Damage's Swarm Wars

[Damage]

From the creator that brought you Magi Deathmatch Arena and Damage Team Survival comes a unique variation on an age old formula:
Swarm Wars

What is it?
Swarm Wars is a unique twist on the Aeon of Strife formula. 2 teams of up to 4 players must use their builder to create structures that automatically spawn their forces. Unlike in a normal AoS game where your forces engage the enemy forces in a tug-of-war match, in this game, your forces engage a neutral enemy guarding a devastating weapon of mass destruction. The team that reaches the centre of the map first will capture this weapon and use it to annihilate the opposing team.

What does the player do?
The player controls a builder and a hero. The hero starts out extremely basic, and earns experience through combat. Using "Blood Power" (see Resource Section) you can upgrade your hero with additional abilities and stats. Using the hero, you can assist your forces in destroying the central enemies, or even cross over to the enemy play field and interrupt their progress. Your builder uses gold (see Resource Section) to construct buildings that automatically create your forces. The units are not controllable by the players, but will engage all enemies they encounter on their path to the middle of the map.

How do the Resources work?
Swarm Wars uses a very unique method of gaining resources which is fair and balanced regardless of the number of players: The Death Income System. Whenever one of your Swarm units dies, you generate 1 income - regardless of the unit that died. Every 30 seconds, you earn gold equal to the amount of income your team has generated over that 30 second period, and it is shared equally with all members of your team. Some structures produce weak units at a very rapid rate exactly for the purpose of dying easily and giving you easy income - while other structures just give bonus income every few seconds.
Blood Power, the game's second resource used to upgrade heroes, is gained by killing the enemy team's swarm units. Also, if your army units happen to engage the enemy units, you will also earn shared Blood Power for your entire team. Through this, the resources of the game are balanced to allow even a single player enough resources to take on 4 others.

How do I ultimately win?
Once your army reaches the middle of the map and has defeated all of the neutral enemy forces on their path, The Distintegrator - a weapon of mass destruction - will become capturable in the center of the map. When your units get close to the structure, your units will automatically sacrifice their health to capture the building. After a total of 100,000 health has been sacrificed to capture the building, your team will own the weapon. It will then go about Disintegrating every single enemy left on the field - winning you the game.

What custom abilities/models/spells can I expect?
Swarm Wars makes extensive use of customised abilities and spells to give the map a more unique feel. The defending neutral forces employ spells such as a cone chain lightning, defending themselves with spinning orbs of fire, overhead fireball volleys and massive cone ice wave attacks. The hero units employ abilities to empower their allied forces with more health and damage, go invisible, deal bonus damage and summon them to a target location or can cast deadly spells themselves on enemies such as vampiric bites, brain rot or shadow prison.
The map uses Custom models sparingly to keep down on file size, but only the highest quality of models and effects from Hive Workshop's database are used.

How much progress has been made on the map so far?
As of 18 April 2011
Terrain: 100%
Interface: 90%
Units and Resources: 90%
Heroes: 5%
Game Mechanics: 90%
Polishing: 20%
Overall Progress: 66%

Do you have a playable beta/alpha?
An Alpha version yes. You can download it from the attachment on this post. However, in the interests of keeping my methods a secret, the map is protected and cannot be edited in World Editor. But should you wish to know how a certain ability or mechanic was implemented, I will be happy to share my methods.
The current alpha version has:
- Resource System, Unit System, All except 1 of the neutral groups.
- No heroes implemented.
- Cannot capture the Disintegrator.
- The last 2 groups of neutral defenders are basically impossible to beat even with a maxed-out army. This is intended - you will have a hero in the full game and they will be defeat-able with their help.
- Contains test commands when playing as Player1(Red): type "kill" - kills selected unit. Type "gimme" - increases income by 100000, type "win" - instantly captures the Disintegrator.


Do you have any video/screenshot previews?
Coming soon...

 

[Vengeancekael]

Well I'll be waiting for some screenshots first.
It sounds really interesting, but really, I'd like to see the map in action first.

 

[Conlan]

Wow, another promising map from you. I once had this idea, but i was lazy Perhaps while its not too late, you may consider adding additional races other than undead, i dont know.

 

[Damage]

I'd like to see the map in action first.

The Alpha should give you a basic idea of how the game plays. Granted, I haven't implemented any of the 3 heroes yet, but you'll get an idea of how the main mechanics work.

Some extra info about the heroes by the way:
At the start of the game, you may choose one of 3 heroes: his primary stat being Agility, Strength or Intelligence. Each hero will have a selection of up to 10 different skills - but you will only be able to choose FIVE of them. When you first spawn the hero, he will have 1 skill point to spend on one of the 10 skills. You must spend Blood Power to upgrade your hero with additional skill points (the cost will be something like 600BP for the first bonus point, 900BP for the next, then 1500BP, then 2400BP for the final skill point). All skills will have only 1 rank, but will scale with the level and stats of the hero. The mana costs will also not change due to this, but I will adjust the mana of the heroes in some way as to make them not spammable at high levels.

This way, even though there are only 3 different heroes, the players have a degree of customisation in their heroes. Some skills will focus on buffing the health and damage of your allied units or healing them and yourself, while some other abilities will be more focused on damaging enemy units or even assassinating enemy heroes if you cross into their side of the field. You'll also be able to spend small sums of Blood Power to boost the stats of your hero (such as 50BP increasing by 5 each time to get +1 primary stat on your hero, and perhaps 30BP increasing by 5 each time to get +1 of the other stats). Blood Power will also be purchasable from your Altar at a cost of 100 gold per 25 Blood Power. You will also gain a large amount of Blood Power if you kill an enemy hero.

The heroes gain experience whenever an allied OR enemy unit dies within 1000 range of them. The amount of EXP they gain is equal to a percentage of the maximum health of the unit that died. This way, even heroes who focus entirely on helping their army advance will still level up just as fast as those who cross the field and attack the enemy's forces. When levelling, a hero will gain +2 in his primary stat, and +1 in the other stats. Each point of strength will grant 10 health, each point of agility is 0.1 armour and a 0.02 attack speed increase, and a point of intelligence will grant +5 mana and +0.05 mana regen (note that the cost of spells is going to around 200, and at level 1 you'll have about 300 max mana).