1% would be better IMO.
Are the rest of you finished with your entries?
I need to update the contestants table.
Sorry, for personal reasons, I didn't post my entry yet. It's finished, so probably today I will do that. If you all want, just penalize me with the 2,5% less rate points.
I am not sure if this was corrected in the update, as this is based upon the first upload that I played, but I only ever required Tier 1 to get all the heroes, and I could get all four. Although apparently getting an army of four low level heroes was quickly proven by the opposing AI to not be the wisest investment, I think maybe there were some complications regarding that. I had some similarly fiddly complications with my own heroes, too.
"Wazzz - The Bandit Outlaws"
The Pros of this techtree is they are made by a stunningly handsome individual. Realistically, there could be no one more perfect to gaze upon in a cool Summer's breeze.
The Cons is that. try as I may, he is ultimately unobtainable, and my affections will go for naught. A pity, when one considers what could have been.
XeTTTTkin.
Well, in fact, one possible technique (in addition to turning cultists into zombies) is to create cultists with the only objective of regenerating the dark mages mana with Cheap sacrifice (by the way, using Shadow skeletons is even more effective. These have more mana and damage, and a little more acceptable amount of life, besides having Shadow bolt too). Also, if you plan to dedicate yourself to the dark mages, I recommend invoking the Shadow Lord, who has an aura of extremely rapid mana regeneration, in a fairly small area.The Shadow Bolt ability adding 75 damage on attacks, even at a cost of 100 mana per shot, is phenomenal - the chance to spawn a Dark Minion on kills is a bonus. With a cap of 400 mana and a readily available Mana Pool in the center of the map, rushing with Slaves and Dark Mages is truly the optimal way to go
A lot of people just forgot that (Blizz used the "undead" name for the Forsakens in Frozen Throne) the Undead techtree is more a Scourge techtree than anything else. The other undead groups uses different techniques in battle (the Forsakens have, per example, the Real Boticary Society. The Ebony sword knights have... Well, death knights. And the CotD, of course, have Orcs, humans, etc.For me, I think a lot of these sorts of techtrees get a bad rap, as they get accused of ripping off the Undead despite demonstrating completely original takes on the idea. Yes, there happens to be Undead within the faction, but that does not inherently mean it's a rip off.
I think I forgot change it, at the start, the dusty skeleton will just die at time (i changed it because i think is interesting accumulate them.65 gold for a permanent Skeleton Warrior that surpasses the Militia is pretty strong, so take advantage of it.
BuildingsUnits |
Holy Crap!!!!View attachment 334073
Features
- Unique unit-training system
- custom building models
- custom unit models
- 2 heroes
- custom ground texture for the buildings.
Known Issues
- Hero tech requirement is ignoring gameplay constants, so you will have to use 'synergy' in singleplayer if you wish to use both heroes of the Starfall Empire in the same session. I do not currently know how to fix this.
- On game start, your star location may clash with that of another player, requiring you to restart the game. I am not sure what's causing this, but it's most likely Custom Race System. Something probably broke when I converted it to wurst. I do not currently know how to fix this either.
- One hero is missing an ultimate :/
Note
- You need Warcraft 3 patch 1.31 or higher to play this map.
- Do not save this in the editor or you will clear ALL triggers from the map.
That... was unintended xD The Mystic Loom initially required an Aegisary to be built but I worried about causing too much of a dependency chain. Turns out, without an upgrading town hall, you kinda need said chain to nerf the rush to tier 3. I've also since made Aether Vaults and Lyceums as expensive and time-consuming as upgrading town halls. Should help with slowing things down a little bit.This does, unfortunately, provide a very fast means of going straight into the third tier, allowing you to fast track your way right into Channellers. This is actually optimal, as I was able to defeat an Insane AI with absolute ease using these. It also makes for easy creeping when you are able to use flying Colossi before the first Night Time even hits. Their primary weakness is that they can't attack air units, but that tends to not be much of an issue as you upgrade the Channelers to do additional damage against buildings and destroy waves of Food Production structures while picking apart entire armies.
I do wonder if that's the cause of some of the issues I've been having. I never intended for the Fountainhead to not be a town hall. That was an oversight. 'twill be rectified.Unfortunately, none of your structures actually qualify as a Town Hall, either, making Town Portal ineffective for this faction. The potential oversight of Tavern Heroes, however, was well taken care of as they require the appropriate Tiered facilities - something that can be overlooked, and I am very glad to see it wasn't.
Whoops. Will remove debug msg.This gives them a Tempest ability which produces a debug message, and after a while begins Thunderclapping the ground with bolts of lightning.
Backpack upgrade was an afterthought and copied and modified from another existing upgrade and in my haste I forgot to change icons and stuff like that.Some other things I noticed was that the Backpack upgrade seems strangely more expensive, suspiciously sporting the same icon and cost as the Thaumapagy upgrade found in the Aether Vault.
It's about perfection and quality over quantity. Notice that the only 'human' (or elven, rather) units at play are tier 3 units and heroes. Everything else are constructs or animals. The Starfall Empire is all about the excellence of the individual, and being elves, they have a long, long, long time to get there. There's also elements of misdirection or subversion in there, like the Tesseract's Inverse Lattice and Phantasm (an illusion that will hurt you if you attack it). Mana shields can also be considered Blue, as you hit something and expect it to bleed, but you strike a barrier instead. The Witness is also a superlative scout, which gives you much needed insight into enemy movements so you can outmaneuver them.A part of me can't help but wonder what the philosophy behind the entry is, either. While they feel similar to the Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds Blue faction stylistically in addition to Magic Protoss, I do wonder what the philosophy behind the faction is, as well as how that would translate into their playstyle.
