(10) The Legend of Sand

Me and a friend have been working very hard last year on making and perfectioning this map and are finally ready to spread it around.

Its an AOS style map, but with more options to make things interesting.

This game has:
- Tech levels
- Caravans that bring recourses to the cities (needed to tech)
- Armies that spawn and improve each tech level
- 24 custom hero's
- Shops with many cool items
- Recourses dropped by creeps

All these elements give new depth to the game!

Although we have tested it thoroughly, the gameplay and balance always can be improved.

Check the website for the latest version and some more info and post your feedback on the forum!

www.sand.nl.tt

We are more than just Nelffun and his friend making the map (they are the editors). It's a great map with all custom abilities and stuff like items needed besides gold to buy other items! These are gotten from the creeps and stuff.
Really try it out and join the forum because when we get 100 members we get an audio!!!

Ill give this a try right now and let you know, good luck.

Post 2:

I tested it twice heres a few things I didnt like or needs improvement.

- Gameplay in beginning is kinda slow
- Heroes spells were too simple, maybe some jass would be nice
- Human entrance was too small compared to orc
- Needs more paths then just the middle

I liked the caravan idea, tech levels and items, great work.

Edited by Blade.dk. Reason: Double posting.

Well, I must say this map has some potential, but it also has some considerable faults.

For starters, the heroes are soo much alike to other AoS maps. Three basic skills, one ultimate learnable at level 6, one attribute bonus skill... just nothing new there. As has been mentioned, their skills also aren't particularly heavily triggered, so they're very remindful of early DotA:A spells. Not that you can invent any particularly new spells even if you trigger them, there's only so many ways in which you can deal damage/heal/modify mana/buff/debuff... so I don't hold this particularly against the map, but it could have used more effort there. Fewer, but more thought out heroes would be better.

What's less forgivable is the snowball effect: when you die, your foes gain gold, experience and time, and Idon'tknowwhyyoucopythisfromDotA you loose gold, and you are given two hurtful revive options, it costs you half your hp and mana or more gold, either way, you are put into a position when it gets only easier to die again. It's no fun to have a match decided in earlygame.

The map has quite some redeemable qualities, though. The caravan system is an interesting addition, truly adding a new dimension to the game. I also think there's nothing wrong with having only one lane, why have more when there are already the caravans for players to worry about. The channeled drinking from the fountains is also interesting, disabling the players from fighting while healing.

However, these are not implemented as well as they could be. The caravans themselves add a snowball effect to the game, which by itself could be acceptable for the sake of having this new element in the game; however, in combination with the hero kills, it becomes annoying. The fountains are only in the middle, making defense very difficult; the idea in an AoS is for the battle to go back and forth, giving equal opportunity to all, not to lock a team in their base while the other team harrases their caravans, their main base, and abuses the fountains.

The biggest problem here is the size of the map. The terrain, for starters, all those woods in the middle serve little purpose, they only make the map too big, requireing a lot of time to get anywhere... to the caravans, to the fountains... And then there's the item and resource system, needlessly complicated nad completely unexplained to a new player, I didn't even know that you had to kill creeps for resources for items; and besides, creeping really shouldn't be the point in an AoS.

So, despite cliche hero design, the map has enough original elements, but the implementation of these gives rise to some severe conceptual issues. I can't approve the map yet.

Edit: I think the Mathematician's ulti bugged on me once, I was intercepting an enemy hero, I wanted to get close so I would be sure my skill got used on him and not someone else, I'm pretty sure he was still alive when I clicked it (although heroes die so easily around here), he was right next to me, but I got teleported to some hero in the enemy base instead. The skill seemed to work ok on other occasions.

Thanks alot for all this helpfull critique!

I know about this snowball effect, its pretty hard to recover once your team has made a mistake / dies etc. But how to change the gameplay so that it becommes a little more easier to get back the advantage? Mistakes in teamplay / harrasment (caravans) or just simply dying to often should be punished isnt it?

@ Anitarf: posted your critique on the official LoS forum, hope you dont mind, I wanted to know what the other community members thought about it.

I have been on vacation for 2 weeks and I am off editing right now!

Just wanted to mention some little tidbits that I seem to have missed in my earlier review.

The multiboard seems way too big, some columns could easily be thinner since all they display is one number, and the intro is way too long. I don't know if my Esc key jammed or if you have a small bug in there somewhere, but one game I couldn't skip it, which was annoying; not so much the cinematic itself, but I had this annoying feeling that once the cinematic finaly ends there's going to be some complaints from the Bnet populace about me not skipping it. Even if you're a big fan of cinematics, you don't appreciate having to watch such a long cinematic in a playable map, it just doesn't fit.

