Through all discussion I have to admit that I really like that pathable castle with a room for each shop.
This could be a great add later.
Excellent. If you go for rooms I would highly recommend using my epic rpg tileset skin, it will allow all building interiors to use 1 terrain tile, allowing all the natural bits of the map to have the widest amount of variation. With tiles that don't need blended edges you can get up to 18 tile variations on one piece.
Well, map will have as few imports as possible. They will be added latter, with a good reason. So for now its necessary to think of stuff that do not need skins. I agree that one side should be darker then other, but I think that there should be more difference then a simple vertex color change, especially since war3 offers such a large collection of building models (compared to other games).
I feel kind of retarded, I was thinking about the fortress area more than the barracks when I type that. But ya, for the actual buildings using in game models would be a very good idea.
For the doodads surrounding the buildings imported resources with alternate skins would probably be a good move, which is more what I was failing to say. The walls I used in the shot of the castle are essentially cubes, and the texture I made for them is much smaller than a standard skin. Even with all 7 wall variations and the skin the total demand on filesize those resources take up is smaller than any standard skin, and much smaller than most unit models. I also have a catacombs, bone, blood-elf, and town version of those walls to, and if you want something else the skin is easily modifiable.
20 dmg wont make a difference late game, but in early it will. And a heroes death will make a way bigger difference early then late game. I'm just saying that it will be a bonus available to ranged heroes only. Yes there are melee heroes that can close in (agility based usually), but there is also a large number of slower, more cumbersome heroes that will have a hard time getting the hero on the tower, and a buff to the hero on the tower isn't helping, especially with the advantage he gets from high ground...
What is the high ground advantage anyways? Isn't it something like 25% evasion?
But ya, the tower should be blocked off at the beginning of the game, maybe it should just be open to heroes after it "dies". Of course, regardless of were a hero is standing moving within range of a tower early game is usually always a bad idea. If towers gave a bonus to damage early game farming would be skewed towards ranged heroes though.
@ Xarwin: Through reading some of the past comments about this project it appears you are changing strength, agility, and intellect to something else, and asked for items not to grant bonuses to those attributes. Is that right? and are the functionality of the stats changing? It would be nice to know for designing hero abilities anyways.
For instance, intellect only increases mana by 15 points while strength increases health by 25. Are you planning on keeping the ratios the same?
Also wondering a bit about damage and armor types. I know piercing and magic are about the only damage types that in-game abilities can change. I think it would be kinda neat to give all units a re-named version of one of those damage types, it could be something like physical (piercing) and mystical (magic). I'm pretty sure abilities that reduce magic damage reduce spell damage as well, and separating damage types to those two categories would make it easy to assign them to fit unit aesthetics as well as create abilities and items that counter them.
For armor types I'm thinking making a ranged-unit armor type, melee-unit armor type, and building armor type. It would probably be all that is needed. something like "light" (ranged) armor would take 100% damage from all sources, "heavy" (melee) would take 80%, and fortified would take 50%.
If it is desired minions deal more damage to each other the Demolish ability can modify the amount of damage dealt to buildings, heroes, and of course units. It's sort of a shame spells all deal the same damage type and items are pretty much incapable of changing armor types. With heroes being stuck with whatever damage and armor types they come with 2 damage types and 3 armor types will probably be the most efficient use of the categories. The default hero damage and armor types are kind of boring anyways, it would be nice to have at least a small differentiation in them.
As a final note, all heroes should totally make units EXPLODE when they last hit them. Besides the graphical updates that's pretty much my favorite part about Heroes of Newerth. A real shame artillery attack types come with the attack-ground command and allow ranged units to easily miss their mark, though I'm sure it wouldn't be to hard to trigger
