skarnet

I can confirm this bug: lives are randomly lost after the latest SC2 update. I don't know what causes it, and it's irregular: not all players will lose lives at the same moment.

Having a nonstandard amount of creeps depending on the number of players is still a problem. For instance, building in 4 gives you a perfect 2-pass if you have 28 creeps, is a little bit ballsy if you have 30, and is downright suboptimal if you have 32. Granted, it's a minor problem if it fixes fairness, especially since fast waves force you to build differently anyway (or to get more power, which is what 95% of players do, lol). I like the idea of a bidding system because it really focuses on optimizing your defensive build in order to be able to afford to spend money offensively. People who are used to spend all they have into towers would have a real incentive to spare more. There's no problem of feeling powerless here: honestly, in anything less than Very Hard, you don't need the interest rates to get to wave 60. But if a player is too greedy, he can bid himself dry, and then he's very vulnerable. I like the psychological aspect and the decision-making it brings to the game: should I rush people but be exposed later ? should I turtle up and get interests so I can grab all the lategame waves and steamroll ? Grabbing a wave isn't necessarily expensive. If nobody bids because they're busy upgrading their towers, 1 mineral and the next wave is yours. I'll add that 1 creep out of N is good if there's a constant flow, but I'm afraid it wouldn't make much an impact in waves if there are a lot of players - unless people team up on someone. That brings some strategic depth, but I don't think it would be as fun as a bidding system, where all the creeps in a wave are controlled by one player, which can really smack someone down. (ah, fast nature to punish cannon spammers. :-D) I'm all for a heavy-offense-oriented approach, but I'm having trouble imagining the details of your last idea. For instance, how is the element of a wave chosen ? What if there are conflicts on the wanted element (which there will be) ? Also, as an aside, if the wave is sent to everyone and upgrades stack, you don't need terrazine, you can use minerals to buy upgrades.

I'm talking about the latter indeed. And 1 out of 8 might not seem much, but if it's 1 out of 8 that your target can't kill and the flow is steady, it really adds up. And yes, I realize there are balance issues: some towers are better against a constant flow and some are better against waves. Tower damage should be tuned a bit differently in wars mode than in defense mode. If it's really not possible, then I'm thinking of a bidding system. We keep terrazine to buy offensive elements and abilities, and 60 waves. But during wave n, players can bid (and irremediably spend) minerals; the amount every player bids is kept secret. At the start of wave n+1, the highest bidder wins: the wave has that player's chosen characteristics. In case of a tie, a normal composite wave is sent, but no money is refunded.

I agree that grouping up to take someone down is a standard FFA tactic and is a good thing. My point is that the target needs to be able to react and at least try to defend himself: a gank should not result in a guaranteed kill, else players feel powerless and it's not fun at all. I actually like the current wars system of non-stop creep sending to everyone: it's fair and it's fun. The flaw to be addressed is that the defensive action (building towers) is also the offensive action (sending a creep). The terrazine idea fixes that: couldn't we mix that idea with the current system ? There are no waves, but a constant flow of creeps; at start, all creeps are composite. The flow needs to be balanced so that single-target towers work just as well as AoE towers, and that the mineral income isn't out of control. Creeps slowly become harder over time. (Since everyone gets the same amount of creeps, maybe it's possible to forego terrazine entirely and make everything, defense as well as offense, have a mineral cost; but I'll use "terrazine" here, but replace with "minerals" if you think it can work - which I do.) Every player has 11 vespene at start, but element picks cost terrazine. So, over time, players will be able to pick (defensive) elements. Players can also spend terrazine to pick offensive elements and abilities. As soon as they do so, one creep out of N gets the chosen element and/or ability, N being the current number of players. A player can also choose for "his" creep to remain composite. The HP of a creep would not be player-controlled, but only depend on the stage of the game. There could be a buyable "HP+10%" offensive ability, though, stackable 2-3 times, so that a player could make "his" creep tougher. I think this system fixes both issues I pointed out: lack of interactivity and lack of fairness, and I also think it can prevent us from adding another type of currency.

