Chess Battles

[Deleted member 247165]

Review	Chess Battles
Key Concept	Mini-game - I like the concept you used to create this mini-game. It is unique for Warcraft 3. The loading screen looks fine. Some pieces of information would be nice to have in the Quests menu, like instructions and so on. The Queen is a necromancer? Please, just a suggestion, use a female model of anything that would fit it. It's a queen not a king.
Gameplay	Moves of the units are exactly as in the classic Chess game. I played Single Player quick match, the opponent AI is moving unit by unit while I'm thinking what move to make next? That's not a good thing in a game like this. When you played Chess in real life you forced your opponent to move faster? Don't think so, there should be a timer created for each turn. White Bishop's Fiery Bolt seems broken. You can spam it and can easily kill opponent's units, it has a low mana cost. The Queen's blizzard spell can be cast on the middle of the table, i suggest you lower the range. Black Queen, a male orc? Where is the real queen? Hiding somewhere I think. The game ends really quick since you can easily move unit by unit and amass each enemy unit with multiple of yours and their spells = instakill. Look here: Imgur And I didn't use any cheats like "Whosyourdaddy" or whatsoever. As for Adventure option; again you can move more than one unit whenever you can. In the first "mission" I should call it, you have from the start 2 units and the opponent only 1. It's totally easy to pass it. And I used the lowest level of Medivh's cheats you implemented, that being 5%. How about deactivating it? Move Down hotkey overrides the default Stop order. In the second wave I have 4 units as I chosen, and the enemy only 3 and those really weak. Again was easy kill. Isn't it supposed to be challenging when you play Chess? That's the great feeling you get while playing it, even for a warcraftish chess.
Terrain & Aesthetics	It's chess! It's a chess board. Good tilesets, the terrain is fitting the mini-game.
Wizardry	I like a lot that you implemented spells for various units but some of them are a bit imbalanced.
Final Suggestions	Consider adding some instructions or things you wanna tell for each player, using the Quests menu. Lower the mana cost or the damage from Fiery Bolts or add a cooldown to it. Implement a timer for each turn and deactivate the possibility to move multiple units whenever you want. It's Chess though. Fix the hotkey problem for the Move Down order and Stop. Make the opponent be a bit stronger or at least fun to play against instead. Improve the model for each Queen (optional not mandatory this one)

I would give it 2/5 for now and vote for needs fix or at least go with it in the Map Development section and improve it please. After you fix what must be fixed, the rating will be improved as well.

 

[Stormshock]

Hello Alxen345,

Thank you for your review.

It's very big and detailed and lot's of things that could help me to improve the map, let me point out a few of them.

- I think you make a good point that not all the spells are balanced.
- Also I think it's an improvement to add instructions to the game.
- For the adventure mode, I agree that the first levels are easy. I made it this way that they get harder each level. From level 5 the enemy has more units that the player, but maybe some tuning is needed there.

I also want to point out that there are a few things which I do not fully agree with you. Maybe if I share my thoughts with you, you get a better understanding of some of my decisions.

- First I like to talk about your remark of the male queen, as written down in the game information, the game is inspired by the WoW Karazhan chess event. The queen models they use are more or less the same as my models. That's the reason I choose these models.
- Second I like to talk about the movement system, In my opinion it's not the same as classic chess. In classic chess each piece can move differently and most of them can move more than one square at the time. Also for here, the movement system is inspired by the WoW event, where you can move one square and where moves are not turn based.

I don't know if you ever played the WoW Karazhan chess event, but that is where I got the models, music, abilities and moves from. Also Medivh cheats every game by buffing his units. I tried to add all of these features into this map. By removing them, it's just not the map I wanted to created.

So, I agree with the balance related comments. For me balancing is very difficult, so it's nice that people tell me if it's to easy/hard. For the other things I don't think they will change a lot.

Please let me know what you think of my reply.

I would appreciate it if you could tell me if you approve the map when I add things like balance changes and instructions, but knowing that some of the features will probably stay as they are.

 

[Deleted member 247165]

On one hand, you're welcome. On the other hand, my review was applied to your map but currently I am in no position to approve or decline maps. The one who can do that only applied my review on the reviews section of your map's bundle. Anyway, fix what I mentioned or at least what you can and I'll test it then and give you another feedback, also raising my rating. Good luck

 

[Stormshock]

Thank you for your reply.

I made some changes to the map, which can be found in the change log, and uploaded the map again.

By the way, this is the first time I've updated an awaiting approval map, so I am not sure I did the uploading correctly.

 

[Deleted member 247165]

I'll test it out today and see

 

[Chaosium]

Hey, glad to see you managed to get your movement system to work

 

[Deleted member 247165]

Changes were made. It should be now approved. I raised my rating to 3/5

 

[deepstrasz]

1. Would be neat for some more camera modes or even to place it how you wish.
2. Maybe, make checkpoints so you wouldn't have to restart or use save-load.
3. Why is the knight just a horse or wolf?
4. Would be lovely to be able to play as the orcs/black too, maybe even make this map for two players to fight each other (a mode).
5. The AI doesn't know how to sidestep.

Approved, mostly based on @Alxen345's review.

 

[Stormshock]

I'm happy to see my map approved after the changes. Thanks!

@deepstrasz thanks for the comment. I was also thinking of adding an extra race, but I decided to first focus on improving the map and add cosmetic stuff later. About the AI; I'm aware that their movement can be improved. I will see if I come up with something.