MebbePerhaps we will see an updated version over the horizon?
"Xetkin Clan"
It's an odd feeling to see Battle Realms inside of Warcraft 3 but it's been done quite well. The unique training system feels original and intuitive but the worker system does need improving. It would have been preferrable for the Layman to be able to construct food production, and for said food production to produce more Laymen since your only source of Laymen is the town hall. When you're teching up, you can't produce any Laymen for at least two-and-then-some minutes. Artisans also just hang around doing nothing. Being able to train them into warriors like the Laymen would allow players to recycle idle Artisans into a more active role.
Aesthetically, this faction is cohesive and quite nice. It has to be said, however, that the units tend to all look alike. That's not really a criticism on your work, but it's worth pointing out, imo.
When it comes to combat, I entered a melee with the Serpent Incarnate and all my unit suddenly caught fire and started doing w/e they wanted. I understand this is a Red faction, but... but... my units. /single tear. They did wipe the floor with an Orc army, but they remained uncontrollable even after the fight. GG, best army, strongk af but one-time use only. The Serpent remained uncontrollable even after combat died. I assume that's not by design.
Quite a fun faction, however. Plenty of neat upgrades to buff those units. Also the Scavenger deals 56 - 276 damage at level 3 damage upgrade. Might wanna nerf that.
PS: if you want to cancel an order immediate after it's given, run a zero-second timer and then order the unit in question to stop. It will look seamless.
Soundtrack is Necropolis theme from Heroes of Might and Magic IV! That game might not be the best HoMM title out there, but imo is has some of the best soundtracks.
This is a very cleverly developed faction, in general. Everything from their altar-type structure being a tavern to the town-hall having the same recruitment functionality as a mecenary camp make it feel extremely well thought-out. Thematically, it's very coherent and it's well at home with its Black philosophy; bandits are mostly selfish bastards, and this is a whole faction of them.
The Skaven units are really fun to use and work really well with the whole army. If you have a few Sharpshooter Teams and Gunner, they will *violate* bases. The amount of siege damage on display is impressive, to say the least.
The Void Walker seems to be the only unit with a healing ability, and the shop doesn't appear to have any way to heal units. Loading a unit inside of a tent will heal them, but the cargo system being somewhat clunky makes this hard to control at times, requiring constant mirco to heal multiple units. For a Black faction it makes sense to not have a lot of healing but I still would have preferred a more efficient way to heal my units after a confrontation. Simply allowing more than 1 unit per tent might have made this better. It's quite a minor point, however. Overall this faction is really good.
The penalty rate still applies now but it's up to you whether you want to take the penalty or not. As it stands, the race is still pretty playable, and I updated one of my posts up above to show a strategy for playing around with it ^_^
Review time!
First of all, Racoons as worker? Brilliant.
The idea of Growth of Green is quite nicely implemented with the Sasquatch and the green drakes.
The use of Gnolls on trees as turret is a nice idea but the implementation could be a lot better (eg using the Orc Burrow technique or some sort of right-click detection).
Some things like the Pool having a healing role but also having upgrades means it can't heal while upgrading.
Rock Golem with chaos damage means I don't need to make anything else,
also Dropbears have a *lot* of mana so they can heal infinitely.
Glad you enjoyed itRemains quite a fun race to play.
hahaha, so I spent writing that manual, for you to continue experimenting? Although I admit it's fun. Even I, knowing what could happen, I spent about five minutes just watching my units die. I save your work. Those are the only combinations. Any other will just kill the unit. I was thinking of creating some secret combinations, but I had no more human units that could be involved.The idea of the Plague Cauldron sacrificing units into better things is super neat. While my first instinct was to ask why not just use a morph, I do feel like this method is potentially more fun, especially if you take that concept and combine it with custom UI to make a global ability. Maybe it even comes in AoE and Single-Target versions, allowing you to convert swathes of units at a time. I did spend a fair amount of time testing the Cauldron's sacrifice on a number of units to see what they become. Really neat feature.
That's a good idea.On the downside, workers with timed life? Can;t say I'm fond of that. I was constantly running out of gold because my workers were dying (though I did have a bunch of skeletons hanging around). It's an interesting way to turn the harshness of slavery into a game mechanic but something more like a health degen and potential ways to curb that (at the cost of effciency) would have been preferrable. What's more, this creates the opportunity for a taskmaster kind of a unit that would specialise in base-management a bit like the Zerg Queen from StarCraft II.
It's based in the argument of shooting star, of the priestess of the moon. A little secret? This ability is, also, based in that ultimate. I just maded little changes.Also one of your ranged heroes has an no-target aoe spell. Better to give that to the melee heroes
Hmmm, it does? After the contest is over, if I do that review, I will decrease the damage and life of the caster at the expense of more mana. For now, you can simply update it, until you have the necessary statistics. Thanks for the review!Also, Pact of the Damned costs more mana that the caster's maximum.