Just a simple question - I may have missed something obvious, but why is this map actually named Catalyst? No offense, but I don't see the connection between a catalyst and building up your own war tank and crushing the enemies base with it. I could go for some far-fetched explanation like the tanks being the catalyst to their teams victory or such, but that just sounds lame rather than explaining the name of the map.
well.. its designed poorly then. it does not work that way. you will alyays have zero shield and every 3 seconds it converts the energie. you can no have an energypolster with it.
They're great if you know how to use them. The idea is you use the energy to get multiple local repairers,which on top of extra armour plating (to act as a buffer in-between repair cycles) make you able to tank huge amounts of damage.
IMO, if your Tank has shields then you're doing it wrong
Just a simple question - I may have missed something obvious, but why is this map actually named Catalyst? No offense, but I don't see the connection between a catalyst and building up your own war tank and crushing the enemies base with it. I could go for some far-fetched explanation like the tanks being the catalyst to their teams victory or such, but that just sounds lame rather than explaining the name of the map.
this works on level one where you have a Shield regeneration of 1, but not on lvl 2, 3, 4 where you still will have shield regen 1 therefore getting the exact same amount out of it as on level 1 because you have to wait 2, 4, 8 seconds until your shield charged enough to use it. they DONT work alone.
if you want to use them in any way, you need shield regeneration EQUAL or GREATER than it drains. this leads to buying another item.. in this case an power diagnostic comes to mind.so you have PLENTY of energy over and 2 Slots occupied.. seems not a good tradeoff.
this works on level one where you have a Shield regeneration of 1, but not on lvl 2, 3, 4 where you still will have shield regen 1 therefore getting the exact same amount out of it as on level 1 because you have to wait 2, 4, 8 seconds until your shield charged enough to use it. they DONT work alone
Just a simple question - I may have missed something obvious, but why is this map actually named Catalyst? No offense, but I don't see the connection between a catalyst and building up your own war tank and crushing the enemies base with it. I could go for some far-fetched explanation like the tanks being the catalyst to their teams victory or such, but that just sounds lame rather than explaining the name of the map.
I liked it better than "Verb of the Noun" and "Two Word Map Explanation".
Originally I was making a first person L4D style survival shooter. The story was that you played a member of Raynor's Raiders and you were being dropped into a Dominion research facility to investigate a convenient plot devi... artifact. When you arrived, you'd, shockingly, realise that they were experiment on Zerg and that they had broken through, killing most of the dominion forces.
The reason I chose Catalyst for the name of this was that this was meant to spark the war of my own little universe between Raynor's Raiders, the Dominion and the Zerg. I chose the word Catalyst because, well, research facility and the word's association with chemicals. It sounded fitting. I plotted everything out, talent trees for the player characters and everything. I learnt that the fps lag in sc2 was too much for the map's style, and scrapped the project.
By then, the name had grown on me and I just felt like keeping it.
oh then i am sorry.. its the other way around that does not work without energy. well i dislike it anyway^^
you shouldn't. Shields are sooooooo overrated. I mean seriously a Siege Tank with armour plating has only 1/4th of its HP in Shield and the rest in Armour that gets repaired from 0-100% in no time. :)
I made a lil' video of it and everything 'cause I was bored:
I kinda dont play this map that often anymore. I hope you noticed that there is no real reason killing enemy players... so its not challenging anymore... as it was before.
No longer cancels move orders when upgrading equipment.
Greatly decreased energy cost for most abilities.
Abilities will only be visible if you have the ability item.
Cleaned up various ability icons.
New assist column on scoreboard.
New item: Shield Projector. Allows your shield to cover other units.
You may now Recall to your scout probes. Cooldown of Recall reduced to 10 seconds.
Thank you for all the feedback. I'll be working on a purpose for vespene next. I'd also like feedback on an idea I had; when your vehicle explodes, your pilot ejects. You can move your pilot around, and when your respawn timer is complete, you will spawn at the closest spawn location to your pilot.
Aircraft decelerate when upgrading an item, they don't stop. Nothing I can do about that until/if Blizzard changes the way items work. Well, I could give aircraft back their instant acceleration, but not sure that'd be too smart.
The reward for killing a player will come when vespene is useful again.
and reallly important: the money over time is far greater than killmoney. well then again there is not a good working denie\lasthit system in place so you need to find a way to reward better players over the weaker ones
As I said. There is best formula to get money=>items=> build in fastest time.
And if anyone wants to distract you from that, he will suffer as well...
When you scan everything in this map, and all actions, then you get what actions you need to take to accomplish that.
One of things you will get is that what Ryaneko wrote in his 1st line.
It lacks of balance a lot. Before victory objectives change, version was quite ok. After that. Its balance was downgraded, a lot.
So what I am suggesting here is to investigate few things and balance the map instead adding new meaningless content. Like aircraft deceleration that is bugged anyway how I read here. It triggers when you update item ?