Let me make sure I understand what you mean. Basically, your idea is that the Wars mode would be exactly like the Defense mode, except players, one after the other, choose the element and special abilities of the next creep wave, and can spend special currency (terrazine) to achieve it? Not a bad idea. However, I see a major issue with this: if the choice is wave-based, then offensive abilities are only used once every N waves, N being the number of players. So in a 2 player duel, you could spend terrazine every other wave, and you probably wouldn't earn enough, which would be frustrating; and in a 8 player free for all, you would only control one in 8 waves, i.e. only 7 or 8 waves if the limit is at 60; that's not much at all and you'd feel like you're playing defense mode for the majority of the game. 60 isn't dividable by 6, 7 or 8, so it would also be unfair to some players who would control 1 less wave than some others. Also, if the other players want to gang up on you, they have up to 7 waves to do so and you can't do much about it. You need to be able to react when you're being attacked. I think we need to take your idea and add more interactivity to it. For instance, your only defense is element picks. What if element picks weren't fixed in time, but simply had a cost in terrazine ? So you could choose to spend terrazine either for offense or for defense. If someone is trying to kill you, you can adjust your build live - which opens up nice ganking strategies, too. The wave system is more problematic, I have no immediate idea how to make the "spend terrazine into offense" thing more interactive. I'm afraid that as long as we stick to 60 waves, we're going to hit a wall here. Maybe a mix of your idea and the current wars mode, where you just gain terrazine over time and use it to either send creeps of a certain element, or to pick a defensive element, would work ? It's interactive, but not snowbally, since terrazine income remains the same for everyone.

I'm not sure it is possible to have more than one-dimensional selection in the lobby screen, so for every alternative, you have to double the number of game modes: you'd need nonmazing/defense, nonmazing/wars, mazing/defense and mazing/wars. Move the hero-nonhero selection to the lobby too and that's 8 game modes... at some point it becomes too complex. I'll let Karawasa be the judge of where the limit should be. ^^ The 2.0.5 patch works, but some projectile graphical models are off now. For instance, the money tower's projectile is now a kind of weird, big round ball that doesn't feel like a gold coin at all. On another subject, I played with Windstrike yesterday - man, your mildew defense OWNS - also, please stay on EU - and we agreed that the game was too easy: in normal difficulty (and everyone picks normal difficulty) there is no real skill differentiation before the fruit wave, because weak builds can kill everything anyway. Also, there's no incentive for players to make progress: if their builds work, why would they research anything else ? The current "very hard" seems to me a pretty good difficulty setting; I wish the game would be more centered around it. For instance, if all the creeps had 150% of their current HP, that would make the game 1.5 times as hard, which would be great: "easy" would still be a walk in the park, "normal" would be slightly challenging, and "very hard" would be a real pro skill test. The Gem Tower Defense game, also available on SC2 Arcade, has some good ideas: you guys should check it out. For one, the difficulty system is very well-balanced, with 6 difficulty levels, the first 3 ones being a piece of cake and the last one being practically infeasible (but fun to fight against !). Also, the last wave is an invincible boss (or 10 invincible bosses in swarm mode, to test AoE towers) and the point is to do the most possible damage to the boss, for epeen purposes. There is a damage and DPS counter for every tower, which is very useful. I understand the fruit wave in EleTD accomplishes the same goal, but since the creeps regen, the focus is still on getting kills, not on dealing the most damage; not for the next version of course, but maybe in a future version, I would like to see a similar damage test :-)

What I would really like to see is a way to select mazing or non-mazing mode in the SC2 Arcade game lobby, instead of in the game itself. Most players have never played mazing mode and it's very hard to find a mazing game ; since the loading time is pretty long (any idea what is taking so long to load btw ?) if people don't vote for the mode you want, it ends up being really frustrating. The SC2 arcade system seems to support several game modes for the same map, so would it be possible to take advantage of that ? Thanks.