SC2Mapster

Quote from DEFILERRULEZ: Go

I forgot one question, Why The facility look remember to The team another from a previous mission?

It was more of a callback to Mission 02. It was where it all began, which is why they remember it. The one's responsible for building the facility in Mission 02 was never really answered, and this piece of dialogue was simply made to confirm that it was them who built it.

Quote from DEFILERRULEZ: Go

How could they use The warpgate without being noticed by the RSSI on the exact second they warp inside of it ?

I don't know. At the time I felt it would just be more intense to have the player think this would be just a very simple micro-section, and then drop the bomb on them later. I also wanted you to have time to get familiar with the heroes again, and learn the new abilities.

Quote from DEFILERRULEZ: Go

When will Rik (SCV guy) will betray us ?

I don't know. Why would he do that?

I don't know... Riki looks suspicious...

So, I'm a little late to the band wagon here but I just finished the first two missions of this campaign. I gotta say, playing it for myself is a lot different from watching Jayborino play it.

Both Missions - The terrain is wonderfully detailed and your choice of music fits quite well. The difficulty feels just right for the start of a campaign.

A01 - This was a very atmospheric mission with some very well done cutscenes. Unfortunately, my graphics card is mid-tier at best and lags when the camera pulls up too high.

The micro section is fairly easy, especially with Reeves' stun ability killing pretty much everything it hits. The tool tip isn't very accurate for this mission, though. I was very liberal with my use of his ability and got to the end with half my energy still in reserve.

The macro section was pretty fun as well. I actually kept my entire army on hold position in the space in front of my base. All of the Zerg attack waves ignored them and I was able to kill almost all of the Nydus Worms right as they spawned. I used mostly Marauders in my army since they're great at killing buildings like Nydus Worms and no air attacks will ever go near them (Mutalisks just head straight for my base and into my turrets)

The boss monster was also a treat to fight. I wasn't sure if the thing was armored but fifty Marauders tore through it like it was nothing.

A02 - A very nice cave installation mission. Umoja's white tileset contrasted nicely with the rest of the grey cave system in the second half.

The micro section at the start was interesting. Once again, making use of your heroes' abilities made it fairly easy to deal with whatever attack wave they send at you. I also found that I can skip some attacks by camping a unit by the door while the rest of my army destroys the lock. The lock is destroyed, the door is opened, and I move the unit through, triggering the cutscene and skipping the attack wave.

The short amount of time between you getting your base and the timer starting was just enough for me to fill one bunker with marines and train an small group of marauders. When the timer started, I immediately made way for the eastern generator and blew it up. Then I moved to the north western generator, continually making more marauders to reinforce my existing army. I think I attacked a little too early as I lost a lot of units trying to kill the generator. I went back to base and rebuilt my army before going to the western generator and wiping out those bases. After that, I took those expos and kept making units. By the time I confronted Rhik, I had so many Marauders that none of his defenses mattered.

Overall, very fun missions and a good start to the campaign. I might go and record some runs and post them on Youtube, though I'll wait until I've played all 6 missions of Act 1.

Edit: I played the next two missions. Just appending this post instead of making a new one

A03 - I'm not a really big fan of micro missions. I still have fun playing them, but would much rather play macro missions. That said, I still enjoyed playing this as the ideas and gameplay presented in it was interesting. Just not enough for me to give comment on. I liked the stone Zealots though. Nice use of those artifact guardians from Smash and Grab.

A04 - My computer lagged like a mofo during the opening cutscenes. StarCraft 2 is not optimized for sweeping panoramic shots of mountains in the distance. The dust clouds did not help. While actually playing the mission I got a stable 60 fps though. As for the gameplay, this mission was a spike in difficulty I did not expect - and to make it worse, it's with an off race.

The micro section with the War Hounds was frustratingly tedious at first but surprisingly easy once you figure out the timings. I ordered all my extra units to move back to the very start of the mission while I continued on with my heroes. I went counter-clockwise starting from the objective directly east of where you begin the War Hound section. Took out two of the objectives before I even encountered my first War Hound. Then ran straight for the next objective and killed the War Hound in my way, moving into a corner to avoid the patrolling strike team. I followed behind the team and let them circle around before taking out the last three in quick succession. Very fun once you know what you're doing.

The macro section was hard mostly due to tech restrictions. Stalkers with no blink mean it's really hard to micro them away from death. Similarly, they'll path-block Zealots trying to kill something. It was essential for me to have a hot key for melee and ranged units so I'd lead in with the zealots firsts and reinforce with the stalkers from behind. That said, this map made brilliant use of this challenge. Lots of choke points make proper positioning key in any attempt to push. It's as much a fight with the terrain as it is with the enemy. And seeing as it's an enemy base, that works out just fine.

The boss was somewhat annoying as the single target missiles did area damage, making it impossible to dodge them completely unscathed. Thankfully, you can easily dodge it by queuing a bunch of back and forth move commands. The multi-target missiles are really easy to dodge unless your character happens to be behind the boss in which case moving slightly to the left does nothing since you'll have clicked the boss instead of the ground slightly to the left of your unit. That's the same problem with the barrage attack since you won't have to move that far to dodge it but the boss keeps eating your move clicks.

