(8) Town Control beta 0.92

General description

Town Control is a multiplayer tactical game designed for 3v3 or 4v4 gameplay.
A good portion of the game concept has been inspired by the great Warhammer40k RTS game, Dawn of War. The elements taken from DoW are:
- Strategic locations
The game is basically about capturing and holding strategic locations/Towns/ on the map, working together as a team.
- Squad based gameplay
Players have a diverse array of squad based units at their disposal, all having defined roles to fill, with different strenghts and weaknesses.
- Reinforcement system
Lost units of a squad can be respawned without the use of barracks/factories.
- Game type "Take and Hold"
The objective is to capture 2/3 of the Towns on the map and hold them for 4 minutes. The team that manages to do that is the winner.

Other features include:
- Enviromental influence
The terrain, the day/night cycle, and the presence of magical obelisks, all greatly affect the combat effectiveness of units, adding extra tactical choices, and making battles more interesting. In this mod, you can beat the odds if you chose the time and the place for the fight carefully.
- Low micromanagement
Ever been tired of having to tell every single unit what to do? How about being beaten by someone who can click much faster? These are the two things I hated the most in the RTS games I have seen so far. So when making this mod, one of the major aims was to put tactical thinking ahead of micromanagement.
- Randomness
The type of magical obelisks mentioned above are randomly decided at the beginning of each game, giving a small ammount of randomness to the map.


As you can see it in the title, this map is still in beta stage. About 6 months of development went into it, and it has gone through some testing, but my local community lacks willing and skilled testplayers, so probably, there are still some bugs and balance issues left. Therefore, I ask for feedback from anyone willing to give.

Updated to version 0.93 on 28-05-2006.

Changes:
- Fixed shadow size for units.
- Changed apperarence of squadleaders /Thx for the idea Tim!/
- Fixed movement speed issues, units no longer outrun their leaders.
- Removed units with no team color
- Added extended help system to aid new players learn how to play.
- Direct attack order is now available /I guess a little more microing wont hurt.../
- Reduced total number of squad types to 13, and made a lot of changes with units.
- Did some balancing too.
- Rearranged player colors, to make identifying allied players easier.
- Added more pre-placed buildings, like waygate stations.
- Generalized obelisk bonuses, and made day/night disadvantages more severe.

"Va va voom" is still absent, but once the main game structure is finalized, I will begin to add decoration to the map. /Although that will put a huge strain on my severely underdeveloped artistic abilities.../

Are those units flying on the screenshot?

Hovering, more like. Those are the squadleaders, and they hover so they are easier to find.

K. This looks like a very original concept for wc3, ill deffinately try it.

edit: Oh, and i must say the shadows are waay too large. Perhaps you should make a smaller custom shadow image, its extremly easy to make.

You are without doubt right about the shadows. I tried to find a tutorial on how to make custom ones, but I couldn't any. Could you point me in the right direction?

Art - Shadow size or something on the unit. Make that smaller. Alternatively, you can remove the shadows all together.

Arent the shadows just alpha?

Ok, I have resized unit shadows /Captain Griffen, thx for the tip!/, but before posting an update, I would like to get some more feedback. Any opinions yet?

Right, I tested this yesterday but forgot to write the review, so here she goes:

Problems:

