- Joined
- Jan 9, 2005
- Messages
- 2,126
Based on Magic: the Gathering's coloured mana system, design a faction that represents the philosophies associated with a single colour.
White
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Blue
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Black
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Red
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Green
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White exemplifies the ideals of order and consistency. White's ultimate goal is peace, ideally through structure and law. White can be restrictive and authoritarian. | Blue seeks perfection through knowledge and progress but can also be the sphere of deception and manipulation. Blue can be unethical or lack morality its its efficiency. | Black embodies the essences of selfishness and opportunism. Black desires power over all else as it allows it to get what it wants. Black is merciless and shameless. | Red desires freedom above all else. Red is pure passion, chaotic and impulsive. Laws are anathema to Red as they get in the way. Red has the capacity for complete anarchy. | Green personifies growth, instinct and harmony with nature. Green is honest and interdependent and dislikes artificial change. Green can lead to rigid and unchanging traditions. |
- 1st place: 75 reputation points
- 2nd place: 50 reputation points
- 3rd place: 25 reputation points
- Entry: 5 reputation points
- Judge: 15 reputation points
I thank you all participants for their entries. I hereby submit my judgement.
A couple general remarks
-I sort of introduce two 'tacit' criteria: completion and bugs. Contest rules gave a minimum number of Heroes, units or buildings; but it's obvious that making four heroes should be rewarded compared to making 1 hero. Bugs are self-explanatory, no bugs is better than some bugs, and some bugs is better than many bugs. I will thus make reference to completion in Creativity and bugs encountered in Gameplay.
-It is impossible, even in theory to say all one wants to say. Accordingly, my published judging does not contain all of thoughts, or even all of my written notes. As reifining raw notes into publishable text is extremely arduous, each contestant will receive my rough notes though private messages.
-You can take my word that I've not done the math for polls, so I don't know who'll win. I judged based on my preference alone.
Theme: 9/10
Unique and pleasant visuals (both units and icons), slave sacrifices, cruel fighters.
I only have doubts about the Evoker-Elemental pair. It's not exactly a magical races. Furthermore, why is there 1 Elemental/Evoker? An ability that says that Evoker has an active Elemental is welcome - but not enough. What is needed (quite badly, e.g. once Elementals start being killed or infused) is some indication of the correspondence between Elementals and Evokers, e.g. upon selecting one the other is tinted black.
Gameplay 7.5/10
Training units in 'armies' is reasonably creative and playable. As often is the case, creativity and playability directly contradict each other and striking the right balance is hard. This map struck decent balance, but my feeling is that is sub-optimal. Namely, training units in batches takes away one's freedom for a preferred army composition. This is further worsened by contents of the offered Armies: why do so many of them contain the 'useless' (T1) Zealot?
Creativity vs Playability clash again at the Slave mechanic. The rituals (uses for slaves) are really creative, but hard to micro well. Furthermore, I was disappointed not to find any instructions on how to get slaves. (On the Nth playthtrough, I figured it's something like 'gain the slain unit's level in slaves with probability 50%'.)
Unit roles are fine (read: armour and attack types), with one exception: both flyers have Light-Piercing. Amazon should have had Magic attack, lest their roles overlap pretty much completely.
Lastly, bugs. Try destroying the initial gold mine - it will disappear. Custom Haunted gold mines are tricky (see yours truly DOC race for a working solution). Then, Elemental Souls can't be summoned at 1 food surplus (apparently checks if food is enough after summoning). A couple of hotkey issues were encountered (these are PMed).
Balance 3.5/5
War Academy causes power to scale poorly over time. Early on, I'm too vulnerable to rushing (fighting worker's don't help much and are too weak). Late game, my ~5x War Academies can create vast armies very quickly.
None of the units or spells seemed overpowered or under-powered to me.
Creativity 9/10
Three heroes and not four gnaws at the tacit 'Completion' criterion. As I wrote in Gameplay, slaves and armies are cool and creative features. So are the dual workers (I'd be flattered to learn that these were an homage to yours truly DEL race, but I'm not so arrogant as to count on that). Spells/abilities/research are also unique, fitting and bug-free (I especially liked Evil Maze and Toxic Arrows)
Theme: 8/10
The race is simple, but not primitive. Most mechanics and visuals are solid and straightforward. I liked the hiring mercenaries feature. Custom icons (e.g. Bandits Shadowmeld) are nice and fitting.
Aesthetics. Mostly good, with a couple of exceptions. The immensely huge red plague cloud attached to Stormvermin is a crime against eyesight (you can see nothing but those on the battlefield). Wizards and Nether Drake's projectile art choice is poor. But these two I would consider relatively minor hiccups.