The seconds phase of the boss was interesting. A little inconvenient that Voradin started in the same hotkey as Khaduros but nothing too bad. I mostly just shift-queued all of my orders to Voradin while I micro-ed Khaduros. Won the second phase within two cycles.

Both maps The terrain and music was still great. I'd have loved to play mission 4 on the highest settings if my computer could handle it. Sadly, it can't and it makes me sad.

Over all, great pair of maps. Really excited to play the next two

@redlerred7: Go

Thank you for the feedback, and I'm glad you enjoyed the introduction to the campaign. I hope you enjoy what's to come! :D

@DudkiSC2: Go

Oh, you posted while I was editing my earlier post. Well feedback for the mission 3 - 4 is on my previous post.

Hey Dudki, now that you're including all of the unit choices to Zerg and Protoss macro maps, any plans to incorporate something similar for future Terran macro maps (if there are any planned)?

@JayborinoPlays: Go

I'm still actually deciding on exactly what choices I want to offer the player. Mission 16 is part macro, and so far I'll be giving you the choice between Ravens and Science Vessels as well as Ghosts or Spectres.

I'm still thinking about what other choices I wannna do. I might take a look at the Research Panel from WoL and give the player some of the choices from there to pick from.

@DudkiSC2: Go

Oh man if we're gonna have to choose between Planetary Fortress and Perdition Turrets I might scream. They're both so good. Similarly, Vanadium Plating or Ultra Capacitors are kind of overpowered regardless of which one you pick.

But if it's based solely on unit composition there might be a bit of trouble. There aren't enough units in the Terran tech tree that fill similar roles to the other. Like you said, Ravens or Sciences Vessels and Ghosts or Specters. You can argue Helion or Vulture but Helions turn into Hellbats, making both the Firebat and Vulture kinda redundant.

The Wraith is also completely phased out now because of the introduction of the Liberator, a fast anti-air unit that can also shoot ground and costs basically as much as a Wraith. The only difference is that a Wraith can cloak but in your maps there's so much detection that there isn't much you can do with cloaked units.

And please for the sake of convenience, don't put units with the same build hotkey in the list of available tech in production structures. The hotkey for Diamondbacks and Widow Mines are the same and it's really annoying having to reassign keys it all the time.

Maybe give groups of three units and the player can pick which one is built with mercenary stats that game. Like Choose War Pigs, Devil Dogs, or Skibi's Angels, then all of those respective units that map are mercs, etc.

@JayborinoPlays: Go

I like that idea more actually. Maybe have a choice for each level of tech. So like three choices for Barracks, Factory, and Starport respectively? You could go Hammer Securities, Siege Breaker, Hel's Angels, Ghost, Science Vessel.

Oh man having mercenaries as your default units would be so over powered though. Tanks with 100 base damage while in siege mode? Vikings that deal 40 damage to armored? I'm all in for that.

On second thought, it's probably a bad idea. It'd be horribly unbalanced

@redlerred7: Go

Well, it's a campaign, so I can balance it out. If I give the enemy Vanadium Plating and Ultra-Capacitors, as well as giving them a lot of mercenaries, then it's suddenly not OP anymore. In mission 14 and 15 I also gave you access to one of the three chiices for your LotV units, while the bases had all 3 variants, so I actually don't think it will be too bad.

Right now I'm thinking about the following choices:

• Ravens vs Science Vessels
• Ghosts vs Spectres
• Shrike Turrets vs Fortified Bunkers
• Ultra-Capacitors vs Vanadium Plating
• Regenerative Bio-Steel vs Cellular Reactor
• Orbital Depots vs Micro-Filtering

How do these choices feel?

So far I've done it so that mercenaries are just unlocked eventually and will replace your standard units. I suppose I could go make it a choice for players, but the only unit I'm worried about is how the Siegr Breaker. It's just soo dang powerful that I think having an unlimited amount is just too good, and offering as a choice will result in a no-brainer pick. What do you guys think?

@DudkiSC2: Go

Hmm, good point. It wouldn't be all that unbalanced if the enemy had everything. After all, they are the RSSI. Having them use only mercenaries kinda fits.

In any case, those look like a good selection of research options. There are clear advantages and disadvantages to having one over the other but the disadvantages aren't crippling. The Cellular Reactor one is the only thing I'm kinda iffy about since that's generally the better option by a large margin. Having a big death ball of mech units with no energy could make Regen Bio-Steel slightly better but Science Vessels use energy for their repair beam.

