.

Work-wise, I did actually poke far enough to actually save the position (X and Y down to 0.1s) of the units with a relative facing while keeping it under a low bank data requirement. It's saved in a 5 character string per unit's usable for 256x256 maps. Otherwise, it would require 3-4x memory space in bank.

Essentially, it's compression tricks that essentially involve putting 3 smaller integer into a large integer then saving said large one into a string so it takes less bank space to keep everything in a large scale. So yes, I got it quite covered in terms of saving a lot of data in bank files in a very compressible way.

[IskatuMesk]

You should make a map called "The Jewish Entrepreneur". It's a live-action version of the Steam trading card game.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

You should make a map called "The Jewish Entrepreneur". It's a live-action version of the Steam trading card game.

Nay.

If I ever do anything remotely similar, it would be some kind of Merchant thing where you deal with your own business for profit without warlords but having NPC customers of all kinds.

On a totally side note, it does remind me of the idea of some "Merchant Rush : Open RPG" where you are shopkeepers that follow CPU Heroes in a Open RPG setting. You need to set the price right, get the right items (potions, weapons, armor ...), etc so they get what they need before their impatience gets off and then get killed to bosses. All while not getting yourself killed in the process.

Obviously, the winning merchant is the one with the highest profit score.

Note that I don't really intend to make a map of this specific idea.

[Krazy]

The space exploration one sounds like it would be the most impressive if you actually finished it. But it also sounds like the one where you would encounter some fatal error halfway into production.

The fighters and builders one would be good if it allowed there to be balance despite uneven team sizes.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

The space exploration one sounds like it would be the most impressive if you actually finished it. But it also sounds like the one where you would encounter some fatal error halfway into production.

It's one of those maps I can make a first alpha/beta version easily but it's like some sort of eternal updating one like W&M was when I did bother to update it. I could help myself with adding bank features for players to "expand" themselves or arranging the map in a way that I can easily implement added galaxies/sectors from others.

In terms of fatal errors, I kind of doubt it since I pretty much already covered what I badly needed to make it work beforehand with some test maps. The only real drawback I might see is expanding so much that I actually hit Blizzard's increased limits and cannot expand further and that's speaking in the long term.

The fighters and builders one would be good if it allowed there to be balance despite uneven team sizes.

I fully intend to have that feature as it's a prime one and easy one to implement.

Based on my experience with W&M, players will always prefer to play as builders than fighters. I wouldn't be surprised that any earlier Fighters and Builders map crumbled (short of popularity issues) because there was too much of a lack of Fighter players when it forced 2B+2F vs 2B+2F or such.

With such feature, I easily remedy this except in the radical cases in which absolutely no one wants to be a Fighter period. At the ultimately worst, I could add some cheap triggered AI but obviously it won't win their game.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

As a quick update, I settled on the Space Exploration Open RPG which I poked about 30 hours in stuff related to it. Ill probably need another 30 hours strict minimum if not another 60-100 for any real first version.

I prefer to not talk too much about it as I want to avoid raising expectations and adding personal mental pressure. Prefer talk much less and do more this time around.

[Pr0nogo]

As long as you aren't selling Drones instead of SCVs (who presses D instead of S?), I may actually play it.

[Chriso]

a

[Ricky_Honejasi]

I played your map, it was quite good. Not really sure what I can say. Would really like to see the Space map you're thinking off done, I've been seeing if random terrain generation is possible in SC2. It was in WC3, but here I'm not so sure.

If we speak strictly on "terrain" word-by-word in SC2, it's impossible or at least you cannot change cliffs with whatever possible workarounds there could be.

Part of the trick in the map is reusing the same empty space terrain so you show up different units, structures, etc depending on your location in the galaxy. That would be otherwise impossible (or insanely difficult) to make it look any good on real land terrain.

One of the aspects is having it large-scale so you can feel there are a lot of space and areas to go around rather than being limited to the traditional 256x256 of the largest maps.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

So far I spent about 40-50 hours on stuff related to the project and it's still going on although I am not rushing it to finish it.

In short, I did spend most of my time on some "editor" map (to be used by me and trusted friends) intentionally to easily add the various units for the real map. Quite some time was also spent to determine the best way to keep the most data inside the map for a large scale use without things blowing up.

Purely in terms of keeping data via "usertype", I managed to keep 45 galaxies * 25 sectors X * 15 sectors Y * 1000 units thus 16,875,000 unit types with positions without blowing up SC2 or the SC2 editor. Note a sector (72x50 of in-game space) is intended to only have 20-30 units with a max of 100 or so in the real final map.

Now, I am mostly putting more time into the real map for the core functionality.