Gameplay: 8.5/10
Really good style: solid, intuitive and simple (not simplistic). I particularly liked several mechanics, namely Refuge ability, also life insurance & higher item sell price research.
Unit roles are all good, except perhaps two 2-food unit (either spear thrower should be a 3-food 'Rifleman' or the axemen should be 'Grunt').
Bugs. Only one encountered (so good job!): Nether Wyrm's splash damage has friendly fire.
Balance: 3/5
I noticed some blatantly OP abilities and features, without any obvious fraction-wide compensating downsides. 'Haste' (t1 bloodlust). Mercs instant hiring. Nether Wyrm costing mere 3 food. Ruthless aura (15% bash!). Red plague cloud (-4 armor!). To be fair, subjectively none of these made a difference in my playtesting, so I'm wary to give less than 3.
Creativity: 8.5/10
As I mentioned above, I really liked some mechanics and research. Furthermore, I really appreciate all 4 heroes being made.
Theme: 10/10
At first I was confused as hell. But this many-layered mechanic grew on me quickly. Great job: you've realized both the very unorthodox gathering mechanic and even more unorthodox training mechanic flawlessly.
I was very impressed with custom sound-sets for units, something one doesn't see often. Visuals are good all around. A deserved 10 outta 10.
Gameplay: 9.5/10
I can repeat that I was confused at first, but once I figured out what to do the game became very enjoyable. I've encountered 0 bugs (immensely impressive given the insane mechanics). Some features such as disassemble and workers being indicated when the corresponding hut is selected are very welcome and appreciated.
Control loss executed flawlessly. Hero spells are cool. Unit roles are good and fitting.
The only 0.5 points deduced here is due to me disliking the rigidity of early game. The hut mechanic and lack of proper workers at the start makes initial few minutes quite annoying (as well as harbingering great vulnerability, to which I now turn...)
Balance: 4/5
The race's gatherers are very vulnerable, especially early game. (E.g. they at least shouldn't grant XP when killed by the enemy). Subjectively, I never felt the race to be either overpowered or underpowered. No OP abilities spotted either. Hence the only point deduced is early game vulnerability.
Creativity: 10/10
I already praised the overarching training mechanic (+gathering through huts). All four heroes are done, so no penalties for incompletion. Spells, abilities and research are all good. A full mark well earned.
This will be a shorter review. The faction is incomplete. Specifically, it violates the "Your faction must contain at least 1\8 hero\buildings." criteria, and is therefore eligible for disqualification.
I really enjoyed playing this alpha-version, without any attempted flattery I must say that it shows a lot of promise.
The unit roles are good, interesting mechanics with lumber gathering (though doesn't always work or respond to the number of gathering wisps).
I leave it to moderators to suspend the disqualification or not. Provided the map stays, the following score is assigned (use as purely informative otherwise):
Theme: 5.5 (some aesthetics are ok, other subpar)
Gameplay: 5.5 (bugs encountered; as well as some debug text)
Balance: 3 (hard to gauge without any Heroes)
Creativity: 4 (quite good, but suffering heavily due to incompletion)
, 16/35]
Theme: 3/10
The race uses only vanilla models and icons. Better visuals via imports are much needed here (e.g. Raccoons don't have work animations and thus make bad workers). Few to no overarching interesting mechanics. The race looks like a beta now, but will flourish if given more attention and work.
Gameplay: 4/10
Unit roles are not well thought-out. Attack and armor types should be based on 4 Warcraft races, not on neutral-hostiles. Shop is bugged (pseudo-mobile). Bite cooldown won't work when auto-attacking (remake with mana or with Orb of Slow).
Balance: 3/5
Felt alright, unless bite-bug is abused.
Creativity: 6/10
I really liked the 'Improved Motivation With Nuts' humor. Tree jump mechanic is quite creative. Only two custom heroes made. As I said in 'theme', more creative mechanics would've been welcome.
Theme: 3/10
The race uses only vanilla models and icons. Better visuals via imports are much needed here (e.g. Raccoons don't have work animations and thus make bad workers). Few to no overarching interesting mechanics. The race looks like a beta now, but will flourish if given more attention and work.
Gameplay: 4/10
Unit roles are not well thought-out. Attack and armor types should be based on 4 Warcraft races, not on neutral-hostiles. Shop is bugged (pseudo-mobile). Bite cooldown won't work when auto-attacking (remake with mana or with Orb of Slow).
