Minimal Melee Beta

I finaly finished my little side project, a simple altered melee. Now it needs some testing so I can try to balance it.

More information about the map can be found in the original project thread.

If you would like to help make this map fair and balanced, here are some beta testing guidelines which you should follow if you want to contribute any balance suggestions:

• Please play the map against people with comparable skill and knowledge of the map. You can't give me any meaningful balance suggestions based on games you play against random people who are trying out the map for the first time.
• If a certain strategy seems imbalanced, make sure you try different ways of beating it before complaining about it, make sure it's that strategy that's the problem and not your counter strategy.
• Please post replays of your games. No need to post all of them, just those you feel best illustrate the common issues that you have with the game.

Here's some gameplay hints to help you get started with this map:

• Scout! Scouting is important, especialy if the enemy has a race which can expand while you can not. Use inexpensive units like workes from the very start of the game to keep an eye on possible early enemy expansions, then use special scouting skills and build a network of towers as the game develops.
• Keep spending your resources. You only have one unit production building, so if you let your resources accumulate you won't be able to spend them all when you need them. So whatever you're doing, scouting, fighting, make sure you have your main building hotkeyed and whenever you get enough gold, start making a unit.
• That's why you should also pay attention to your food supplies, you can't train a unit if you don't have enough food producing buildings. It's usualy smart to start constructing a food producing building immediately when the game starts.

Changelog Version 1.1: - increased the cost of human scout towers to 250/100, up from 200/50 - increased human farm build time to 60 seconds, up from 45 - increased the mana cost of Shatter to 100, up from 75 - decreased the mana cost of Imbue to 75, down from 100 - decreased the Rifleman attack damage to 40-46 from 44-50 - Siege Engines can no longer be loaded into other Siege Engines - fixed the forced return of resources to farms bug - increased the movement speed of Ancient Protector to 60, from 40 - increased the movement speed of Ancient Custodian and Guardian to 80, from 40 - increased the Archer attack damage to 44-50 from 40-46

When can we get online and play this? set me a date.

Well, I'll probably be on northrend tonight from 8PM onwards or something like that. Just do a whois Anitarf to see if I'm on.

Ok i played the map with 2 other mappers. I had orc and my enemies were ne and hu. The hu dominated the whole game because of safety bases and a good army. He was able to expand a lot and inspite of my earthquake wards i was unable to do something (ok i played first time).

Directly i think i would have won against the ne and hu army because the orc casters are very strong army supporters and kodos/riders do the rest against stronger enemy units.

I think u should perhaps lower the map size/expansion possibilities. Its a total advantage for hu and propably ud and a total disadvantage for an orc. :( The hu towers also seemed way better than my ones wich additionally needed peons to do something at all.

But in general i really liked the map. The simplicity of the races but difference between them is really cool and well realised. Nice alternative to normal meele games.

...Dojo

I discovered a brilliant strategy with humans. Listen.

I build 10 siege tanks, about 10 footman and three knight and one battlesmith. Then I load one siege tank inside another and that tank inside the next tank. I use knights and footman as cover and unload all the siege tanks from each other and blast anyones base to smithereens. If tank gets wounded I just load him inside of another tank. Brilliant, no?

Bottom line you can load tanks in tanks. Pretty sweet, no?

*chuckles*

Nice little bug.

About the tanks, darn you're right! I guess I should set their transport size to something larger than 4.

As for the non-expanding race vs an expanding race matchup, I imagine that will be hard to balance. Perhaps for starters, try playing 2v2 games where the map is easier to control and thus expansions easier to counter. As you get more skilled, you could try playing 1v1. With orc, I find it a good idea to train 5 peons at start and send two of them scouting (of the rest, one to build a burrow 3 to harvest lumber and 4 to harvest gold).

To be brutally honest I think not giving all races expansions is a rather careless move.

Humans. They have the best expansion in game. Their farm can be used for dropping of and they can be turned into nice little town halls to build workers on site.

Undeads have their goldmine corrupting which is cool and works like a charm. It's the second best way of making an expansion.

Night elves must relocate their tree in order to make a second expansion, not really useful since tree can be destroyed while moving and during that time they may neither build nor mine gold.

Orc. After orcs spend their first goldmine they are in serious trouble. Getting to any other goldmine will be difficult. Ofcourse shamans can use their haste wards to speed things up but that supply line is easily countered and/or destroyed. In my opinion you should make burrows be universal drop off for both gold and lumber. Or allow burrows to gain gold drop off when you upgrade to your stronghold. You may suggest that pillaging is a good way to earn profit, but it really isn't, considering the risk of losing units compared to benefit of pillaging.