• The game started and I thought “Okay, what the heck am I suppose to do?” There was no explanation of gameplay really, the load screen could be better suited for this. I only knew how to play because I read the quest log, but many will never even open it. You need to make very clear how you play and how you win.
• You cannot see the hp of units when you hover, this makes knowing when to attack or retreat difficult. Make the hp bar visible.
• Gigantic shadows for small units, uhh..fix that? (I assume as such that you already did)
• Many units like the infernals lack team color, this makes knowing when to attack or retreat difficult.
• The units run past their leaders, this is silly, just make the leader have the same move speed as the units.
• On a similar note, why are the leaders floating on wisps? Just make the leaders bigger than normal units, and attach that shop arrow thing above their head. Placing them on wisps looks really silly.
• Terrain is simple and effective but seriously lacks flair. You need to add, to quote RDZ, va va voom.
• The Nerubian crypt fiend units were heavily overpowered against town halls. To win all you had to do was have one player mass Fiends, one mass Catapults, and the other just distract the enemy. I am aware Fiends could not attack towers, but still. Clearly you have balance issues.
• The units didn’t always respond to what I said. If I attack-clicked on an enemy they all just attack-moved to that point, rather than directly attacking that specific unit. This pulled from any micro possible, and must be fixed.
• There are far too many units types to choose from. All it does is confuse the player, and they therefore only build 2-4 types the entire game. I suggest no more than 9 unit types.

All in all the concept is unique, but it could certainly be built much better. You need to work on the things listed above, else no one will approve.

Unapproved.

OK, thank you for the review, this is exactly the kind of stuff I need.
Two things though:

- To understand why I made the HP bars invisible, I need to explain a bit.
During the early stages of the squad system development, I found a major problem. When squads engaged each other in combat, casualties occured slowly at first, then as more and more units' Hp reached red status, they started to die in bunches, sometimes almost simultaneously. Thus players often found, that their squad had already lost half of its units, while it was nearly at full a few moments earlier. This made decideing when to retreat very difficult, and also made battles highly impredictable. I wanted casualties to occur at a reasonably predictable rate, so I came up with the following system.
When a unit dies in the game /its Hp goes below 0/ it is instantly resurrected by a trigger, and the Mana value of its leader gets reduced by 1. After the leader's Mana reaches 0, the next time a unit dies in the group, it will be permanent. The leader's Mana is then set to maximum, and the cycle starts over. So, you could say that combat units die 6 times on average, before they die permanently, and the squad suffers a casualty.
In this way, it is ensured that you will always lose units is a squad one by one with some interval between casualties.
Now, if the HP bars were on, players would see them go yellow, red, then jump back to maximum all the time, which would really be confusing for them. You can check the squad's casualty status by looking at the leader's Hp value, as it indicates the current/maximum number of units. The leaders also have a HP bar, so by pressing Alt, you can take a quick glance at your overall situation. My question:
When making decisions in battle, did you find that information unstatisfactory?

- Removing the ability to directly attack a specific unit was actually intentional. Because of the above system, a direct order to attack a single unit would be useless. Your squad would start pounding the target, and kill it in a few seconds. However, 5 out of 6 times the target would resurrect, but your units would change to new targets, since they already killed the designated one. This actually happens when ships are ordered to attack land units.
Also, I want to keep microing as low as possibble, to close the gap between players with lightning fingers, and the slower ones. However, I realize this may limit the number of tactical choices too much... Any further thoughts on this?

I've taken notes on all other suggestions, thx again.

Some people believe that micro should be the be all and end all of all WC3 maps. However, I think it is good for some maps to cut down on micro, as it gives far more variety; varied game play can only be good.

I don't have time for a full review now, but I find being able to attack single targets very important. For example, there were a couple of times when only a single catapult was left and I wanted to kill it before fighting the rest of the enemy army and I struggled to do so (killing certain units first can be important).

Actually, catapults - along with towns and buildings - are directly attackable...
But I did some testing today, and even I find it difficult to destroy them, probably due to the system described in my previous post. Another thing to note, thx.

The leader has a spell that says it resurrects the units when they die, so that’s really not a problem. Just make it so when a unit is revived it is tinted black so you know when your units are running low. I find it extremely annoying that I cannot easily see the HP.
Regardless, this makes a serious problem when trying to knock off certain unit types. I highly suggest restoring single-unit-targeting.
Yes, Micro == Good. Do not deter from it, your system makes not microing very easy, so micro should be a skill you can use to win. I suggest you permit microing in as many ways as possible.

Very judgemental. Very much a personal choice. I'd love to see your reasoning behind why every map should require micro?