Tactical Commanders

This map is an attempt to make the hybrid MMORTS/RPG game Shattered Galaxy for Warcraft 3. It supports up to 12 players, 6 per side.

Gameplay revolves around capturing Points of Contention. (hereafter refered to as POCs) There are 4 POCs on the map. When one team holds more POCS than the other, the team with fewer POCs periodically loses points. Each team starts with 10000 points. The first team to run out of points loses. A POC is captured by standing on it for 30 seconds.

A few features:
-No heros
-No building
-The ability to specialize in four different areas (Tactics, Clout, Education, and Mechanical Aptitude) that affect your units in profound ways.
-Each unit may be further specialized using items like jet packs, infiltrating devices, armor, etc.
-Armor based off of Hardened Skin ability. (Directly reduces attack damage)
-Units with armor piercing weapons
-The ability to strategically place land and air mines
-a focus on micromanagement


I have completed all the triggers and with my albeit limited testing capabilities I haven't found any problems. The units are all done, (although more may be added later) but I have done no balancing of them whatsoever. The terrain is rudimentary right now and I have a sneaking suspicion that the map is too large.

I would appreciate any and all help testing this map. Please post here or send me a PM if you are interested.

Wantok

Love the idea. I'll try it now.

I played a 1 vs game, so a few obserations:
My points dropped to 9999. Is there natural decay over time?
Two structures make the airborn protector.
Are portals supposed to teleport to random locations?
They map seems to big - but I guess I can't gauge that effectively without lots of players :)

Forgot to mention, every time one of your units dies you lose a point as well.

When you click on one of the circles of power to teleport your units it should ping where it teleports them to. There are only 2 places per team: the top right corner and mid right side for the red team and the bottom left corner and mid left side for the green team.

I thought i fixed that with the airborne protector. Thanks for pointing it out and for trying the map :)

Is there an AI to play with Computer?

OK, in that case - McGuyver's tower makes you lose a point when it expires.

I'm curious as to why he has (3000?) mana, when he has such high cooldowns on the two skills.

There is no computer ai, sorry.

As to the tower thing for MacGuyver, they shouldn't count as units. I'll have to change the scoring trigger. It's pretty basic at the moment. As far as his low mana, he can get some items to increase his mana and mana regen, but yeah as I said, no balancing yet. :P I'd love to give it a try with you online if you want. I'm currently online if you're interested. US East name: wantok.

I'll have to catch you tomorrow, its 2:23 am here.

I feel stupid. I re-read your post, Whitehorn, and I realized you were saying MacGuyver had too much mana not too little. I think you're right and I increased the mana cost on the turret spell. I don't want to do too much fiddling though, until I get a chance to see how it all works right now.

I also rewrote the score trigger. It should now only subtract points when an enemy kills one of your units. (turrets not included)

*Updated the map in post 1.

Drop me a PM when you're online.

I've had a chance to test the map a few times now. I haven't played a full 6 vs 6 yet, but the map doesn't seem quite as oversized as I thought, although it's probably still a little too large.

A few other observations:

-Medic's heal was way too good. They are no longer able to heal themselves and I increased the mana cost and decreased the amount of hp healed.

-People will not bother to read the quest menu to learn how to play. After having to explain how things worked over and over I added a few more tips and hints that are displayed at appropriate times directly on the screen.

-The game took way too long to finish. Admittedly people didn't know what they were doing, but even when one team had all four POCs the entire game, it took forever for the points to reach zero. I can only imagine how long a game would take between two teams that knew how to play and each held two POCs for most of the game. Therefore, I increased the amount of points lost when holding fewer POCs. If one team has 3 POCs and the other team has 1, they will now lose 40 points every five seconds. If one has 4 and the other has none, they will lose 90 points. Also, after 20 minutes, BOTH teams will lose points every 5 seconds on top of the normal point loss for the team holding fewer pocs. The normal point loss is doubled from 40 to 80 and 90 to 180. These changes should force the losing team to go on the offensive instead of sitting back with 2 pocs waiting for people to get bored and leave.

I added a leaver trigger. I never realized one was necessary. Since all the maps I've played announced when players left, I assumed it was built in. Also, when a teammate leaves, his food supply is split amongst the remaining players on his team to make up for his leaving.

I noticed a couple of bugs as well. The POC timer windows sometimes messed up like both were trying to display in the same place on the screen. Also there was a strange problem with units freezing. I did not notice problems like this in the unoptimized version of the map, so this version is unoptimized. All I did was take out the editor only files.

*Updated map in first post.