Zone Defense map open for suggestions

As you might know from my sig I am currently working on a zone defense (to pass time mostly). First let me just describe what a zone defense is because I dont see 'em at all on battle net.

At the start, you have one zone. This zone has a barracks that spawns footmen (No, its not a footy wars although it starts out sounding like one). The twist is that with enough foot men you can control more zones, them each spawning foot men. Controling other zones costs a certain amount of footmen and they die once you bring enough. Certain zones may cost more at the bonus of spawning units faster or having a pre-built defense (that may change later to a build your own defense).

Currently I have

• Different zones (described above)
• Heroes (Balance will be severly stressed)
• Creep spawns in the middle every 90 seconds for experiance bonuses (I have to get rid of units because I hit a wierd bug at about 500)
• A unique massing system
• Upgrades that require a certain amount of zones (tenative, read below)
• A simple layout

But, I'm not much for creative thinking :/ so I was wondering if anyone else has ideas: do you think this is enough, needs a little more, whatever. The zone defense is open to suggestions and anything you say I will consider.

Additionally the upgrades requiring zones is tenative because I'm worried about someone too strong getting stronger, but I cant think of another good way to upgrade. Any ideas?

Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read this, and post ideas.

Here are some images from ingame:

sounds fun, i need to play it though to see wht needs balancing

Good, perhaps I can enlist you as beta-tester.

Ok, I have a question for anyone who feels like answering. I was revising my ideas and I wondered if you people would like heroes that have pre-made abilities with more levels, or new abilities wth 3 levels. Just curious.

i prefer the standard heroes. make them purchasable in a store or something
, and only 1 each so they will run ut if u keep wasting them, or to avoid mass mks or something

Perhaps you got this idea from a mad tactical game called Z? If not, then let me explain, it had a similar system to the one of your map, only difference being that units spawned very slowly and every unit counted, and the player had to time the onquering of other player's zones right in time to get a new unit produced.

Now, of course, having 5 units at a time in a war3 based game can get boring, but maybe you should try decreasing the ammount of units moving around, if you are having problems with 500+ of them... Maybe add in some elements that encourages players to keep fighting with smaller ammounts of units, like small-area high-damage AoE spells (or just AoE attacks on defensive turrets) that discourage massed assaults (because of the experience the opposing hero may gain).

@Anitarf

Hmm. No, I actually got this idea from an old starcraft game.

And what did you mean by 'onquering', its a typo but I cant figure it out.


That AoE idea is a good idea. Its a little annoying though because I had this nice way to balance out spells and AoE spells will throw a wrench into it.

I've tried to make the amount of units less (by making the spawning time twice as long) but you still will max out.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions.

@Monkeyboy
Grr. I guess what I will do is have my 4 custom heroes (I lost inspiration for heroes halfway through) with maybe 4 game heroes. I dont want to have too many heroes because that is just asking for an inbalanced game, which I am taking every step to get rid of.

The typo was conquering, as "the event when a zone is conquered, captured". :)

More ideas; perhaps defensive structures could have artillery attacks, like the aincent protector, making it very hard to dodge with a mass of units, but easier when attacking with just a few.

Another idea is that these defensive structures could have high damage and could be neutralised quickly if attacked from behind; that way, even an outnumbered player can still defend if he manages to block the attacker from getting to the defenses, because then the defences would already cause severe damage to the attackers before they manage to clear the blocking units; on the other hand, the outnumbered player could attack with small groups of units and still be able to defeat defensive structures/machines that weren't protected by infantry (because if the opponent controled many zones, he couldn't protect them all). A skilled player could, in such a case, still win even if luck was against him in a FFA game.

And, if units are too many, you can always re-double the spawn interval. Just don't forget to decrease the ammount of units required to capture a zone if you do that.

Progress has indeed been made on this map. I am now to version 0.8, although it could easily be considered the version 1.0. I am currently beta-testing this map whenever I get a chance on battlenet (currently someone else is on the internet, thus I cant hook my computer straight up to the internet; stupid router...) and lookling for balance changes and bugs (too many bugs in my opinion).

Every and any suggestion will be taken and considered. I am focusing on balance right now however.

So thanks for the help thus far, and keep on providing suggestions.

Thanks.

P.S. I uploaded a protect version because I cant trust the general battle.net population to leave an unprotected map alone. If you want to know how I did a certain trigger, just PM me.

And. Anitarf, I did indeed use your suggestion. For example, the archmages' blizzard (with expanded range) or the wardens fan of knives (with extra damage). Perhaps now I should make those arrow towers into cannon towers like you reccommended, except with less HP.

I just looked at your map out of curiosity (can't host, so I did a little playing around against computers). Of course, I can't give a good judgement based on that, but still, I saw waaay to many units. Waaay to many. Yes, when playing against live opponents, there is probably more action, but anyway, the sheer fact that you need 100 units to liberate the most expensive zone means that there must be masses of footmen going around.

I would reccomend a drastic decrease in the ammount of units required to conquer a zone, and a considerable increase to the spawn interval. Perhaps 5-15 units required to conquer a zone and 1 unit spawned every 5 seconds. That may sound little, but if you consider you must defeat enemy opposition before you can conquer their zone, that means you need much more troops.

