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Invasion in Duskwood was originally started to create an unique AoS map for us that's fun to play. It has a lot of never in WC3 seen features and should show you what the WarCraft 3 engine is capable of.
Features:
General
We didn't want to change the classic 5v5 map structure. There are three lanes (top, middle, bottom), where minions spawn every 45 seconds: 3 melee, 2 ranged and 1 siege minion in every 4th wave. However, each lane has individual models and names for their minions: the map is a war between fractions and alliances, not between two empires. The bases are also made to represent this, giving a unique feeling of a big allied basis.
In the jungle, there're minions: regular and rare ones. The rare ones give much more experience, gold, and a buff. These buffs are unique for each rare monster and gives you some sort of a bonus. Jungling & jungler heroes are available to play.
Also, creeps, minions and towers upgrade every 4 minutes. They have more HP, Attack Damage, Armor, Resistance, and killing them is more rewarding as they grant more XP and gold.
Kill Streaks & Assistances
Being on a killing spree means you're worth more money than the others. Hunting down a godlike player is more rewarding. In addition, there're death sprees as well; dying many times without scoring a kill means you're worth less gold. This feature was implemented to stop intentional feeders.
Helping an ally get a kill will reward you; 75% of the gold the killer gets will be split between the assistants equally.
Advanced Combats
A lot of stats have been implemented to make sure you'll always have great fights. The time of "QWER-Right Click" team-fights are over! Short cooldowns, unique spells & items, multiple visible and hidden stats will try to entertain the player.
Strength/Agility/Intelligence, the old and boring stats are completely removed. The bonuses you were getting from them now appear as individual stats, with lots of new ones.
Complex Crowd Control Mechanisms
Crowd Control Stacking means always the longest CC will be applied; but what about slows (and impede, a unique IID CC, which is basically an attack speed slow)? They have factors as well. In most games always the strongest slow is applied; Invasion in Duskwood is different. In Invasionin Duskwood, if your hero is slowd multiple times from different sources, the slow factors will stack, using a formula. The formula ensures that the total slow factor is always below 100%.
Also, Crowd Control Reductions appears as a stat. If it was not enough, each CC has its values attached to heroes, meaning it's possible to modify only your Stun Duration Output and reduce the duration of Silences you get.
Advanced Shop & Recipe System
Instead of the traditional merchants, Invasion in Duskwood uses shops. Each player has a shop, which can be accesed from any spot on the map.
Furthermore, you don't have to be a ninja when it comes to buying an item. You can just enter the shop, select the category (Weapons/Magical/Defensive/Movement/Consumables), enter the tier (1-4) and buy the item. The recipe will show the reagents, the ones you already own has different colors. You can see the total and the remaining cost of the recipe at the bottom. If you don't have all the required items, but you're rich and have enough money for the item, you can buy it without buying the components; the ones you already own are removed from you and their cost is subtracted from the cost.
You also can't drop items; dropping items has lost its purpose and just messes up things, therefore it's not allowed anymore.
Cool Spells/Tooltips
Long cooldown, high mana cost, raw spells do not exist anymore. In Invasion in Duskwood you don't have to be passive. Cooldows are made to be low, their cost is low, plus regen effects are quite high. Being agressive is rewarding, why shouldn't we support that?
Everything you have to know about the spell is printed on the top of its tooltip. In addition to these things, spells have different ratios, such as Attack Damage, Bonus Attack Damage, Maximum Health, Maximum Mana, Armor, Resistance, and so forth.
IID spells are also made to fit into a set; most heroes are built around something, they all have their purpose, and their spells support this purpose and each other as well.
Unique Health Bars
The ultimate AoS health bars have been made!
Invasion in Duskwood has the old boring replaced with an unique health bars; they even have different textures for the two sides to avoid any sort of distraction.
These bars are bigger than the built-in ones (which are used for minions, creeps and towers), and show not only the target's health, but its mana and level as well
Lore (Sketch):
The whole story is placed in time around the Second War. The story begins with the duel of a human mage and a demonic spellcaster (eredar or nathrezim). Before they could finish the fight, an Infinite Agent appears, and removes them from the timeline for an unknown reason. When the mage wakes up, he founds himself in an alternative timeline, in a battle taking place between the Last Alliance (a coalition of humans, dwarves and high elves) and the Invading Fel Force (demons, fel orcs and undeads). All he knows that his enemy, the demon he fought, "arrived" earlier than him, and took the leadership of the Invaders, and that the Infinite Dragonflight wants the fall of the defenders. The demons estabilished a stronghold in the northeast of Duskwood, and opened a dimensional gate to support their attack. On the other hand, the alliance repaired one of their old fortress, built to defend a violet citadel, which generate a power-shield, blocking the way to the Alliance territory.
The invading force of the Burning Legion consists brutal battle-beasts, malicious eredar spellcasters and cunning assasins, while the alliance enlisted most of the mortal races, various nature creatures and elementals even.
Well, we'll try to write interesting hero background stories, but it's not the main thing of such a map.
I focus on the gameplay. I've seen so much bad designed map with their stupid STR/AGI/INT based heroes, where all you had to do is pick a carry, survive the first 10-20 minutes and the right-click for the win. Even if you've picked an INT based hero, you was not like a caster because of the high cooldowns, high mana costs. Each teamfight looked like a huge effect storm for 2-3 seconds and then the whole fight becomes a right-click parody.
