Reworking Map - Battleship Command

I've been tempted to fix up my original Battleship Command map, and I thought I should get some feedback here before I start anything. I'm gonna list the background history of the map, current features, features I plan to implement, current problems, and what I'll be doing to fix them. Basically, tell me what you think and whether you think it'll be a fun map to play.


HISTORY

Battleship Command v1.0 was originally a map I created for RoC that was released approximately 2 months before TFT was in stores. I got the idea for the map from the game "Mech Commander", from being able to customize battlemechs with different weapons. Since I haven't seen anything like this before that time, I'm going to assume that I officially made the first map involving ships and multiple weapons. It was an AoS style of map involving ships (flying ships in a futuristic setting) and multiple weapons attached to the ship. The weapons were units that followed the ship (as opposed to buying items with different versions of Phoenix Fire) and had different ranges, cooldowns, and effects (e.g. Nitrogen Missile Racks slowed enemy ships). v1.1 was released as a TFT map, then after v1.3 (or v1.4), I didn't have much time on my hands anymore. The map development was taken over by Shadows_Call (aka Elven_Ronin on this forum). His final version was v1.88.


CURRENT FEATURES

• Over 40 weapons used for point defense, long-range warfare, bombardments, or all-around capabilities.
• Special weapons manually fired from the ship.
• 8 classes of ships.
• Upgrade your base's units and overwhelm your enemy.

Yeah, I don't have much to say. I have already forgotten much of it. =\


FEATURES I PLAN TO IMPLEMENT

• MORE WEAPONS! :D
• Definitely custom models (one of which will definitely not be the Chopper X7 :p)
• Certain weapons will only fire at certain angles that depends on where your ship is facing.
• Reworking weapons so that infantry units cannot be targetted. (Ground attacking weapons can still splash on them)
• Hangar Bays as a purchasable component so that players can safely bring their own fighters into battle.
• Ship Barracks as a purchasable component so that players can board enemy ships. If forces on an enemy ship can be defeated, the ship will be destroyed. The internal fights will be purely calculated in JASS.
• Smarter base units. When they're at a low HP and are not engaging the enemy, they'll return to base to heal and then go at it again.
• Strategies. Players will be able to buy "strategies" to get the next spawned wave to either all go in one direction, or attack a specific player.

CURRENT PROBLEMS

• Memory Leaks. A lot of them.
• Weapon imbalances. A lot of the weapons do splash damage, and can eventually kill all of a player's weapons.
• Player-bought fighters are generally useless for their cost.
• Other minor bugs.

FIXING PROBLEMS

• Memory Leaks. There shouldn't be any problem fixing them.
• For the weapons, I'm thinking of changing most of them to use Missile (Bounce). That way, only a handful of a player's weapons would be damaged.
• Fighters will only be bought if a ship has Fighter Bays installed. Once they buy a fighter it'll be with the ship until the Fighter Bays are destroyed or sold. If a fighter is destroyed, the ship must return to base and buy a "Refit" for a very low cost to replace all fighters for the ship. Of course, the fighter can be sold.

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So what do you guys/girls think? Is it a good idea to rework the map, or should I simply not waste time on an old map?

I liked the map. I believe I still have one of the versions that was made by the other guy. I'd say go for it, it was pretty good as-is, but improved it should be quite a fun map.

What about that steep learning curve?

Sure, make it steeper, what do I care...

It wasn't that hard a curve. Go into factories, load up with as much sh!t as you can afford, and charge at the enemy. Just like all good AoSes!

Does this mean you will not work on the next Marine Corps map for awhile? :(

That's not a learning curve, because you don't learn anything this way.

This seems appropriate: > link <

mmmmm That's a good read. It just reminded me of something. There's only around 30 weapons initially available to the players (after the initial availability timer), then as a player upgrades their ship new components become available. As the game progresses, the components that are "unlocked" slowly enable players to kill the base and other ships easier. This way, there's not many components for new players to memorize, and they can still be competitive with the initial weapons if they're behind everyone else a little bit.

I think that there's a lot of variety with initial components while still maintaining significant differences between them (as in different components function differently). As the game goes on, the initial components will never go obsolete since they'll generally be smaller (take up less food) and are still needed to carry out specific tasks, especially the point defense weapons. That's how I'm gonna add new weapons. Even late-game, I want players to be able to continue to unlock more weapons and hopefully they won't make any of the earlier components obsolete.

What do you think of that? Would it help with the learning curve issue?



Not really. If you kept updated on my forum, you'll notice people giving a LOT of suggestions that I don't wanna implement. You'll also notice that it's taking me a while to simply make changes to the general gameplay across all three maps. I already have the terrain and the gameplay design of Assault finished. Once I fix up all three maps, I can go ahead with moving the triggers to Assault and making it playable.

The steep, steep learning curve is an issue in the map that Anitarf mentioned.

That said, it can be quite hard to understand what all the weapons and upgrades and everything does. Of course, it's a very enjoyable map, but very hard to play with pubbies.

30 weapons? That's 3 shops, just for starting weapons. It may not be as much as DotA, but I think it's still way too much.

The Start Stock Delay for components should be enough to keep players from simply getting lots of weapons at the start of the game, and encourage them to go in with what they start with which is 2 SRMs, 2 Vulcans, and 1 Laser. It's sufficient for very early parts of the game while they wait for the initial weapons to become available. The initial weapons become available starting at the 1 minute mark, then the more powerful initial weapons become available after 15 minutes. This way, new players will only need to worry about 2-4 more weapons everytime they go back to heal or buy something. Would there be anything else that would contribute to the steep learning curve that I've overlooked?

BTW, I have two more features I'm planning to implement (updated first post as well).

• Smarter base units. When they're at a low HP and are not engaging the enemy, they'll return to base to heal and then go at it again.
• Strategies. Players will be able to buy "strategies" to get the next spawned wave to either all go in one direction, or attack a specific player.

I just saw now that you had a site, never noticed before the link in your sig