One game I tried this horde assasin hero who is supposedly (according to the tooltips) good against single targets. I thought to myself, jolly good, I can kill anyone who comes to harras my caravans. That doesn't happen, because no matter how my hero is supposed to be number one in hero killing, he can't do squat against this enemy demon hunter, as his damage output is laughable. I suppose I should have bought a better sword, but this was all happening before tier 2, and thanks to that hero it took a long time before our team got there.

But I really shouldn't complain about hero balance after only a few games, after all, what do I know, maybe that assasin gets super good after he levels up his skills - however, the tooltips should inform players about such particularities, rather than giving me incomplete or false information causing me to play the hero all wrong (either that, or he's underpowered).

But there's a bigger balance problem here: balance between harrasing and defending. Let's say someone attacks a caravan, and a hero on the other team goes to defend it. Even if the defending hero is stronger and manages to scare the other hero away, he's still at a loss: they both lost about the same ammount of time, but the attacker gained experience and gold from the few caravans he managed to kill before the defender arrived while at the same time denying the opponents gold/units/upgrades - the defender gained nothing.

Something is not balanced just because both sides can do it.

Multiboard: The colums are as small as possible, they fit the words in it excactly.

Intro Movie: True, its a bit long, but if everything works correct (you are sure you played as player 3 teal) it can be skipped. The length is based on the amount of info we wanted to give. 1st part is a bit story and teraining, 2nd part is a chunk of gameplay info, I think both parts are essential for beginners.

Master Assasin: The enemy DH is nearly the direct counter hero to the master assasin, he is very evasive, has decent armor, avarage health and has windwalk. Try buying a Poison dagger @ tier 2, and backstab a mage / ranger, you will be victorious!

Horde Hero Tooltips: The Alliance tooltips are far more complete than the horde ones, they need a review, true true.

Balance between harassing and defending: Defending needs to be learned, its not good to wait until your caravans are under attack, run towards them and make the enemies flee. Indeed you lose time, xp, money, not good. Its better to start creeping with two hero's near your own Stone Caravans (centaurs / salamanders). So you dont waste your time and you dont have to run from the mid to the caravans.
This way you can make the enemy flee before they killed a caravan and you get gold and xp, the enemy got nothing.

Thanks for the feedback! If you have some other points, please post them at the official Sand forum, more sand players will see them and be able to comment on it and it keeps all discusions at one point, easier for the editors.

I tried this out some time ago with some random people on BNet, the map was fun to play but it felt like there were something missing, can't quite put my finger on what but it were alot like most other aos maps really, not something you play more than 3-4 times max. Well made though, 6/10.

Thanks, but pitty you can't describe what your missing. We are trying to create an unique gameplay, not the standart AOS thing, a bit more detailed feedback is welcome :), but thanks for trying!

Any staff wants to add about what is left to be approved for the main section or something like that?

Very nice and interesting, I like the caravans idea an the item combinations that need a special stuff...

But some things are too...unbalanced...

-At the start, is very easy to kill a enemy caravan, I was playing with my friends, and at the start of the game we didn't upgraded our troops/buildings because of? Because the caravan were too easy to kill, and when my enemy was coming to kill me(because I was killing their caravans) I already killed something like 3 stone caravans result : -15% of the enemy economy to upgrade and more 150 gold for me(the caravans drop a 50 gold coins), and the same occours with my team, I and my enemyes were not upgrading!!!
-At the start too, is very easy to kill the lonely tower at the center, at 5 minutes of game my team were invading the enemy base(this occoured by playing single player, not multi), perphaps you should make something to cause the teams to take more time to destroy the towers and reach your entire base...
- Only one lane? Well no problem because than the game becomes much nice, but TOO MANY SLAUGHTER, in single player, in 20 minutes of game my base were beign slaughtered by the humans!!!
-Too quick gameplay, the game ends with no more than 30 minutes...
-For some reason, the humans start with 1% more stone economy than the orcs, I think it's not a big problem...

If anything, the short games are a big plus here. AoS maps that drag on for over an hour are just plain boring.

You know, I was surprised when I played this. I thought it would be an open and closed case of the average rejected AoS. What I found was several original ideas, and some very interesting takes on the AoS genre. For lack of a better word, I was impressed. Unfortunately your ideas were not delivered as well as they should, and as such I can not approve your map. Listed below are several reasons why, but this definitely has potential.

