Have played 4 rounds so far, my opinion is rather mixed.
Playing against AI solo you are one but they have full team, which puts you at odds from the begin out.
Well, when you play against A.I, the heroes work more like normal spawns. They spawn, grab some control points and do random things, then most of the time, get killed. So it's not actually comparable to a human opponent. But I totally understand that the map settings may presently be too difficult. On the next update I may include variable difficulty. Please not that you can put a computer player as opponent to make it easier, cause the game will be loaded as if you were playing against a human doing nothing.
Battledawn is intended for human-against-human, but making an A.I that plays exactly like a human would, is really beyond the scope of the project.
Get rid of the teleport scroll invincibility mechanic, there is nothing more unexciting and trollish in an hero battle arena than that 'get out of the jail'-freebie mechanic. Its most annoying in this genre of map.
Battledawn punishes death a bit more than other maps, and the basic idea is to jump back to altar before you're dying, then jump out to control points or whatever again. This is pretty much ingrained in our way of playing, and I'm not sure why you find this annoying.. When the opponent is forced to use TP, you have won important time. I presume you want to see your opponent bleed, but. This particular thing is believe is not going to change.
This game needs to force unique pick (one of each hero can be present at a time) as an trio of Beastmasters can push forever, when i was Elementalist have been overly sufficient as a killing machine, as such dont even want to think what would happen with more than one present at a time in the field at once.
Ok. I can implement that for A.I. Again, The game already has unique picks for player vs player.
Playing Elementalist was the most exciting, walking into the orc citadel through an floor mopped with the skeletal corpses of our enemies, forming an dreadly skeletal carpet with the reach of it extending even further at any second. Should have had hireable Necromancers somewhere...
Yeah, he's badass against many small enemies... and structures. Necromancers.. good idea, but the Skeletor hero has raise dead ability. On level 4, the number of undead gets friggin ridiculous
Priests can area dispel them, but they pop up really fast again.
The other heroes ive tested are Paladin, Archmage and the one with Tauren Chieftain model.
Playing with both the Paladin and Tauren dude was not much different than their usage in regular melee.
Indeed, some of the heroes are near vanilla warcraft. But that was intented; i wanted to keep the original feeling of Warcraft 3 in the game. I've always liked how to Paladin works, and beyond the few tweaks (prayer or healing etc) I wanted to keep him as is. So, many are direct references to the game, but most of them are tweaked and some are quite different; same for their abilities. Some new funky abilities are about, for example Nethermancer's Spirit of Death and Beastmaster's Call of the Wild.
Archmage is underpowered and useless, anything he cant do Elementalist does miles better, its not about his mana or lack thereof, but rather spellpower and the speed at which he can(not) contribute his skills to the combat.
Constantly using Blizzard takes too much time dealing damage, and totals out at an far less amount than the Elementalist would have dealt in a matter of seconds.
Water Elemental is of very limited use as it doesnt even scale properly throughout the game, is very worthless at begin, late game its still better to haul a bunch of mercs along if you want more dps, is slower than the archmage, hampering his ability to dart around, and deals magic dmg, which doesnt work against immune creatures, all this despite costing 125mana and having an long accountable cooldown attached to it atop of all that.
Since the game ended in defeat so quickly with him cant give an accountable opinion on how worthless his mass teleport ultimate would have been.
Hmm... I would be happy to prove you wrong here. The archmage on his horse is relativey fast, and with his high intelligence bonus he gets the strongest attack damage in the game. Also, many worry that he's strong because of Mass Teleport enabling him to jump to allies practically anywhere. For the Blizzard and Water Elemental spells, these are close to the original version, which is balanced.
Next i will have an question about what measure is a "screen" ? mentioned in one of the artifact's descriptions.
Once i had zoomed in couldnt zoom out to the same levels given at game's start.
It seems you didn't read the pop-up hints... I REALLY recommend you do that once. You get this message in the beginning prompting you to write "tips!". Earlier it was the other way around, so you needed to write "notips!" to NOT receive them. I don't know which one is better.
If you press ESC, you will zoom out to Battledawn's normal zoom.
Well, a screen atleast gives you an idea. What should I say? range 2000?
Not everyone has used the editor a lot, and that number doesn't say much. Perhaps I could use "the width of 10 Taurens"
Also have to state that to put Mana absorb, an long stun that has dirt cheap mana cost, rejuvenation, free reveal, and shockwave put into the very same spellbook has been so generous of you. Thanks to Mana absorb in particular have never ran short of mana whilst playing the Elementalist.
One of my players say the Spellbook is bad and takes too much time to use and micro. I'm a bit on the fence about that item. But hey, thanks for the tip.
The abandoned towers never got activated but im presuming they are to be such, existing only for decoration purposes.
Well, yeah.. for the time being.
The additional footman/grunt that spawn at the captured control points did not participate in the war effort, prefering to idle camp where they have spawned when their comrades are falling by the dozen in the battlefield that is literally just before their eyes.
No, it should only be 1 of the footmen/grunts that remains to protect the control points. The others will run and fight as normal. The reason for having one staying behind is that one units shouldn't be able to lure all the protectors out and then grab the control point. It's actually a thought to this.
The map did not run smooth on any playthrough, had much lag, which i can presume is caused of leaks, and even freezing for several seconds on one occasion where more than 3 heroes used their spells with fancy effects at the same moment.
I have removed the most important leakages, but I acknowledge that there are some more leaks about. However, we haven't had ANY problems playing this over the net with friends. Are you running the game on a very old computer?
ManoWar mercs can cast inner fire and bloodlust on heroes and other troops, is this intended ?
Those units was kind of an easter egg from back in the day, and reference to the Manowar band. They will probably be removed.
And nobody uses mercs anyway. Normally it's a better idea to use forces from your own town, and have them upgraded.
Next ill try with the Skeletor hero on horde and try to find both keys this time. I suppose both key carriers are lvl9 ? Once Ghost Key dropped from the northernmost golem when playing with the Archmage, with description stating that i need to find the other key to unlock the whereabouts of an ancient weapon.
Yeah, you get both keys and talk to a dude in your base. He tells you a location (random) where the guardian exists. Then you have to go there with your army and use the key to awake the guardian. But he has divide armor, and you need to get him to half health before using the key once more. Then he's quickly going down, and you will get your new bad ass unit. I will streamline this process and make that encounter easier in future versions, I think. Nobody has time to find this unit in an actual game.
Thanks for the feedback, though. Much appreciated! Oh, how do you feel about the base concept of the map, i.e., free-flow war with no corridors or symmetrical spawns?
Also; if any of you guys ever feel like playing a real game with my and my crew, you're welcome to join oss over the LAN-simulator Tunngle.
Approved
Well, I gave it a shot.