I really, really think the abilities should be upgradeable. When i played for the first time, i thought it will come in the next patch, but since that there were tons of patches and tons of upgrades, but still no ability levels o.O
The problem is, that later in the game, some of the abilities become completely useless (like the heals) and all of them get too cheap (ability 75/315 and like the best drone 27500 (dont know the numbers expactly, but its not important now) )
I see no reason why everything is upgradeable, but abilities not.
I noticed that Overcharge now has a much longer cooldown - it was hard to use properly before due to the high energy cost, but the damage increase made it a good tradeoff. I think that was much more interesting than having it so it uses next to no energy on a long cooldown since now there's pretty much no reason at all to not use it every cycle (but I've found that I'd rather just equip something else instead)
also Containment Field now shuts off too easily IMO, which compounded with the super long cooldown makes it useless for any setup that uses energy in big bursts (Like Multiple armour reps) as it shuts off after the 1st or 2nd rep cycle.
In retrospect I feel like both the containment field and overcharge were a little silly for abilities. They may as well have been standard items that just increased weapon speed by 20% but chugged 50 energy per 10 sec. Same for containment field. They aren't what I wanted in abilities.
I want abilities to feel cool and their timings to be important. As such I buffed the containment field up to 20% and gave it a cooldown, same for Overcharge. I'll likely up them to 30% next patch and add some fresh graphic to most of the abilities. I'm strongly against the old incarnations of both these abilities. They were implemented back when I didn't have the knowledge to make more creative items. I feel that now, I do, and these items have lost their original intention.
With that said, I don't want to go around willy-nilly nerfing things for no reason. I'm likely going to redesign both abilities entirely because I just feel both are too passive.
I want abilities to be the twitch reaction skills that make a good player better than a bad one. I know things aren't quite there yet. or even close. I'm hoping to find a proper way to display a lot of different abilities on the same unit so that I can properly implement an ability system that is actually good.
Back to the topic of the 2 abilities you mentioned, I'll play around with changing containment field to be a 50% reduction but making you immobile for the duration. It can be cancelled as normal. Overcharge will let you move 30% faster, deal 30% more damage, but take 30% more too. These are just ideas at the moment.
i wouldnt focus on items right now. its more important to get the basics right.. income for example is just messed up, as well as infantrie ways, they are just not good
Are Sensors supposed to stack? Right now you can get 4x debuffed by differently upgraded sensors. If stacking is intentional same upgrade level sensors should also stack (but the debuff should be decreased a bit then if you ask me).
I would still like to see a defensive type weapon that shoulds incoming projectiles(missiles), thus sacrificing offensive ability for defense ability.
Keep up the good work Eiviyn!
PS: Did you spell Vespene right yet? I keep seeing Vespane ingame.
Just a simple question - I may have missed something obvious, but why is this map actually named Catalyst? No offense, but I don't see the connection between a catalyst and building up your own war tank and crushing the enemies base with it. I could go for some far-fetched explanation like the tanks being the catalyst to their teams victory or such, but that just sounds lame rather than explaining the name of the map.
They're great if you know how to use them. The idea is you use the energy to get multiple local repairers,which on top of extra armour plating (to act as a buffer in-between repair cycles) make you able to tank huge amounts of damage.
IMO, if your Tank has shields then you're doing it wrong
Because it sounds better than "Hero Tank Wars" :)
@Libra350: Go do the math..
+ 1,5 Energy - 1 Shield
this works on level one where you have a Shield regeneration of 1, but not on lvl 2, 3, 4 where you still will have shield regen 1 therefore getting the exact same amount out of it as on level 1 because you have to wait 2, 4, 8 seconds until your shield charged enough to use it. they DONT work alone. if you want to use them in any way, you need shield regeneration EQUAL or GREATER than it drains. this leads to buying another item.. in this case an power diagnostic comes to mind.so you have PLENTY of energy over and 2 Slots occupied.. seems not a good tradeoff.
I think you'll find they do
oh then i am sorry.. its the other way around that does not work without energy. well i dislike it anyway^^
-after unequipping the scout drone item, the scout drone remains. this is not in line with the other drones.
This isn't intended. I'll fix this.
I liked it better than "Verb of the Noun" and "Two Word Map Explanation".
Originally I was making a first person L4D style survival shooter. The story was that you played a member of Raynor's Raiders and you were being dropped into a Dominion research facility to investigate a convenient plot devi... artifact. When you arrived, you'd, shockingly, realise that they were experiment on Zerg and that they had broken through, killing most of the dominion forces.
The reason I chose Catalyst for the name of this was that this was meant to spark the war of my own little universe between Raynor's Raiders, the Dominion and the Zerg. I chose the word Catalyst because, well, research facility and the word's association with chemicals. It sounded fitting. I plotted everything out, talent trees for the player characters and everything. I learnt that the fps lag in sc2 was too much for the map's style, and scrapped the project.
