New Map: Strategy Craft

Since september of 2003 I have been working on really good Rts map, called Strategy Craft. I have designed the map to focus on Strategy( controling armies, large scale decesions/macro/Map control/army design) over tactics(small decisons do I nuke his hero or his chimera>)

Their will be 5 races in the game, 4 are 100% complete. Each race also has around 20( A total fo 100) units compared to the 12( a total of 48) in warcraft.

Coalition of Magic: A group of mages/wizards/druids/warlocks. They have mediocre units and powerful magic. Strong for thier cost if used right. They have really good and useful spells. They have lots of units with splash and bounce attacks. And alot of utility units.

Human Legion: Powerful But Slow really good siege and defence, weak magic. Their legionares can double as a ranged units and they standards and muscians which can boost the army. They also have walls and the most powerful towers in the game.

Demon Horde: Weak units but fast to make and inexpensive. Weak strucutres. They have good spells, and when thier basic unit(heralds of doom) kill a unit it spawns 2 more heralds that last for 3 minutes.

Nianar Forest: Nianar Elves, excelent range, incredibly powerful during night for there cost but incredibly weak during the day.(worth double thier cost during the night, half their cost during the day) They have a spell called growth which allows them to produces resources but takes a mintue to cast.

The one race left that is under construcutre is th Legions of the Night

Legions of the Night:Their units are powerful for their cost. Undead with skeletons/wraiths/dire bats/dire wolves. A fast army with masses of units, but must costantly be near a undead building or a leader class unit: Vampire(master of Dark magic), Litch(master of Ice magic) Necromancer(Master of death magic) or a wright(combat leader), if not near one of these they will lose 4% of their hp a second, meaning they will die in about 20 seconds.


Each race also have 7 spells at thier main building, costing 100-700 mana. These spells are game altering, but can be countered.
The Coalition's spells are damaging and scouting spells

The Legion's spells are standards that heal/revive/increase damage/increase move speed/increase armour stuff like that.

The Demon Horde's spells are demon summing spells. Like summon X number of demons for Y mana.

The Nianar's spells are healing/summoning/causeing ngiht to come, and a few nature based attacked spells.

The Legions of the Night's spells are raising dead/dark magic/ice magic


Balance:
You might be thinking, with all these units and races, this game must be very imbalanced. It is not the map uses a hard counter system, this means, a units counter will be able to take out several of a kind. The counter system goes like this, Melee Counters Ranged, Ranged Counters Magic, and Magic Counters melee. Any unit counters siege, Siege counters buildings(towers walls) I have destroyed 15 heralds of doom (Demonic unit2-2 damage 15 hp melee) with one 1 Fire Guard(3-3 damage 50hp magic).

You might also think, with towers, and walls, it must be easy for legion to tech, well it is, unless their enemy gets siege units which have extradonary range(3000 for catapult(Coalition) and denazine(demon) and Roxh(Nainar)


The spells are very balanced, lets say ur huge army is attacking me, I use Conflageration(700 mana huge flame spell think uber Flamestrike) To destroy most of ur army, you could then use Standard of the heavens 600 mana(revive 40 units) Standard of the battle 300 mana(summons 40 legionares)

Or lets say i destroy your army, but lose half of mine, u revive your army with Standard of Heavens, which means ull defeat me, how ever I use lighting blast one of my 7 spells, destroying some of your men.

But you r main spells dont have to be used for battle, some heal, others can speed up ur army so they can move to reinfoce and ally quicker, some produce resources, some give extra soldiers.

Every unit has a purpose:

Also every unit has a purpose and can be used through out the game unlike warcraft(why use grunts when you can use tauren and have plenty of gold. In my game the first melee unit the Demon Horde gets is the Herald of doom 2-2 damage 15 life and if it kills a unit it spawns 2 more heralds. Later in the game the Demon Horde gets the Basher, a 500hp fortifed armour 29-29 damage melee unit, but this unit moves slower and attack slower and does siege damage which sucks vrs units, so instead of using only 1, a better idea is using 4 Bashers to draw your oponets fire then send in heralds who are the real damage dealers.

If you like to play my map with me, msg Legacyspy@Azeroth. If you have any suggestions(balance/glitchs/whatever) you should post here. I am also looking for a few terrainers, they dont have to be great, just better then me, to terrain a 6v6/5v5/4v4/3v3/2v2/1v1/ 10 people ffa map which I can then load in my data. If you would like to terrain(cause the map will not be like a normal wc3 map) just post here.

Ps. How would I go about getting a forum for my map(s)? And also because I would like a place for people to discuss my map and to post suggestions, and for me to post my map with different terrain. After I finish the Legions of the Night Race I will try every week or so to release new content( units/upgrades/spells/abilties/terrain) And it would be helpful to have a forum where I can take suggestions from players about new content.

I want to play your map but thier seems to be a glitch when i try to create a game with it. Warcraft III cant find it. Did you name it something other than strategy craft?

This looks pretty interesting, Legaycspy, and I'll be looking forward to a finished map. Could you show us some action screenshots? Some good things would units of a given race in action, or "strategy" troop movement, etc.

Sure I can get screen shots, they come out as TGAs though, how do I switch them to jpegs?

Use a program like Adobe Photoshop (or, I think even the Kodak Imager program that sometimes comes with Windows will do it).