Warlords and Merchants is now public!

[Ricky_Honejasi]

EDIT : As of patch 1.2, the chat channel for W&M will be "WandM".


At the start of the game, players can pick to play as a "Warlord" or a "Merchant".

WARLORDS

Warlords essentially play as melee in FFA with the following main differences :

-> Can buy units and researches off a merchant player.
-> Starts with a "Warlord Defender". An immobile anti-rush "unit".
-> 150% harvesting rate
-> 4x harvestable minerals and gas.
-> 300 supply cap
-> Has access to the SC2 campaign units along with some SC1 units.
-> Turrets, Spore Colonies and Photon Cannons deals splash vs air units to discourage the usual mass air units in FFA melee games.
-> If a warlord is defeated or type -surrender, he respawns as a poor merchant (which also grants full vision of the map like for an observer).

MERCHANTS

Meanwhile, Merchants also compete with each other in a FFA fashion for the highest profit score before the Warlords finishes their game.

-> Merchants can train units and research technology to sell it to Warlords.
-> Tech up main merchant techtrees : Cheap & Fast (C&F) Merchant, Combo Merchant and so on.
-> Has full sight of the battle map.
-> Cannot interfere with the Warlords' battles (other than selling stuff)

W&M VERSIONS
So basically there are 3 "versions" of W&M :

1) "Warlords and Merchants" (4 melee players, 6 max players)
Uses the melee map terrain of MCP-011[Korhal] by ExTraxx.
This version is intended to be the one for climbing in popularity (after I prepare publicity and "boosting" the map)

In addition, since I did flag W&M with a category of "Melee" instead of "Custom" or "All", it will probably be much more easier to join W&M games if you search for "Melee". As for hosting it, searching with "Warlords" is usually enough.

2) "WandM on Pi" (12 melee players, 15 max)
Uses the melee map terrain of Pi by Krazy.

3) "WandM on Exotic Garden" (12 melee players, 15 max)
Uses the melee map terrain of Exotic Garden by masterwerk

#2 and #3 are intended to be for "private" large games with a big gang of friends and such.

For all W&M versions for large games, I did intend to make it easily searchable with "WandM" for hosting games as I might add more of them over time.

ALONE BUT CURIOUS?
Join up in our SC2 FFS event which you can write your player ID there so we can play with you. You can read more info about the FFS event there.

Otherwise if you want check out W&M alone
-> To fool around with the Merchant role : You can still host a solo game (no AI, you as sole player) of W&M so that you can try the Merchant role.

-> To fool around with the Warlord role : Host a solo game with dummy AIs (they do nothing yet in v1.00) then pick Warlord. You will spawn as the chosen melee race in the lobby.

GAMEPLAY VIDEOS (PRE-PUBLIC W&M GAMES)

Those video playlists are FFS event games of pre-v1.00 W&M versions which IstakuMesk (aka mancatcher) recorded from its replays and commentated them. Most bugs seen in those videos were corrected over time.

Game #1 (recorded & commentated by Mesk)
Game #2 (recorded & commentated by Mesk)

WARLORD SPECIFIC CHANGES (V1.00)

TERRAN
Missile Turret : Deals 15% splash (AoE : 3) vs air units.
Perdition Turret : Added. Requires E.Bay and Fusion Core.

Firebat : Added. Has +2 Armor and can use Stimpacks.
Medic : Added. No changes
Spectre : Added. Uses Ghost's Cloak research.
Vulture : Added. Spider Mines requires research.
Goliath : Added. Has Charon Boosters for +3 air range (allowing 9 air range).
_______ Air damage is 75% vs non-armored instead of 50%.
DiamondBack : Added. Base damage is 20 (+5 armored). Requires tech for 20(+20).
Predator : Added. Lightning Field research is required for Lightning Field effect.
Wraith : Added. Has SC1 resource costs instead of SC2. Still requires tech lab.
Hercules : Added. No changes.
Science Ves.: Added. Irradiate costs 75 energy instead of 25.

ZERG

Spore Colony : Deals 15% splash (AoE : 3) vs air units.

