Priest vs Necro (3vs3 Castle Fight)

Human vs undead mini map with only 2 type of heroes: priest and necromancer.

Game revolves more around common units than heroes.

Day-Night cycle is important: Undead get bonuses at night, Humans during Day.

Game time is limited to 20 minutes so there is a possibility of a Tie.

No permanent items, all items are perishable.

No Fog of War.

Map is open-source.

Changelog =========== 2011-12-01 =========== Removed item sell cooldown from lumber. Better tooltip for staff of teleportation. (important, read it) Fixed bad hotkey of human heal and undead heal spells. Added sounds for Ogre and Abomination summoning. Game Time Left is now displayed in countdown timer. =========== 2011-11-23 =========== Necromancer ultimate now summons 3 skeletons and 1 skeleton archer. =========== 2011-11-16 =========== Added starting gold to players. Added starting items to players. (teleportation staff and clarity potion) Added fixed gold income to empires. Added victory score (calculated from how fast you defeated oponent). Decreased the health of towers and castles. Workers can now build towers. Rebalanced bounty, price of units and price of items. You can now buy lumber. Fixed day/nigh auras bug.

TIPS Ogres > Tanks Tanks > Towers Towers > Ogres

I posted the unprotected map. You can now be amazed by my coding skills.

Out of curiosity, why did you decide to have it just be 3v3?

8 heroes on one lane? lol

Actually original idea was a 1vs1 map.

More than 3 heroes damages balance.
For example it takes 4 holy light spells to kill a necro.

new version 2011-11-15

A couple of things that I noticed testing it single-player:
-I was affected by both the sun and moon auras at all times as a hero.

-The time limit was really, really irritating. Most of the play-throughs I had the enemy main building down to half-health at the 20 minute mark and just couldn't finish it off in time. Again, I'm not sure if this would be an issue with more than a single person on a team, but I can imagine it would only be worse in 1v1. You could implement building health scaling based on the number of players in the game or something like that. Or else, just decrease the health of the last few towers and the main building.

-Near the end of the game, I had more wood than I knew what to do with and almost no gold, even though I barely ever bought potions.

-I really like the zone-control idea behind the black dragon.

Thank you for a great review.
I realized that the problem is that heroes are too impotent at the beginning so the action in game was starting rather too late. See changelog.

new version 2011-11-16

edit: someone please change thread title from AoS to Castle Fight.

Tested it again. The balance of item costs is definitely a lot better now. I'm still a little doubtful as to the relative power of the necromancer's ultimate, as opposed to the Priest's. The skeletons just seem to die really easily and you go through corpses very fast (especially since the undead soldiers don't leave them behind.

Making skeletons leave corpses could fix the problem in 1vs1 game but not in 3vs3 since all necros would need to share. So I simply made Animate Dead from Skeletal Summoning ability. Now it has same manacost and cooldown as priest ulti.
In addition you now also get skeleton archers :)

Thanks for testing Shade987, I credited you in map info as beta tester.

new version 2011-11-23

Yeah, I'm thinking that works better. It just didn't seem formidable enough, and it was always better to buff and heal the abominations than to summon minions.
Also, thanks for crediting me! I usually go by Phox, rather than Shade these days.

Are you planning on developing it further, or are you gonna stick with the map as it is?

The map is finished, I will add no more content.

Probably some minor balancing left to do but that requires people to actually try it in multiplayer. (will change your nick on next update)

Come on people how often you get to see a map that is good for 1vs1.

I'll try to get to find time to test this later today or tomorrow.

Okay I tested this in a 1v1 with a friend so excuse me if some of these points aren't true when there are more players. Anyway, imo, the Black Dragon item should really say something about being neutral. I mean yeah it was a REALLY fun and surprising thing when I summoned it but I don't see why the players shouldn't know what they're using before they actually use it. Also, unlike Shade, I actually had a lot of gold but no lumber (as well as my friend). This may be due to the fact that I was always forced to be in the middle fighting instead of using gold on items, and instead just tons of lumber on units/repairing/etc. However, I'm thinking that if there are 3 players and the item to get lumber has the same # of stock/stock refresh time/etc. it could really cause a problem. The side paths are nice but as I said it's pretty difficult to tell how much time you really have to go out and buy items when it is a full 3v3. I am not sure how much you experimented with it but perhaps the distance to the shops could be closer? Finally, sort of minor but the Heal spell for the Priest has a screwed up hotkey; it's "H" but of course H cannot be used because it is for Hold Position.

Black dragon says in colored letters it is a hostile summoning.
Besides sometimes it is fun to let first time players discover stuff like that themselves :)
Everything else I will fix.
You made a great review, thanks.

new version 2011-12-01

As always read changelog.

I love double-posting, it makes me feel dirty.