• Why require you to drink from the fountain like that? I like that you can’t be attacked while healing, but certainly you could make it more passive than active like that?
• Your Multiboard had a huge gap in the center dividing the upper and lower parts; this was unnecessary and wasted space.
• I liked the item system, but I think you had too many available options. No one is going to buy the cheap bows; they will save up for the more expensive ones. I suggest you bring down the number of items.
• So many caravans spread so far apart that it’s hard to block them. I suggest you keep the caravan system, but try and rework it to be more effective.
• I like the revive system, but maybe you could make it so the gold value in the dialog box changes so you don’t have to click NO over and over until it’s low enough for you to say yes.
• Why only one lane of spawns? Come on, don’t bottleneck things. It’s certainly original, but ineffective. Try a few different layouts.
• As mentioned by Anitarf the abilities are either blizz abilities or slightly triggered blizz abilities. This is a huge problem in AoS’s.
• The terrain was very large, you may want to shrink it down and kill some of the dead space filled with trees.
• I saw the use of custom icons and I think some models, but nowhere did you give credit to the creators. This is necessary, please add it.

So far so good, now that you have the originality thing covered, make the delivery of them better.

Unapproved.

To add a few things on to Tim's post:

I played a mathematician hero. What? 'Oh look a I confuse the enemy with e=mc^2 which makes me stun him while channeling' seems like a kind of iffy ability. I was also an intelligence hero (my ultimate even relied on intelligence to do damage) and yet I could not buy one of the major early sources of intelligence: staves. Not only that, but when I did try to buy one it just dropped and I lost 1500 gold (apparently there was a message when you selected your hero about which kind of items he can use, although I certainly didn't see it, even if that is the case you need a better way to handle it).

My hero's ultimate was also bugged; instead of moving me to the closest enemy hero it moved me to the furthest. This resulted in my teleporting all the way across the map to a hero healing in his base, rather than killing the assassin attacking my caravan (who was right next to me). The balance on the ultimate seemed like it could become a problem (it dealt 20/30/40 x (your int - enemy hero's int) in damage). My base intelligence was up to about 120 and that could be further boosted by items. I think the assassin had ~45. That means 3000 damage before items. Which brings me to another thing, the item system. (Another random thing: the enemy farseer had1000 hp at level 6, more than 2000 later in the game. My (melee) hero didn't even hit 1500 with strength-giving items. What gives?)

Recipes, in general, are annoying. I happened to look at the heavy armour shop, and see an armour that gave +25 intelligence. I think "cool, this will add 1000 damage to my ultimate", and then I looked at the requirements. It required two items, each of which required another two, and each of those had to be bought somewhere and some of them even required leather and linnen. I had to investigate the beastmaster just to find out that I had to kill random creeps around the map to even find some of those things. Way too complicated and not 'new-user-friendly'.

Lastly, the caravans were an innovative addition to the gameplay, but I think they should upgrade with your other spawns. Add a few more units to the escort on later level, and possibly even strengthen the caravan itself a little. I saw caravans get one-hit killed a couple of times.

I would have to say unapproved in its current state, but with some work I could see it passing.

Thanks a lot for all the positive feedback!

We are working on the 'better delivery' of the gameplay and the hero's atm, new custom abbility's and changes in the gameplay should make things more logical and fun.

- Upgrading Caravans (so called convoy system)
- Food has another impact upon gameplay
- More weapon options
- Balance changes (like the Mathemacician)
- Changed abbs

I like the recipe thing and it's pretty logical, first you create things at the light armorer, then you bring this piece to a medium armorer + extra recources and he makes it into something better. So there are many combinations possible, but most things are pretty basic and logical (in my opinion as creator, not objective).

More lanes is also pretty useless, we played a game of sand (4vs4) with only experienced Sand players and normally there was only 1 person in the middle. There are so more things to do then just pushing a lane.
With more lanes you get things as: 1 in right lane, 1 left lane, 2 mid... and there you go, it often results in simple lane pushing back and forth, its pretty fun, but it could be more interesting.
This is were the caravans come in, you devide your team in harrasers and defenders/creepers and 1 player to keep the controll mid. While you keep mid under controll you kill stone and defend yours, and when you want to push the defenders help mid and the harrasers focuss on food caravans.
There is no need for extra lanes cause the action happens outside the lane most of the time.

Incomming weekend (august the 26th) the new version (1.22) will arive with many of these things worked out, I would like to know what you guys think of it! Thanks for giving feedback!