Scourge : Added. Explodes on enemy air. 90 damage instead of 110.
Lurker : Added. Burrowed attacker. In W&M, it has the Ghost's Hold Fire for surprise ambushes.
Kerrigan : Added. Unique Zerg unit. Requires to be trained at a Hive (not at a Hatchery nor Lair).
________ Skillset mostly similar to base data.

PROTOSS

Photon Cannon : Deals 15% splash (AoE : 3) vs air units.

Dragoon : Added. Using Dark Immortal model. Fairly similar to SC1 version.
________ Better than Stalker (without Blink) but more expansive.
________ Can be warped from both the Gateway and Warpgate.
________ Has Singularity Charge at C.Core for +2 Range (allowing 7 Range total)

Scout : Added. Is Light instead of Armored. Modified to counter Void Rays
_______ (even fully charged ones) but to be countered by Phoenixes.
_______ Has SC1-mirrored researches on the Fleet Beacon.

MERCHANT MAIN TECHTREES

CHEAP & FAST (C&F) MERCHANT (5 Levels)
Able to train standard units (not Combo units, etc.) faster, cheaper and to send them quicker to customer Warlords.

COMBO MERCHANT (5 levels)

A combo merchant's wares have "combo units" that are based on standard units but are usually mixed with interesting perks or abilities from other units (including from other races).

In addition, higher "tiers" of the same unit usually carry over the previous added bonuses and top it off with more of them.

In development :

ELITE MERCHANT
Mostly contains more unique units. Usually said units are either strategic or "glass cannons" (hurts a lot but break easily).

A few elite units are available (as of v1.00) but are under the Combo Merchants due to the few numbers of them.

ADVANCED RESEARCH MERCHANT
Can research unique technologies to sell to merchants. Also able to reach Level 4 to 8 of standard weapon and armor researches.

CUSTOM MERCHANT
Can customize their own units for sale. Most expansive merchant. Will take a long time before I actually develop it.

[Dread]

Hey, I'm glad to see you making it public. If you're concerned with the length of the average match up there won't be enough games being played to boost it to the maximum popularity, well, make FFS a night forcing people to start individual sessions and then quitting and repeating.

[IskatuMesk]

lol @ boosting maps

I mean it's fucking stupid that's what you can (and need) to do just to get people to play it. The entire concept is stupid and is a textbook example of battle.net failing miserably at achieving its primary goal with the system.

I'll make mention of the map's release when I do another replay recording.

[Hercanic]

Map boosting? Hm, seems the way to correct such a silly problem is base the popularity system on plays per day per account. In other words, one person can only contribute one play per day to a map's popularity. That way, shorter maps do not have the advantage over longer playtime maps, people cannot artificially boost a map, etc.

Anyway, glad to see you've made a public release! I wish you the best!

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Map boosting? Hm, seems the way to correct such a silly problem is base the popularity system on plays per day per account. In other words, one person can only contribute one play per day to a map's popularity. That way, shorter maps do not have the advantage over longer playtime maps, people cannot artificially boost a map, etc.

Anyway, glad to see you've made a public release! I wish you the best!

That would help considerably but I fear it's not enough.

Basically you would also need to calculate :
1) Number of players (otherwise 4-6 players games would overall have more "plays" than 10+ ones)
2) Length of games (Quick 15 minute maps would have more "plays" than 1-2 hours maps)

Some things I notice is that B.Net actually added two extra categories : "Tower Defense" and "Tug of War". So far it's not enough but with enough extra categories, map authors could write the specific category that their map matches best so that you have an easier playing the specific type of maps instead of it being always in the void unless you are in the top 25-50 of all maps possible.

Also one suggestion I heard (but that Blizzard didn't gave any real sign about it yet) that holds more water than it seems is having a "Favorites" section. Thus you could favorite the maps you care the most so you don't have to continually click "Show More" to join games of lesser known maps you care about. It's easier for both hosts and joiners to meet up that way.

EDIT :

Hey, I'm glad to see you making it public. If you're concerned with the length of the average match up there won't be enough games being played to boost it to the maximum popularity, well, make FFS a night forcing people to start individual sessions and then quitting and repeating.