As for just having everything be merc units, the increase in effectiveness in using those units aren't that big making it very balanced to have them. Unfortunately, the Siege Breakers really are just over powered. Maybe lower their base siege damage to 60 instead of 100? It fits better since a regular Siege Tank deals 35 base siege damage and the Siege Breaker is supposed to be 2/3 more powerful. 35+35(2/3)= 58~

@DudkiSC2: Go

I agree, when given a choice, the player would/should always go for Siege Breakers. There could be two alternatives to this... just don't add Siege Breakers in any way, or include them in a actually difficult choice. For example, you either take Siege Breakers, or all of your infantry being mercenaries. So that's 4-5 other units (Marines, Firebats, Marauders, Reapers, Medics) being mercenaries as part of the tradeoff. I'm just spitballing so it's not an exact science, but the choice has to really make the player not just immediately go for the obvious merc Siege Breakers if you decide to include them as a pre-mission tech choice.

You could get super crazy with a pre-mission menu that gives the player a set number of merc points (for lack of a better term) and they can assign them to which mercs they want e.g. War Pigs cost one point, Hel's Angels may be three, and Siege Breakers five. This way you can assign the value you think is best to each improved unit and the player has to ration their choices based on these restictions.

Like you also said though, it's a campaign so even if you give the player Siege Breakers by default, you can make the enemy hard enough to deal with to balance it out somehow, which is a viable third option.

@JayborinoPlays: Go

Thanks for the suggestions, both of you.

I don't know how advanced I can really get with the system. Assigning points to different units would be quite challenging, but also very interesting! The idea of sacrificing more than one mercenary-variant in order to get the Siege Breakers would also be a good way to go about it. As redlerred7 said, reducing their damage output alltogether would also be an effective way to balance it.

There are many ways to approach it. Another thing I could do is also having it be the last unit you unlock althogether, so let's say you unlock it in A22, meaning you would only have 3 missions to play with them, and at this point, the enemy would be so powerful that they would have a lot of Siege Breakers themselves as well as other very powerful units, so balance at that point in the campaign definitely wouldn't be an issue.

I'll continue thinking about it. I have no intention of giving the player access to Siege Breakers in A16 so I have plenty of time to think about how I want to approach this particular unit's inclusion. The choices I specified in my last post is most likely the options I'm going for with this mission, and I may give you access to some more mercs as well.

A strong suggestion would be to change Micro-Filtering for Automated Refinery, making it 'Orbital Depots vs Automated Refinery'. That'd create a conflicting choice between choosing either easy supplies or easy vespene.

@DeltaCadimus: Go

That's a good point!

So, just finished mission 5. Right now, it's my favorite mission. Like with all macro missions, if you know what you're doing then you can win.

So, I cheated a little and checked the editor for where the survivors are. Ridiculously well hidden, I have to say. In any case, when I gained control, I hotkeyed my production, made an SCV and a Medic, and immediately made my way to the first two survivors. It made the early game a lot less hectic since I could focus on getting a better economy rather than making more units.

Once again, Reeve's stun blast was valuable as the biggest threats to the APC were Zerglings getting a full surround on it. They clumped up together and were dealt with quite easily. Later, when I had more units, I used the stun on Abberations since they were priority targets. Later in the mission, when multiple APCs were being sent in quick succession, I literally only sent Reeves, Baldwin, two Marauders, and three medics to cut off the next APC while the rest of my army followed the current one. Like I said, I love Reeves' stun

For base defense I was a little annoyed. That Perdition turret on the top of the ramp was too close to the edge. Even if it killed the units giving vision to it, they'd just have to move a tiny bit to get vision again. I ended up letting it fall and instead relied on a Bunker full of marines a little bit into the high ground and two Perdition turrets a few spaces in front of it. I also put four Widow Mines on either side of the perdition Turret. I realize now that using mostly Widow Mines would be ideal since the enemy doesn't bring detection. Six Widow Mines near the entrance of either base it basically a guarantee that nothing will touch you (unless they send Ultralisks and I don't think they do)

As for the terrain, once again, very atmospheric. You can practically feel the heaviness of the air as everyone is trying to evacuate. The one thing I didn't like was how hard it was to find survivors. The hiding places just blended in with the environment so well.

Overall still a fun mission. My favorite one so far. Can't wait to play the next one

@redlerred7: Go

Your reviews of the missions are great! I even did video reviews and don't think I captured how great these maps are. Dudki, I've been replaying the available Annihilation maps because of how fun they are.

@JayborinoPlays: Go

Glad you liked them. Personally, your videos work better for story and general gameplay. Seeing you play through these maps made figuring out the best strategies to do them fairly straightforward. My reviews have a bigger focus on gameplay and strategy. I'm not at a disadvantage of playing them blind and have a reference point for how I want to go about things. Granted, I fare slightly better in the blizzard campaign missions because there are significantly more references than one video by one Youtuber doing it blind.

But you're kinda right. It's really hard to understand how good these maps are without playing them yourself. I'm really happy since I recently got a lot of free time, allowing me to actually play them.

@redlerred7: Go

Jayborino's video also showed me how difficult it the survivors were to find. I wanted them to be hard to find, but I never expected them to be THAT hard. :D

May I ask you what difficulty you're playing on?

Jayborino - I'm happy to hear that!

So, I can expect you to have great knowledge of all my Heroes and play them like a pro for the next mission and leave everyone in awe, right? :D