I tested this map as green, the high elves and was quite disappointed by it...
The first thing you notice is the horendous FPS and lag everyone is getting when the map starts. I fell to a mear 5 FPS and my allies were at 1-2 which is beyond unplayable. Purple had early game lag as well. Fortunatly lag reduces as game progresses if fighting occurs and bases are lost but still as armies increase the lag also increases unti 1 FPS in combat. The only player who was not really suffering or dropping due to lag was my brother, who is using a PC with quad core and DX10 gaming graphic card (8800GT) which logically will not lag in a 6 year old game. Thus currently it is unplayable for 66%+ of the WC3 community due to the extreem requirements.
Secondly what is up with the neutral bases. There are dozens of neutral bases around the map yet you can not do anything with them. They also spawn units which is even worse making even more lag late game. Also why did my units have attack upgrades yet no way to research them? I mean if there are no attack upgrades do not have them, while if there are make them easilly researchable. Currently technologies are a shamble, like almost everything else in the map. Here are just a few of the broken stuff I found.
- All my units and a lot of other player's units have technology upgrades for weapons and armor and mage rank or skills, yet no way to research the required technologies to unlock or upgrade them. This is often the mark of a poor map maker or a really lazy one. If you want your map to be played atleast keep out or include factors that are meant to be in or out.
- Prince Kael's intelligence upgrade says it adds 10/20/30 intelligence based on level, however when learned it only adds +10 on the first upgrade, no ability icon and all following upgrades do nothing but waste skill points.
- Most hero abilities have fucked up icon positions, it is highly imported that ultimates and normal skills are in a standard order otherwise it becomes hard to find anything. Having them hop around is just a joke and shows real laziness.
- Purples ship has an ability that is meant to boost speed, however all it did was make the ship immobile, the total opposite of what it is meant to do...
- All autocast abilities for my wizzards and units next to the priests started in off mode, which is highly micro intensive late game to turn them all on, another lazy shortcut from you.
A perfect map should have no such flaws, however as you can see your map has a lot so it is far from perfect.
Game play wise, this has to be one of the most boring maps I ever played. Firstly the slideshow hurt my eyes. Secondly all you do is spam units with minimal tactics as their pathing is overloaded and hope you do not lose the fight. Thirdly you just spam banner in your capital and fourthly you build as many towers and junk as you can. No upgrades, no tactics, no small armies to take care about, nothing important at all. No wonder everyone dropped even when they still were alive. Also the poor workmanship on a lot of the features and lag did not help... but come on, a good map would still be able to hold players with all that while this would probably still make them drop even with none of them.
My current ratting for this map is 1/5 as it is totally unplayable to 66%+ of people due to lag. Even with out the lag I would still rate it 1-1.5/5 due to all the broken stuff and totally boring gameplay so you need a lot of work to make it even hold players ingame let alone be hosted commonly.
Looking at version numbers and gameplay it is probably a alpha, but still you should not publicly submit alphas as I am sure there is a rule against it. For the sake of people who play this, I advise alpha / beta testing more or better before submitting the map into public domain. People diserve some level of bug-freeness and lag-freeness when playing a map and this gave them none of those.
And I conclude with a quote from some other player who tested with me who also think it diserves a 1/5
DrSuperEvil said:
Several unit and building descriptions were misleading and the goblin fortress worth 8k lumber did nothing.