I played 8 games of this with my friends and tried absolutely everything. No matter what we did, the humans always won because of expansion ability.

Night elves need help in that regard, by the way. Only being able to mine one gold mine at a time is terribly ineffective for them. I recommend making their units cost more lumber and less gold, since they have arguably the best lumber mining, but lack heavily in the gold acquiring side. I ended most of my NE games with 0 gold and something like 5000 lumber.

Also, make trees move faster please. Consider that when a mine DOES run out, you have to wait ten minutes for your stupid tree to get to the nearest mine, all the while having no gold income. Compare this to any of the other races, who can all get gold on the spot when needed.

I do like the leap ability on the huntress model units, though I think the PotM model could use it too. Also, NE fail at siege even if the PotM model out ranges most towers. Recall how wretched piercing damage is against fortified armor, and suddenly you'll notice just how hard it is to get anywhere against mass towers when you're NE.

Oh and one more thing. I would request you increase the ancient protector movement speed as well and give them siege damage in walking form. Every time I did well with NE it was because I uprooted my structures and just massed wisps set on auto-repair. It's a great strategy, but taking 30 minutes to get to an enemy base and then having to burrow in the ground for siege damage is pretty mean.

Just my thoughts, anyways.

If you ask me, increase speed of all trees and give big tree some movement bonus aura that works only on Ancients.

PS. Lore wise, it is better for the Ancient to have siege while rooted and piercing while moving.

And if u ask me weaken human tower hp and buff orc towers slightly. For keeping the aspect of having very different races u shouldnt give orcs and elves expos but better ways to get gold. A faster tree of life is ok but orc should also be buffed.

They can only get money with destroing buildings but therefore an advantage is necessary. Without that advantage they are supposed to lose because of lack of money.

Solution? Perhaps orc units should be able to pillage goldmines. That would be away to get money without being forced to a direct confrontation with the enemy.

Actualy, no, a farm must be upgraded to a town hall in order to serve as a resource drop-off place. I have just discovered a bug which allows a peasant to return resources to a farm if manualy ordered to do so, but that's not really a feasible exploit since you would have to dedicate all your time to manualy ordering the peasants coming out of a gold mine to return gold to the farm. I will of course try to fix this regardless.

I see now that I forgot to add one beta testing guideline: I need replays. No need to post dozens of them, just a couple that you feel represent a typical game and illustrate possible imbalances.

Yeah but if you don't add that ability then farm can be placed next to the goldmine, right? Yeah I noticed that too. But once you order them they drop it off regularly. I never thought this was a bug.

Anit can you show all units in your tier 1 buildings? Them appearing out of nowhere is kinda dull. When you see what you are going to get it builds some anticipation.

Also as dusky said, make trees move faster. I was wrong actually night elves have the lousiest expansionistic powers. They can't even build while searching for another gold mine.

I actually like Dojo's idea of grunts pillaging mines for gold (like 1gold per attack).

Orcs aren't that badly balanced. So long as you go on the offencive early and hard you can partially make up for the lack of expansions, the NE really get hit hard though, for a 'highly mobile race' their lack of mobility in bases tends to get them faceraped.

Undead seem fine, matches i've played with Orc vs Undead tended to come out fairly even, Human are definitely overpowered though. Their ability to not only expand quickly, but their incredible defencive power which allows them to expand quickly and then secure those expansions against anything less than a full-scale assault means that it's far too easy for the Humans to end up with 4+ sources of income.


Frankly, i think you should still have expansions possible, but do it differently. The Night Elves for example could 'root' any gold mine anywhere with their main building and put wisps in it, without the main building having to move. This means that while they can't get 'expansions' as per say, they'll lose the huge and vulnerable travel time between mines which is what rapes them at the moment.

Orcs are fairly nomadic, if you can find some way for Kodos to become caravans which carry gold, either by 'deploying' into mobile town halls or being able to mine large amounts of gold proportional to the distance of the mine (Further the mine is, the more gold they mine per trip) then i think that would work out.

Orcs don't need efficient expansions, a vicious early offencive can often help, but Human defence definitely needs to be toned down, the Orcs need something (not much) and they'll be on even footing with the Undead and the Night Elves are in desperate need of some way to avoid the travel time between mines.

Thanks for your feedback, I'll make sure to do something about the hu imbalance in the next version. In the meantime, please, do post a replay or two, it'll help me a lot in deciding what to change.