Also, it seemed to me that you can't conquer a zone as long as enemy troops are in it. That could be abused by having a few footmen dance at the edge of the zone, preventing the units at the centre from claiming it. That brings us to another point: before you can defeat enemy opposition at a base, the defending player can rush reinforcemets there easily, thus disabling the element of surprise that could aid an outnumbered player at claiming a zone. That could be solved by decreasing the HP of footies compared to their damage, thus making battles last less time.

You should also try upgrading the mass-attack option to add more strategy; like having a mass attacker for every region and only order troop movements from that region, or making the mass attacker a captain you can train and assign troops to and only the assigned troops attack with him, or something else, just make it more than just "rush that zone, give it all you got!"

I agree with Anitarf, in the Zone Control maps i have played, just one, but many versions, there are ALOT of units, i think that way too few units in the beginning is boring and would make many leave since there's no instant action. On the other hand, too many units in late game just creates lag on bad computers and makes it all, 'who can get the best AOE spells and order his 45 groups of footmen the fastest'. Which, i presume, wasn't what you intended.

So, you should make it quite dynamic, so at beginning the units spawn faster, BUT when you get like 40 units, they start spawning slower, like upkeep. To prevent the players from not participating in the game as much as they might have otherways.

First of all, Milkman, that Upkeep idea is an interesting idea. My only problem with it is that it could prevent people from losing because of a faster spawn rate when they are about to die, so they bring the extra units to attack, where the attacker cant spawn much more units, so they cant win, then the defender attacks and the cycle repeats...

I like the idea though, maybe it should be only in the beginning of the game.

Thanks for responding.

@Anitarf: I followed your advice about zones (I just halved the cost all around) and it makes the game completely different. I just tested it out twice and lost (;)) in about 8 minutes instead of the much longer 15+ minutes it normally took. The mass attack every base option would be nice (and simple) although I sorta like the fact that when an army is inbetween zones (most of the time, in the middle) I can rush out to meet it... And that also leads the problem of massing the middle, perhaps I'll put a mass on the choose your hero button.

And you might be suprised, because 1 unit every 5 seconds is exactly how fast it currently spawns.

Thanks again.

Oh, one last thing I forgot to mention. It prevents major lag and makes the game lead to short, decicive battles. That would be the Unit cap. Thought up by linkmaster23, the idea is simple, stop spawning units after a certain amount (the unit cap; currently 110 and there is still slight lag) but it makes the game a lot more strategic.

Ok, so it wasnt the last thing. Another thing is that I noticed that those dark green squares are too powerful. Whomever gets them almost always wins. I'll fix that next time around.

Thanks everyone who responded.

I always did like Zone Defense, but one thing struck me as complete gay. If it's your first time playing you die sooo fast. Like player 1 red could kill like 12 of my units in about 12 seconds. It was slaughter, which means Balances must be made! I also though the towers one each square were way underated. like 5 units could kill one tower, that's gay. I'd send my units out and come back to see that I have 1 tower left, GAY! Not to mention the fact that it took 600 gold to get a tower :\ .

There's really no need for an upkeep idea. Just make it so the more units you have the slower the units come. That way People will be forced to send out their units, this will keep the players statistics more balanced. If you don't know how to do this just reply saying I dunno how to do that.

3 Infernal Roxorz for you

That's EXACTLY what i said, duh...

Huh? There is no way that this could happen in my zone defense without you killing just as many units...

Ok, your right there. Towers need some vamping.

Eh... towers dont cost gold!

But thanks for the infernals ^_^ , and thanks for the replies.

Yes, i noticed that the units spawn slower than the tooltips say. :)

Other than that, here's a suggestion for troop spawning: as long as a player has less than 10 or 15 or something else low units, his footies spawn much faster. That way, the beginning of the game isn't too slow, and in the endgame, it doesn't make a player unkillable, because even if his footies spawn a lot faster, you outnumber him by then something like 10 to 1, so you can kill them as fast as they spawn with no problem. And, if you don't outnumber him enough, his footies will stop multiplying rapidly when he reaches a very low unit cound, and after that, they spawn as fast as your own, only you have more zones, thus getting the upper hand very fast.
Also, such a system would encourage getting the low-cost zones first, because that way, you would be without footies faster, getting a bonus of 10 footies spawned in a short interval; players massing footies for a more expensive zone wouldn't get that bonus, and so you eliminate the rush for the dark-green area.
Also, with this speed-up, you can slow down the general production of footies a bit more, making micromanagement more important.

Has any player ever tried a massive decoy battle and when you rush there to fight, take out your towers with a small team of footies? Because that would be cool, if the gamem mechanics worked that way to support such moves. That's why I voted for lesser zone-conquer-costs, so that, after destroying the towers with a few "commando" footies, those footies would be sufficient in numbers to claim the zone, before the opponent realizes what's going on.

Other than that, it would be nice to have more macromanagement options, perhaps special circles of powers at zones that would automatically redirect any footies ordered to move on them into defensive rings around towers, or other such options.