Balance: 3/5
Felt alright, unless bite-bug is abused.
Creativity: 6/10
I really liked the 'Improved Motivation With Nuts' humor. Tree jump mechanic is quite creative. Only two custom heroes made. As I said in 'theme', more creative mechanics would've been welcome.
Theme: 6/10
The race is okay, but suffers form overusing of vanilla models. Acolytes, workers, Sacrificial Pit... Furthermore, I've encountered several typos and weird english in tooltips. The presentation is also lacking at times, e.g. hero abilities should have line breaks when describing levels, not just "Deals 100/200/300 damage". You reuse (and misuse) some icons, as well as sometimes not giving them proper positioning.
Overall the race feels undead-ish enough, so the score here could've been much higher if some simple (if tedious) issues were dressed.
Gameplay: 6/10
While there are some original mechanics (workers dying into skeletons), the race doesn't feel new enough. Unique overarching mechanics and hero abilities would've been most welcome. Some bugs encountered, such as a worker being stuck inside goldmine's collision on initiation.
Balance: 2/5
Necromancer star(lightning)-fall kills virtually everything at level 1, and absolutely everything at level 2. 1000% dmg increase for Geist's ultimate is overpowered. Workers too vulnerable to early rushing. Sacrificial Pit turning units into weak skeletons and dying itself is under-powered for sure.
Creativity: 6.5/10
I already mentioned that I like some mechanics but these sort of are few and far between. More polishing would've allowed the map to blossom, as the potential is clearly there. A fourth hero would've been welcome.
Theme: 10/10
Just wow! Phenomenal aesthetics. Really beautiful building wrapping in really beautiful units through a really beautiful UI. Outstanding, sir. I'd consider bending the rules to give it an 11/10, were it not for a few vanilla icons (e.g. Blacksmith).
I really like many mechanics, such as Huge Sorc line-lightning attacks, mana-dependent abilities, towers being mounted on the blue turtle.
Gameplay: 7/10
Gameplay itself is totally fine (except light armor being weird choice for a basic ranged unit). All three point deduced here are from bugs alone.
Firstly, gold mines. The only one that works is the initial one, and that only if you don't destroy it.
Loading saved games doesn't work.
Witness can't be moved (I'm aware that this is known), so a non-existent unit gameplay-wise.
Turtle starts granting food already at the begging of wrap-in.
Wrap-in charges are nowhere explained (I sorta figured that this is the limit per time slash total limit).
Some other more minor bugs are PMed.
Balance: 1/5
Everything is overpowered as hell. T1 3-food units are insane fighters. Three sentinels and a lvl-1 hero absolutely annihilate orange camps; 8 Arbalests and a hero destroy a ~50lim opponent army. Shard armour totally op - would've remained so even if it cost 125, not 50 mana.
Most important of all, wrap-in mechanic allows construction of huge armies in a blink of an eye; this fraction-wide advantage is not offset by anything (aside gold expansions not working, lol).
Creativity: 8/10
I already praised the wrap-in mechanic. Unit abilities are cool as well. So all is fantastic. Both points here I deduce for incompletion. Two heroes with 7 spells between them is lamentable. Witness is de-facto a non-unit.
- Judgement: 70%
- Poll: 30%
Riki Martin, Sons of Tyskhadi [Black]
(30*3/38)+(70*29/100) = 22.6684210526
0 days overdue (no penalty)
Final score: 22.6684210526
Wazzz, The Bandit Outlaws [Black]
(30*8/38)+(70*28/100) = 25.9157894737
0 days overdue (no penalty)
Final score: 25.9157894737
xYours Trulyx, The Xetkin Clan [Red]
(30*7/38)+(70*33.5/100) = 28.9763157895
0 days overdue (no penalty)
Final score: 28.9763157895
MyPad, The Orderions [White]
(30*4/38)+(70*18/100) = 15.7578947368
2 days overdue (3% penalty)
Final score: 15.2851578947
islesofurth, The Forces of Gaia [Green]
(30*3/38)+(70*16/100) = 13.5684210526
2 days overdue (3% penalty)
Final score: 13.161368421
Leods, Cult of the Damned [Black]
(30*3/38)+(70*20.5/100) = 16.7184210526
0 days overdue (no penalty)
Final score: 16.7184210526
Spellbound & Mythic
(30*10/38)+(70*26/100) = 26.0947368421
2 days overdue (3% penalty)
Final score: 25.3118947368
Congratulations to all the winners and a big thanks to all those who participated in the contest.
Contest | Poll
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