By then, the name had grown on me and I just felt like keeping it.
you shouldn't. Shields are sooooooo overrated. I mean seriously a Siege Tank with armour plating has only 1/4th of its HP in Shield and the rest in Armour that gets repaired from 0-100% in no time. :)
I made a lil' video of it and everything 'cause I was bored:
you can leave the spawnplace with aircraft..
I kinda dont play this map that often anymore. I hope you noticed that there is no real reason killing enemy players... so its not challenging anymore... as it was before.
Version 1.48
Thank you for all the feedback. I'll be working on a purpose for vespene next. I'd also like feedback on an idea I had; when your vehicle explodes, your pilot ejects. You can move your pilot around, and when your respawn timer is complete, you will spawn at the closest spawn location to your pilot.
As always, feedback is appreciated!
dont do that.
oh and aircraft has way to much armor slots
-make leaver NOT be controlled by ai. they just feed and are of no use.. better control them per hand
-needs reward for kills
-aircraft stops when upgrading
Aircraft decelerate when upgrading an item, they don't stop. Nothing I can do about that until/if Blizzard changes the way items work. Well, I could give aircraft back their instant acceleration, but not sure that'd be too smart.
The reward for killing a player will come when vespene is useful again.
and reallly important: the money over time is far greater than killmoney. well then again there is not a good working denie\lasthit system in place so you need to find a way to reward better players over the weaker ones
-remove drones again from fighter -_-
As I said. There is best formula to get money=>items=> build in fastest time. And if anyone wants to distract you from that, he will suffer as well...
When you scan everything in this map, and all actions, then you get what actions you need to take to accomplish that.
One of things you will get is that what Ryaneko wrote in his 1st line.
It lacks of balance a lot. Before victory objectives change, version was quite ok. After that. Its balance was downgraded, a lot.
So what I am suggesting here is to investigate few things and balance the map instead adding new meaningless content. Like aircraft deceleration that is bugged anyway how I read here. It triggers when you update item ?
I really, really think the abilities should be upgradeable. When i played for the first time, i thought it will come in the next patch, but since that there were tons of patches and tons of upgrades, but still no ability levels o.O
The problem is, that later in the game, some of the abilities become completely useless (like the heals) and all of them get too cheap (ability 75/315 and like the best drone 27500 (dont know the numbers expactly, but its not important now) )
I see no reason why everything is upgradeable, but abilities not.
I noticed that Overcharge now has a much longer cooldown - it was hard to use properly before due to the high energy cost, but the damage increase made it a good tradeoff. I think that was much more interesting than having it so it uses next to no energy on a long cooldown since now there's pretty much no reason at all to not use it every cycle (but I've found that I'd rather just equip something else instead)
also Containment Field now shuts off too easily IMO, which compounded with the super long cooldown makes it useless for any setup that uses energy in big bursts (Like Multiple armour reps) as it shuts off after the 1st or 2nd rep cycle.
In retrospect I feel like both the containment field and overcharge were a little silly for abilities. They may as well have been standard items that just increased weapon speed by 20% but chugged 50 energy per 10 sec. Same for containment field. They aren't what I wanted in abilities.
I want abilities to feel cool and their timings to be important. As such I buffed the containment field up to 20% and gave it a cooldown, same for Overcharge. I'll likely up them to 30% next patch and add some fresh graphic to most of the abilities. I'm strongly against the old incarnations of both these abilities. They were implemented back when I didn't have the knowledge to make more creative items. I feel that now, I do, and these items have lost their original intention.
With that said, I don't want to go around willy-nilly nerfing things for no reason. I'm likely going to redesign both abilities entirely because I just feel both are too passive.
I want abilities to be the twitch reaction skills that make a good player better than a bad one. I know things aren't quite there yet. or even close. I'm hoping to find a proper way to display a lot of different abilities on the same unit so that I can properly implement an ability system that is actually good.
Back to the topic of the 2 abilities you mentioned, I'll play around with changing containment field to be a 50% reduction but making you immobile for the duration. It can be cancelled as normal. Overcharge will let you move 30% faster, deal 30% more damage, but take 30% more too. These are just ideas at the moment.
i wouldnt focus on items right now. its more important to get the basics right.. income for example is just messed up, as well as infantrie ways, they are just not good
Are Sensors supposed to stack? Right now you can get 4x debuffed by differently upgraded sensors. If stacking is intentional same upgrade level sensors should also stack (but the debuff should be decreased a bit then if you ask me).
I would still like to see a defensive type weapon that shoulds incoming projectiles(missiles), thus sacrificing offensive ability for defense ability.
Keep up the good work Eiviyn!
PS: Did you spell Vespene right yet? I keep seeing Vespane ingame.