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Advanced Techtree Contest - Recycle, Revise, Reinvent

Honestly, I did not want to submit this map at all. I knew it was a royal mess, and some bugs make *absolutely* no sense and seem to occur ONLY in this map.

@GhostThruster and @VeljkoM I agree with pretty much everything you say. One thing I can say for certain is that a lack of model practically destroys my ability to twist things into a presentable fashion - pretty much my own fault since I wanted to make a 'holy' theme with robots, of which there is little in the resource department. I didn't really plan where to get the models from.

since the entry was basically an idea/design "pitch"
This pretty much hit the nail on the head, although I wouldn't call this an idea pitch since to me it felt more of a stream of consciousness. This is mostly the reason why I didn't want to submit it.

Heroes, to me, exemplify general critique (3). Does allowing 1 hero to be trained underline the race's theme (e.g. I could see this working for a zerg-like race, where the hero is a Hive Mind)? What meaningful gameplay change occurs? I'd say, apart from the Avatar of Flow, you're basically playing the same as a player that can access 3 heroes - except that player has more strategic options and you have more of a tough time balancing the mechanic. And I know I said I wouldn't focus on numbers, but goddamn these heroes need major rebalancing.
This wasn't much of a gameplay thing as it is a lore thing. The Undying are supposed to be god-like beings, and the heroes you train are their Saints. I meant to portrait that on the battlefield by allowing only one of them to be present at a time. Note that they are quite powerful as well - and, if you can believe it, they were a *lot* more powerful before.

This race really told me what I needed to know about the 1 hero idea.

I think the stationary Avatar of Flow has potential to be cool, tho she needs some way to easily access items from creeps/shops etc. You could probably just have her be flying above her Exarch, or be "chained" to it (like Sanctuary Line).
I was going to make her pick up items globally as long as an Exarch was in range, but never ended up implementing that idea due to lack of motivation. It was also past the deadline and I didn't feel like I should be updating anyway.

Upgradeable T1 units isn't really new, but it's cool to see. Keep in mind you need to balance for the bonus power you get from avoiding a training cooldown. For instance, Destroyers are much weaker (HP and damage-wise) than what their food cost suggests.
Tbh I should have just made them upgrade like buildings so I get the 'build time', but I was concerned about rally points and such and just never bothered.

Mechanical units are a terrible idea in terms of balance, since they're immune to so many spells. To make it work, you'd have to incorporate compensating weaknesses. For instance, lowering their HP or making their strength very niche (how it's done in melee wc3), or even make them use up mana as a fuel to attack/move around.
I was extremely hesitant to do the full-mechanical-units-roster thing, but in my head, my races exists outside of wc3 canon and are meant to fight against other races. I figured, oh well, just try it, even though I knew it was overpowered as hell to do this. This race is meant to fit in a different context, but, yeah, contest requires they fight wc3 races. My bad.

The prevalance of mechanical units had way more potential as a mechanic - an example of (3). You only had 1 ability that targeted mechanical units: a glorified repair.
I'm pretty sure Overclock is mechanical-only, but yeah, I see what you mean.

Credit where credit is due, Kinetic Bubble & Sanctuary Line are very cool abilities. Would like to have seen more offensive abilities, though - the race desperately needs disable spells (e.g. Ensnare, Slow, Dryad Poison etc.)
It never crossed my mind to have disable spells D:

The Arcblade's abilities essentially amount to a unit with life steal. A passive mana shield is a cool idea - if there was actually any interaction with his mana, other than just him attacking - see general critique (2). If you gave Preservers something like Siphon Mana, for instance, we could see a lot more depth to the unit. There's no meaningful way in which the player actually interacts with the Arcblade's passives, and as such right now it's an example of (3).
Fair enough.

There didn't see like much rhyme or reason to the units (maybe a problem with models). Like why does the race have Ray Shooterthings (I assume light-based) and Warpstalkers (dark/void-themed)? Why does a Warpstalker upgrade into an "Arcblade", whatever that means? I mean I guess they're all robots or something. It sounds like I'm making a big deal out of minor aesthetic details, but the cohesion and understandability of a race (which by definition should have some clear, identifiable commonalities) goes a long way in allowing players to have fun with it. Imagine if, when Blizzard was designing the Night Elf race, they added Archers & Ancients (cool, amazonian bow ladies & spirit trees, makes sense) plus Fire Sprites (okay they burn down trees, but they're still kinda natural & spirit-y) plus Toad Sharpshooters (sure toads live in forests... but WHO gave them snipers, and WHY are they allied with night elves?) that upgrade to Tortoise Samurai (THEY'RE NOT EVEN THE SAME F****** SPECIES) - that's the dissonance I get when going through your units.
The Warpstriker was kinda put there to fill a gap, and could definitely have used a better name, but keep in mind that pretty much none of the units are supposed to look like that. Like I said in my submission post, this map is pretty much a WIP:

So you know how gaming development goes through alpha stages? Yeah, this is pre-alpha. WIP DISCLAIMER. PLACEHOLDERS EVERYWHERE. OH NOES.

This map was, in the end, mostly just trial and error (mostly error, it seems), though I do think the criticisms it got are rather enlightening. I'm quite bad at analysing things like that, so getting an outside opinion is really helpful... so, silver lining? :D
 
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