I am aware that I won't magically have lots of popularity for it. However, what I did is to put W&M into the "Melee" category of maps. Even if a map is custom, you CAN flag it with a Melee Category for searching melee maps. Since my project fits most the Melee aspect anyway, that's what I did along pointing it out when a W&M game is over.

Thus even if I don't get that many plays per day, just having 10 plays per day can be just enough to push W&M in page 2-4 of the Melee category rather than having to compete directly with all custom maps possible.

EDIT 2 :

Oh yeah, in terms of rivals in the Melee category, other than many Blizzard melee maps filling the page 1 and quite a bit of Page 2 ... there is only the Fastest Map Possible map, 2-3 SC1+SC2 maps and some favored fan-made melee maps. W&M is enough developed to hold well against them.

[Thalraxal]

Congrats on going public, Ricky!

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Congrats on going public, Ricky!

Thanks. :p


Also in a side note, I did start my SC2 thread over there : http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic ... 0?page=1#1

[Krazy]

The rich expansion on the left side needs to have edited mineral placement. You have to build really far back, and the destructible cocks are misleading (don't completely block the CC patch, so if you build a turret beside the cocks you have to destroy it).

This is on the Warlords and Merchants terrain.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

The rich expansion on the left side needs to have edited mineral placement. You have to build really far back, and the destructible cocks are misleading (don't completely block the CC patch, so if you build a turret beside the cocks you have to destroy it).

This is on the Warlords and Merchants terrain.

Okay, ill write this down.

By the way, how was the W&M game on this specific map terrain? I am interested to know since it's a much smaller map unlike all other map terrains so far. Although, I presume 2-3 persons were in the observer/referee slots since I remember you guys starting with 6 players and I presume a few more joined up eventually.

[Krazy]

I can tell you how both games ended. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how it was for the other people. I seemed to somehow get ignored, massed air, and rolled over everyone both games for the end. But it seemed like there was a lot of mid-game combat that I wasn't seeing.

I think we'd need to see a game with a few more people (so there aren't tons of empty slots/unchallenged expansions for me to mass expand on) to get a really good assessment of how it went.

[IskatuMesk]

ricky ranted at me about how people are bad at making workers and doing stuff and even sent me a rep I've been too scared to watch T.T is it really as bad as that 4v4? because that 4v4 was awful

I mean it's like hardly anyone is even making any kind of an effort to improve

[Bishotron]

Don't look at me Krazy, that was my first time playing the game and I think I did ok considering, I ran through your defenses at the end till I ran out of the few Thors I had left. If I had known how to buy AA scourges I might have faired better.

[IskatuMesk]

wtf you made thors instead of ravens/void rays insta lose bro

[Ricky_Honejasi]

ricky ranted at me about how people are bad at making workers and doing stuff and even sent me a rep I've been too scared to watch T.T is it really as bad as that 4v4? because that 4v4 was awful

I mean it's like hardly anyone is even making any kind of an effort to improve

Depends, I would say the first half of that replay I sent you was more or less okay, it's in the second half that there are some inexplicable brain meltdown phenomenons. My suggestion when it comes to that would be just to fast forward at 2x to 8x speed since there are usually long delays between key events in the second half anyway.

As for making efforts, I tend to not play melee that much especially that most of my time tend to be spent on improving W&M (easily with 4-8 hours in a single day when I seriously poke about it) or doing homework.

[Bishotron]

wtf you made thors instead of ravens/void rays insta lose bro

Normally I go mass banshees and Vikings. but its an easy win and rather cheesy. When I saw I had all units open to me in that game I went mass Goliths and then into thors latter, but got trounced before I could have any more fun.

I love Goliths though, next chance I get I'll just steamroll the bored with them.

But for hounest feed back, the map was good, but everything seemed forced along the sides. Also I don't know if it was a pathing issue, but all my mechanical units would walk all the way around the map to go form one expansion to the other. If you watch the replay you can see what I mean. I checked a couple of times to make sure my factories wern't blocked and I am pretty sure they were clear.

I did like how the ramps and expansions are placed, everyone close by makes skirmishes more fun. The issue was it was set for four people and we had 3, so Krazy got ignored while I killed off the playere below me, (forget his name).

Actually felt rather good about that