Worship altered melee

Greetings.

I typed this whole message up once, but my browser crashed before I posted it. I hate that. I'll try to cover everything I covered the first time, and if I leave anything out, I'll be sure to add it in later.

Worship is an altered melee style of map, which is to say, you control a town that provides a source of resources and serves as a base of operations, you get heros with special abilities, and you control small armies, and you fight enemy players. However, there are substantial differences between the standard Warcraft 3 melee game and Worship.

The premise of Worship is that you are one of four civilizations: humans, dwarves, undead, or elves. At the beginning of a game, you start with control over a small hamlet of the race of your choice. The Priest is the most important kind of villager in your hamlet, since, among other things, he has the ability to summon the gods of his people. The gods take the position that heros have in the normal melee game. However, in Worship, the gods are great flying dragons who have the ability to attack, defend their civilization, cast spells (which can increase with their level), and, most importantly, to convert unaligned villagers to their belief.

Since each village area in the map is secluded from the others, the only way for your gods to expand their influence is a strategy of aggressive conversion. As gods discover new village areas, they convert villagers there, who found a new village. Naturally, over the course of the game, your gods are going to encounter rival gods who are also seeking to expand.

Each race has a god of each of three types: a god specializing in combatting other gods directly, a god specializing in dominating civilizations, and a god specializing in defending your civilizations from harm. Though their abilities vary substantially from race to race, the general categories of skills that they possess are shown here.

God-combatting dragons:
Single-target damage ability
Damage prevention ability
Combat superiority ability
A "tough-to-kill" enhancement ability (Ultimate)

Civilization-dominating dragons:
Area of Effect damage ability
Exploration ability
Summoning ability
Large Area of Effect damage ability (Ultimate)

Civilization-defending dragons:
Villager-benefiting aura ability
Sacrifice ability
Resurrection-style ability
Incarnation as a villager ability (Ultimate)

That's all the information I'm posting for now; more will come later. This is one of the earlier maps that I started working on, and it's fairly far through development. Mostly what I'm working at now is implementing the new ideas and better triggers that I've since learned, and finding ways to reduce the filesize of the map. I'll post a protected preliminary version of the map fairly soon, although at the moment it weighs in at about 1.7 mb. For the time being, you get a satellite-capture image of the terrain, which I'm fairly proud of.

Please feel free to leave any kind of comment you like.

Sounds great, I like the god summoning idea, but I think it might be more interresting if the gods were different for each race, not just dragons i mean. I really like the idea of the whole mod though, good work so far.

Man, I wish I could terrain that good, oh well partice makes perfect I suppose.

Thanks for your comments, thegenestealer. While I'm open to having other than dragons as gods, there are two issues. Firstly, I like the look and feel of the dragons. Secondly, the gods would have to be flying and roughly the same size for them to be balanced for each race.

I had custom-skinned dragons so that I would have brown, purple, silver, iron, and gold dragons in the map, but the increased map size from all these models (plus the custom dwarf units) made that many extra models effectively prohibited. So, regretably, I cut a couple dragon models and replaced them with other things that could pass for dragons, like the Vulture and Ether Drake, and used altered coloration to make a difference between skins (I'm unhappy with that, however, since I really don't like how the altered coloration affects the teamcolor areas as well as the rest of the skin). However, because of this, my map is back below 1.00 mb, which is my personal absolute size maximum.

When I'm back on my real compy again after the holiday break, I'll put up some information about the titles, names, aesthetics, and abilities of the gods for each race, and I'll post screenies of the custom models and skins. Don't hold your breath; I'm just an amateur. However, the modelling and skinning really improve the game as far as visual appeal and the believability of the world.

Comments are welcome. You'll have more you may wish to comment on as I document the map better.

this sounds like balck & white... how are u suppose to *convert* nuetral/enemy villages to your own?

Insomuch as your units are gods and their worshipping civilization, then, yes, it's like Black and White. On the other hand, the way the game plays is completely different, so no, it's nothing like Black and White.

To convert a villager, a god uses his "Convert" ability. It has a pretty long cooldown, but having it is a priviledge of being an awe-inspiring representation of a god's power.

When a god Converts, he targets a neutral peasant, gets within range, and the peasant is changed to a peasant of his race and under his control.

Hey Panto I'm just curious in how this is going are you still working on it or has it been scraped?

No, it's not scrapped. I haven't done a whole lot of work on it lately, but I still intend to finish it.

Thing is, I don't think it's going to be quite as interesting a map as either of the other two that I'm maintaining right now. But once both the AoS and Footwar are released for 1.15 (and assuming that 1.15 sticks around for a while) I'm planning to dive back in and wrap this one up.

Ok thanks for telling me that. I was just curious because that is a very cool idea.

hey this looks like a reeeallly interesting map idea
are you stil working on it?
will we be able to download a playable version any time soon?

Not soon, no, sadly. I just agreed to take on another project which is going to be taking the bulk of my time until it's finished. I *am* still interested in wrapping this one up, but I just don't like to split my concentration too much.