For those of you who love some original SC and SC:BW maps I have some sad news for you. When you use the Convert Legacy Map feature in the StarCraft II Editor the map's topography will be pretty well done but there will be a few issues you'll have to keep in mind.
1. Cliffs will often not be placed, and the ground will be merely raised in the spots where you need to make cliffs. So you'll have to do that yourself.
2. Water is not added, and the ground where water needs to be will be lowered. So you'll have to add water yourself then either lower the cliff where the water is or add pathing blockers around the water.
3. The mineral placement will often be very bad. So you’ll have to re-do the entire mineral placement.
4. There will be only 1 geyser. So you’ll have to add a second geyser (just replacing the geyser with a rich geyser won’t work because it only increase the gas per trip by 2 making each trip worth 6 not 8).
5. Any SC2 features won’t be on the map (obviously) such as Gold Expansions, Destructible Rocks, LOS blockers and Xel’Naga watch towers.
6. You’ll have to add all your own doodads to the map none will come over from the original map.
7. No triggers come over from melee or UMS maps, so you'll have to make your own melee or custom triggers. For melee maps just copy and paste the default melee triggers from the triggers of a new melee map.
8. Sometimes the starting points are placed in an uncacceptable locatoin. So you'll have to fix the starting points.
9. When converting the maps, the StarCraft II Editor converts the map and doesn’t add any extra space to the edges so a lot of it won’t be playable. So you’ll have to fix the bounds of the map by 1 increment in all directions so that the edges of the map don’t interfere with game play.
10. Most importantly the map will be too small. No getting around this. 4-player maps are only good enough for 2 players, and 1 player maps are right-out. You can kind of get around this using Destructible Rocks to block rushes, and high enough cliffs to stop reapers but it can be very difficult.
Let me give you an example of a map where I did all of these steps minus step number 2 (because there was no water) and step number 3 (because I wanted that authentic feel to the map): I re-made one of my favorite maps from the original SC called Three Kingdoms. I LOVED THAT MAP! So I re-made it. Well it became a rush fest. Protoss couldn’t even rush some zealots before lings would destroy everything or a marine would start to harass. You could never recover because the reinforcement time was so short! In a game where we agreed no rushes the Terran merely lifted off to a Gold expansion because of the small size of the map he barley lost any mining time. He obviously came to win the game.
So in recent news I added Destructible Rocks to fix the rush problem and am hoping that that will fix both the rush problem and the gold problem. There are destructible rocks between each base so no one can attack anyone with ground units before killing that rock (save for reapers and a Terran using his CC as a drop ship to drop a SCV on the other side of them). There are also destructible rocks where the Nexus/Hatchery/Command Center are to be placed on each Gold expansion. I also made the center cliff too high for reapers to get over since some bases would be able to be hit while still on the cliff making this imbalanced depending on where you spawned. But reapers can still get around the Destructible Rocks making them still usable.
As you can see I have to do all these things just to make a balanced SC1 map balanced in SC2.
Here is the map so you can see what I mean:
(3)Three Kingdoms - original map converted without adding any features of SCII (except for 2 geysers)
4. There will be only 1 geyser. So you’ll have to add a second geyser (just replacing the geyser with a rich geyser won’t work because it only increase the gas per trip by 2 making each trip worth 6 not 8).
A fully saturated geyser in Starcraft costs 250 minerals compared to two fully saturated geysers in Starcraft 2 which costs 450 minerals. So even if the rich geysers returned 8 per trip the investment that would be required to get it up an running would not at all be the same as what it is in a regular Starcraft 2 map. After having converted a legacy map to Starcraft 2 you should always make it so that there is two geysers at each base.
A fully saturated geyser in Starcraft costs 250 minerals compared to two fully saturated geysers in Starcraft 2 which costs 450 minerals. So even if the rich geysers returned 8 per trip the investment that would be required to get it up an running would not at all be the same as what it is in a regular Starcraft 2 map. After having converted a legacy map to Starcraft 2 you should always make it so that there is two geysers at each base.
Very good point sir, I didn't even think about that.
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For those of you who love some original SC and SC:BW maps I have some sad news for you. When you use the Convert Legacy Map feature in the StarCraft II Editor the map's topography will be pretty well done but there will be a few issues you'll have to keep in mind.
1. Cliffs will often not be placed, and the ground will be merely raised in the spots where you need to make cliffs. So you'll have to do that yourself.
2. Water is not added, and the ground where water needs to be will be lowered. So you'll have to add water yourself then either lower the cliff where the water is or add pathing blockers around the water.
3. The mineral placement will often be very bad. So you’ll have to re-do the entire mineral placement.
4. There will be only 1 geyser. So you’ll have to add a second geyser (just replacing the geyser with a rich geyser won’t work because it only increase the gas per trip by 2 making each trip worth 6 not 8).
5. Any SC2 features won’t be on the map (obviously) such as Gold Expansions, Destructible Rocks, LOS blockers and Xel’Naga watch towers.
6. You’ll have to add all your own doodads to the map none will come over from the original map.
7. No triggers come over from melee or UMS maps, so you'll have to make your own melee or custom triggers. For melee maps just copy and paste the default melee triggers from the triggers of a new melee map.
8. Sometimes the starting points are placed in an uncacceptable locatoin. So you'll have to fix the starting points.
9. When converting the maps, the StarCraft II Editor converts the map and doesn’t add any extra space to the edges so a lot of it won’t be playable. So you’ll have to fix the bounds of the map by 1 increment in all directions so that the edges of the map don’t interfere with game play.
10. Most importantly the map will be too small. No getting around this. 4-player maps are only good enough for 2 players, and 1 player maps are right-out. You can kind of get around this using Destructible Rocks to block rushes, and high enough cliffs to stop reapers but it can be very difficult.
Let me give you an example of a map where I did all of these steps minus step number 2 (because there was no water) and step number 3 (because I wanted that authentic feel to the map): I re-made one of my favorite maps from the original SC called Three Kingdoms. I LOVED THAT MAP! So I re-made it. Well it became a rush fest. Protoss couldn’t even rush some zealots before lings would destroy everything or a marine would start to harass. You could never recover because the reinforcement time was so short! In a game where we agreed no rushes the Terran merely lifted off to a Gold expansion because of the small size of the map he barley lost any mining time. He obviously came to win the game.
So in recent news I added Destructible Rocks to fix the rush problem and am hoping that that will fix both the rush problem and the gold problem. There are destructible rocks between each base so no one can attack anyone with ground units before killing that rock (save for reapers and a Terran using his CC as a drop ship to drop a SCV on the other side of them). There are also destructible rocks where the Nexus/Hatchery/Command Center are to be placed on each Gold expansion. I also made the center cliff too high for reapers to get over since some bases would be able to be hit while still on the cliff making this imbalanced depending on where you spawned. But reapers can still get around the Destructible Rocks making them still usable. As you can see I have to do all these things just to make a balanced SC1 map balanced in SC2.
Here is the map so you can see what I mean:
(3)Three Kingdoms - original map converted without adding any features of SCII (except for 2 geysers)
(3)Neo Three Kingdoms - original map converted with adding the features of SCII.
Hope this helps you guys who want to use this feature. ^_^
A fully saturated geyser in Starcraft costs 250 minerals compared to two fully saturated geysers in Starcraft 2 which costs 450 minerals. So even if the rich geysers returned 8 per trip the investment that would be required to get it up an running would not at all be the same as what it is in a regular Starcraft 2 map. After having converted a legacy map to Starcraft 2 you should always make it so that there is two geysers at each base.
Very good point sir, I didn't even think about that.