I tried to solve this; the mana costs, the cooldowns, the manaregen, the items, everything has been made to give you a dynamic, action-packed AoS, where you always have to do something. If you are a caster, you have to cast your abilities, if you want to do something.
Also, bragging? Should I have written that "this map is not different from any other maps, but try it please, because it's mine"?
What are the factions? Why do they clash? What is the task? What about the style and battleground?
Rather than stating what your AoS is not, can you explain what it is? Why, right off the bat, would I assume bugs in your project? Of course you can make comparisons to other AoS but first thoroughly describe your own one. This includes illustrating what an AoS is, so you get a coherent picture and you can show where you leave the regular path.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Luorax
Also, bragging? Should I have written that "this map is not different from any other maps, but try it please, because it's mine"?
You can argue and show the quality of your project by giving a thoughtful and complete description.
Beutifully made systems, not so basic abilities (I prefer these advanced ones) :)
I recommend adding a wall-hit damage effect for the knocking back abilities, as you'll get hurt if you are thrown into a wall ;)
Invasion of Duskwood ? You could have picked a better setting for all the lore fans out there. Like... Warsong Gulch (border between Barrens and Ashenvale), or Arathi Basin... or like... Stormwind vs Ogrimmar, Shattrath vs Black Temple.
Or is it like the creatures of the Nightmare spawned through the portal within Duskwood on one side... and... the... citizens of... Darkshire on the other side !?
My friend is a very big lore fan too, and this name was his idea.
However the name is not the final, it may change once we starting writing the lore and the hero background stories. (It's not done yet, as we'll try to give a part from the map background story to certain heroes.)
I think I'll ask him to register here, just to answer these kind of questions. I've got some ideas too, but I'll give him the freedom - this is what he likes, and also, I don't know that much about the lore.
Well, after Kenny won them the war with the golden-PSP, they became lazy. They realized that the beings on our beloved Earth are strong enough to fight with the demons.
Devil doesn't really like this situation, but the angels of heaven are too lazy to leave their home, and fiends found Heaven too shiny :(
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Well, my old terrainer is back. He's already started to work on the terrain. Once it is done, I'll update the main post. Also, I've sent a PM to ALONE, hopefully he's still ready for logo and loading screen requests.
I heard that you were bombarding Luorax with lore questions, so I'm here to answer them.
Don't forget, some names are temporary only.
About the lore, the factions and all that stuff: (rough sketch) The whole story is placed in time around the Second War. The story begins with the duel of a human mage and a demonic spellcaster (eredar or nathrezim). Before they could finish the fight, an Infinite Agent appears, and removes them from the timeline for an unknown reason. When the mage wakes up, he founds himself in an alternative timeline, in a battle taking place between the Last Alliance (a coalition of humans, dwarves and high elves) and the Invading Fel Force (demons, fel orcs and undeads). All he knows that his enemy, the demon he fought, "arrived" earlier than him, and took the leadership of the Invaders, and that the Infinite Dragonflight wants the fall of the defenders. The demons estabilished a stronghold in the northeast of Duskwood, and opened a dimensional gate to support their attack. On the other hand, the alliance repaired one of their old fortress, built to defend a violet citadel, which generate a power-shield, blocking the way to the Alliance territory.
The invading force ot the Burning Legion consists brutal battle-beasts, malicious eredar spellcasters and cunning assasins, while the alliance enlisted most of the mortal races, various nature creatures and elementals even.
Don't forget that this is not the final version, a lot of things may change.
If I'll have time, I'll refine the lore and answers the questions. If it's possible, we might even make a short video that tells the story of the map.
hey man I think you should leave the untargetable impaled units "bug" alone. That's for balance issues. How would you like if someone impaled you then while you were in the air unable to move would get some free shots at you maybe even killing you ?
That was there becase Impale was unique - not the effect was attached to the unit, but the "unit was attacked" to the effect. The Impale effect appears and the unit's model is attached to it ("sprite, first", if I recall correctly).
Impale (Knock Up) is one sort of Crowd Controls - their job is to disable the enemy while giving you the chance to kill them. It's duration is somewhere around 1 seconds, even a stun is longer.
Also, the damage is more sustained than it's in DotA - shorter cooldowns, less mana costs and less damage from abilities. Noone can kill you over 1 second (unless they're fed) Now it more depends on timing and positioning, not on the first clicking player. On top of that, playing a caster or a tank is more funny and interesting, which I like :P I hate waiting for my cooldowns.
Plus I had to write my own system to make "movement effects" stackable, plus the AI became crazy when it as ordered to attack the impaled unit. I was also unable to get some effects work with Impale, so I decided to write my own one.
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The main post is kinda outdated. We've made a lot of progress. For example, we're proud to show you our new healthBar system:
Screenshot
Credit goes for 13lackDeath for his awesome textures.
The shop system is also done, 25 items have been implemented already. I've also made some LUA textmacros to make item creation as rapid as possible.
I'll update the main post as the terrain is done. I'll also try to make it less like a huge Wall of Text.
