Castle Defence

[Moderator]

Orcnet

00:12, 16th Nov 2013

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Castle Defence (Tested Version 1.02) Rate Score Percent Letter 5/5 91-100 A Rate Score Percent Letter 4/5 81-90% B Rate Score Percent Letter 3/5 75-80% C Rate Score Percent Letter 2/5 70-74% D Rate Score Percent Letter 1/5 50-69% F Overview: Gameplay "The map is quite unique due to being a defense only suitable for a single player which an ongoing trend nowadays require teams to help each other, everything seems to go in pace and well executed." Terrain "Terrain is great especially when you can really interact with the trees by actually seeing the tree's name and all." Management "Overall map can be useful." Total Score: (Gameplay[x/5] + Terrain[x/5] + Management[x/5] / Total Score[15] * 50 + 50) Rate Score Percent Letter 9/15 80% C

 

[Rheiko]

from the screenshot it's a nice and decent terrain!
good work!
Review will catch up later

Gameplay:
It's really a survival game, i should say this map is fun but you are lacks of description on the unit's abilities, for example: building site (mini), (tiny), (little) without a description. if you add a description to it, people can easier to know what they are used for.
your walls and towers is Walkable, make it really awesome. but to upgrade them, you need your unit to work on them, in my opinion it's a bit annoying but that's fine
the weather change is really cool, it kinda feels like a real world. but the time passes really quick, maybe you can slow it down for a bit.
About the Gold Mine, it's pretty far to gather gold from gold mine and back to your town hall.
Off-Topic: My Worker have been killed before reach the town hall ;_;

Terrain:
the Terrain is nice and pretty decent, keep it up!

Suggestions:
Add a custom abilities for your hero, it's pretty boring to see that your hero cast the same spell like usual melee maps
and give more information about ingame description
also spelling mistakes

Overall:
This is a good survival map with nice terrain and features
I rate it 4/5 and +REP

Have a nice day/night
If you have any question about this review, contact me through VM/PM

 

[Radicool]

A lot of things are not clear in your map. This makes it very unfriendly to any newcomers to your game.

There are no tips to start the player off. No explanation of how to get lumber. No descriptions on what the houses do. I could upgrade a house, not knowing what it does. Also there was no upgrade description. I did find it strange that the first raid was on the gold mine. I think a better difficult curb is needed. The peasents structures had no description, so I had no idea what any of them did. Also, the "Work on a Building ability". What the hell does that do? Then again your grammar was lacking in a lot of abilities. No capital letters, full stops, etc.

Cool idea for a game. Defending against enemies in a customizable castle with a vast amount of strategy involved. Good idea, it just needs a bit of polishing before it's ready.

 

[MassiveMaster]

Thx you very much for reviews and suggestions, really helpfull.
I totally forgot about the descriptions.
I'll try to make it easier to understand the game mechanics for newcomers to the map and will work on the spells.
The waves come from random directions so you can't just block one path or something, but I'll make the first wave come from the front to make it less difficult right at the start.
Concerning the long way to the goldmine: That should force you to place watchers/guards and then retreat behind the walls when a wave is coming from behind the castle. But I'll think about how to make that better.

 

[Rheiko]

maybe you should make a timer for each wave?

 

[MassiveMaster]

I didn't made a visible timer as I wanted the waves to be more unforeseeable. It just doesn't fell realistic that you know when exactly raiders will come to your castle to plunder it.
So they come from random directions and even slightly different times and the player has to react to it by manning the walls, calling in the peasants, etc. That's kind of the idea of the map.

 

[Rheiko]

yup, that's right. nice idea, and realistic

 

[Xonok]

I like the idea of this map, but atm some things are bothering me:
Manning the walls seems a bit clumsy(I dunno what to do about it).
The weather is overwhelming, especially fog.
After some point the walls suddenly got higher, causing the units to not be visible on them anymore.

 

[MassiveMaster]

Thx for the short review.

Manning the walls seems a bit clumsy(I dunno what to do about it).

That's the bad wc3 pathing. Smaller paths with a width of 1-2 pathing-pixels (like for the stairs) are often not recognized correctly it seems, especially if further away.
Only if you first send a unit to the beginning of such a narrow path (like the bottom of a stair) the unit will recognize the narrow path correctly and walk on the wall correctly with the next order. Maybe I can enhance that with scripting, but that won't be easy...

The weather is overwhelming, especially fog.

Yea the weather effect is kinda supposed to be very intensive. The idea is that you can really see less when the weather is on heavy fog etc. I think that creates a nice atmosphere. But I'll try to enhance the weather system (like smoother transitions when changing) and mabye toning down everything a bit.

After some point the walls suddenly got higher, causing the units to not be visible on them anymore.

