Tech Tree Contest for Astaroth Zion:
The soul of the contest is to create from scratch a full faction that can stand in a standard W3 map. Meaning that it should gather gold and lumber and follow some classic mechanics of the vanilla W3. All bound up by the contest particullar rules, like doing a nomad faction, a darkness/light faction, etc.
The challenge resides in 2 things;
First, you got to present something fresh but also intuitive to anyone using your faction, that has to be balanced with the vanilla W3 factions (no overpower heros for example)
Second, to fulfill your grand vision of a custom faction (aka Dragon Kin for example) you need to use a great deal of coding (GUI or VJazz) doing dozens of custom spells and systems, then to get the aesthetics right you modify dozens more of 3D modells and in some cases create your own, then modify even more 2D icons and skins to have an appropiate overal look. Finally you got dozens of ours of fine balancing to get a playable and enojable entry.