General Questions on Designing an AoS Map

I have a few questions to ask. Hopefully I can get the answers to some of them.

1. Is there a very efficient way to have the units spawn for each side and attack targets accordingly?

2. Is there any way to have a shop that only sells to the player that owns the shop? (No Allies)

3. How do you get 6v6?

4. How bad is it to have a ton of global variables? What benefits and drawbacks to global vars have vs. using a game cache?

1: a timer. Spawn em if their toop building is alive, then order them.

2: there is i think. dunno what exactly.

3: You cant, really. Neutral players have problems with camp locations, so they cannot be used as "troop" players.

4: Gamecache is better if you know how to use it, and globals are better for some things. This is a complex subject.

It's okay, you can feel free to explain things. I'm a computer science major, and I'm good with programming. I'm just relatively new to JASS and WC3.

You can get neutral players to fill in as troops; I have done it. I can explain what problems you will face, but I don't have the time at the moment. I'll return and tell you about it if you're interested.

Put the items under Created Items, rather than Sold Items (in the object editor, near the bottom).

I believe there is a way to give players units that will take orders from triggers but will not listen at all to the player's orders, except for that player triggering for the bounty should be done.

Essentially you use two of the nuetral slots (the non-player ones) as the spawns. Nuetral hostile can't be used due to some hardcoding, and I'm not sure exactly which two I've used in the past, but the other three might all work. You can change their ally settings to ally with the players on each team, but the major problem comes in the fact that nuetral units will run away when attacked by a building, period. You can't stop it. What you have to do is make all your buildings units, and have another invisible, invulnerable building at the same spot. When the unit 'building' dies, you destroy the invisible dummy one.

Use variables for the spawn locations and order points. Also, don't have all of the units spawn at the same time, a small gap is best. Read a tutorial on memory leaks if you don't know about them.


As already said. Best not to use neutral hostile for it though.


Globals are better for pretty much everything, as it is faster than game cache, and also probably takes up less memory, but it is quite a bit faster.

Globals are faster, but game cache allows much more flexibility and is what you want for multi-instancability.

AoSs rarely require multi-instancability. Really, if you can use globals, use them. Use game cache only when needed.

Use the shop sharing ability, and put it as items made instead of items sold.

What exactly do you mean by multi-instanceability?

An instance of a spell / system would be a unit able to use it. Multiinctanceability is the ability for the system to be used on more then 1 player / unit / whatever.

I see. Why not just use a global array? One to hold the unit ref, one to hold the variable you want to multiinstantiate, unitref null meaning unused and an int indicating the highest value used? That's what I do in all my maps. Easy, fast, simple, little memory, and no pesky game cache.