That's definitely a bug (wall units weren't replaced correctly). Were it just some walls or all walls (and also the towers?) and do you know what happend at that point of time? Was a wall partly or completely destroyed or was a wall constructed or rebuilt? Every hint makes it easier for me to find the bug.
But in any case I'll look if I can recreate and solve the bug.

 

[Xonok]

Thx for the short review.



That's the bad wc3 pathing. Smaller paths with a width of 1-2 pathing-pixels (like for the stairs) are often not recognized correctly it seems, especially if further away.
Only if you first send a unit to the beginning of such a narrow path (like the bottom of a stair) the unit will recognize the narrow path correctly and walk on the wall correctly with the next order. Maybe I can enhance that with scripting, but that won't be easy...



Yea the weather effect is kinda supposed to be very intensive. The idea is that you can really see less when the weather is on heavy fog etc. I think that creates a nice atmosphere. But I'll try to enhance the weather system (like smoother transitions when changing) and mabye toning down everything a bit.



That's definitely a bug (wall units weren't replaced correctly). Were it just some walls or all walls (and also the towers?) and do you know what happend at that point of time? Was a wall partly or completely destroyed or was a wall constructed or rebuilt? Every hint makes it easier for me to find the bug.
But in any case I'll look if I can recreate and solve the bug.

It was all walls and maybe towers too.
I did try fixing one of the broken walls earlier, but I didn't manage to gather enough workers(1 worker alone won't do any progress?), so I just left a worker there.

 

[MassiveMaster]

It was all walls and maybe towers too.
I did try fixing one of the broken walls earlier, but I didn't manage to gather enough workers(1 worker alone won't do any progress?), so I just left a worker there.

Ok thanks, then the bug was probably caused by the terrain adjustment. I now had to deactivate the terrain adjustment because the problems that came alongside it got just to heavy (irreversible memory leak and and lag peaks at every adjustment that seem to be connected to the amount of doodads on the map...). I couldn't recreate the bug with deactivated terrain adjustment, so I hope that is solved now.
About the workers: Lightly broken walls (still walkable) just need one worker. Only the heavy broken walls (with only the basement left) need two workers (like newly build walls do) as they are supposed to be rebuild nearly completely.

 

[taavidude]

can i play it with bots?

 

[Rheiko]

nope
you can't
this is a single player map

 

[Orcnet]

Map approved, see moderator comment on top.

 

[fr14nd1]

Just tried your map, and it was good.
My question: Why don't you add timer for each wave?

 

[MassiveMaster]

Just tried your map, and it was good.
My question: Why don't you add timer for each wave?

I think I already answered that :

I didn't made a visible timer as I wanted the waves to be more unforeseeable. It just doesn't fell realistic that you know when exactly raiders will come to your castle to plunder it.
So they come from random directions and even slightly different times and the player has to react to it by manning the walls, calling in the peasants, etc. That's kind of the idea of the map.

But thanks for trying out the map.

 

[fr14nd1]

Okay, thanks for the answer
So, your main point of the map is to make a quick decision with every attack?

 

[MassiveMaster]

Yes and encouraging the player to place guards/scouts at the different sides of the castle and build walls so that the enemy can be hold back long enough until the players main forces arrive.
Thats kind of how real castles work. They were build to give shelter to the nearby population in the event of enemy raids/attacks and hold them back until the liege lords or allied troops arrived to lift the siege.

 

[fr14nd1]

Yes and encouraging the player to place guards/scouts at the different sides of the castle and build walls so that the enemy can be hold back long enough until the players main forces arrive.
Thats kind of how real castles work. They were build to give shelter to the nearby population in the event of enemy raids/attacks and hold them back until the liege lords or allied troops arrived to lift the siege.

Nice job on making using that idea.
BTW, there are crates in one of the castle walls, right?
Oh, forgot to tell, 4/5 and +Rep

 

[HOooDy]

Too hard too make goldmines.

 

[Paillan]

The map isn't working and/or opening at war3 editor to me. Any ideas?. When I tried opening in war3 editor it crashed when loading doodads. maybe that can help.

 

[MassiveMaster]

The map isn't working and/or opening at war3 editor to me. Any ideas?. When I tried opening in war3 editor it crashed when loading doodads. maybe that can help.

Yeah, that's probably the high res trees. Try to set the texture settings to high and maybe other settings as well before opening it.

 

[Paillan]

Yeah, that's probably the high res trees. Try to set the texture settings to high and maybe other settings as well before opening it.

Okey thanks. But how do I do that?

 

[MassiveMaster]

Okey thanks. But how do I do that?

You open your editor (without opening the map). Then go into the data tab and click preferences (or something like that). There under the grafics tab you can change your settings. As default it uses the same settings as your Warcraft3, so you should also be able to change it there. After that you should hopefully be able to open the map.

 

[Paillan]

I played and I can say, holy walls this map is difficult...

 

[MassiveMaster]

I played and I can say, holy walls this map is difficult...

Yea it's probably not that well balanced. Though personally I rather like hard games than very easy, casual games.
But if you have any advise on what should be changed I'd really appreciate that of course.

 

[Paillan]

make a damn ranged unit that is strong againts bones but not so resistant, because frikin dragons destroy me.
Also I somehow won the game becaue the enemies didn't attack my main building. What was that? xD

 

[MassiveMaster]

Thx a lot for feedback

Yeah dragons are meant to be the hardest enemies.
But I will look into adding better possibilities to defeat dragons in the next version.

That's because not all units have an attack that can target buildings (like dragons ). Will think about that.

 

[Streak]

it was such a good map i was finding a map like this in the other day and cannot find a type of castle defence like this with a model 5/5

 

[Ilztas]

Strangely, I can't seem to get this map to actually play. It loads up to about 60% and stops every time.

 

[MassiveMaster]

Strangely, I can't seem to get this map to actually play. It loads up to about 60% and stops every time.

I downloaded and tested it and it worked without any problems for me...
Do you have your graphic settings etc. on maximum? Otherwise I can't really help you, as I don't know what it could be, sorry.

 

[Tal'Rarity]

How does this system work? Like I can't get it to work at all, towers connect automatically to a wall and leave a giant gap with the other wall, init placement seems broken as well.

 

[MassiveMaster]

How does this system work? Like I can't get it to work at all, towers connect automatically to a wall and leave a giant gap with the other wall, init placement seems broken as well.

To put it (kinda) simple: For a new placed wall/tower segment it checks if there are adjoining segments of fitting type (no tower next to another tower etc.), placing (distance + angle -> no gap allowed) and facing. Then according on possible adjoining segments the best fitting variant + facing is chosen (eg. inner edge variant if adjoining walls in east and north that face north-east). When the segments construction is finished its pathing (realized via an invisible walkable destructable with fitting custom pathing map) and the pathings of adjoining segments are adjusted so units can walk between them (but not get of the edge of a wall without stairs for example).
And then there is a bunch of other stuff that controlls construction, the different damage variants, terrain heights, reconstruction etc.

So it's intended that a wall placed next to a tower auto connects to it but if there is a gap between wall segments they won't be connected. But as you might have already recognized the system is very complex making it very prone to bugs and unexpected setups...
So did you have these problems while testing my Castle Defence map? Maybe you can attach some screenshots to better visualize what exactly didn't work / what you tried to do. Then I could probably also better explain on that how the system is supposed to work.

 

[Tal'Rarity]

Well me and a friend kept connecting them and made sure they were really close yet it moved to one side still and wasn't connected anymore with a gap as well there.

I'll see about some screenshots soon.

 

[deepstrasz]

Not sure how to build walls and building upgrades, tried both workers left clicking, using construct but nothing really happened.
Some of the hero's ability descriptions mention 0 values. The Paladin unit's Holy Light does not mention any value.

 

[BrothForMyPeople]

Am I in dream? I didn't know Warcraft 3 can have moveable walls. I've felt like playing Stronghold games.

Still kinda bugged though

 

[Velrog]

Thanks for leaving the map unprotected. This is gonna be huge help with the triggers for the map i'm trying to make.

 

[horneastefan]

wonderfull.

 

[Valexto]

I'd like to know how to make a wall walkable, it's been a while that i try to figure out how to create one

 

[SNIper of DARKness]

Great map, especially good for you as it showcases the potential of your fortifications.

 

[Herod]

Very cool map, the units, the scenario, the meat wagons throwing zombies, very cool lol.
But I think the buildings should be easy to build and archers on restauraded walls should has a % to avoid a enemy attack. 5/5

 

[Barade]

I really like the concept and models of this map.

Some things which bothered me when playing it once:

• A Palisade ladder at the Palisade wall at the Gold Mine leads to the gold workers taking it instead of the gate which slows down gathering gold.
• To me it was not clear if I should have build a town hall next to the gold mine and defend it to gather gold faster.
• The whole repair/construction system is a bit hard to handle and building areas might be hard to select from the top view is a wall is next to them. Maybe add a spell which gets idle workers and architects automatically to finish the construction/repair. This would be REALLY helpful.
• No upgrades to make units or buildings stronger. It's basically building more units and buildings, making the castle bigger and bigger but not making units stronger.
• No items? Did I miss them?
• Difficulty became a bit hard for beginners. After my hero has level 4 I lost so many units against mortars and then the next wave destroyed me. Maybe allow playing it on Easy and multiple difficulties.
• More content: Unit types, upgrades, items, placing traps/goblin land mines (maybe I missed them).
• Coop mode? At least one ally could be added with either another castle or handling the same castle together.