SC2Mapster

For those of you who still need beta keys, participate in the Weekly Data Exercise, the Weekly Terraining Exercise, or the Monthly Triggering Exercise for a chance at earning one!

HotS- Now with talking AI's!

That's right- a recent update to Heart of the Swarm just added AI's that communicate with you when you're on the same team. You can set your AI's build order using an in-game build-order-picker to choose from a few different opening and late-game strategies. The higher the AI's difficulty setting, the more advanced build orders or strategies it can be ordered to use. And for those who are concerned, you can still let the AI do it's own thing without orders from you, if you'd like. You can also give the AI orders like Attack, defend, scout, get detection, and expand.

Perhaps the most interesting feature is that the AI's will now actually talk to you. You'll hear the AI's voice say "I'm going to expand here" and see it ping the map- you might here it say "I've spotted some enemy mutalisks here". The AI will also let you know what it's building and when.

You can check out the full post here or join the discussion here!

HotS Groups Feature

HotS recently added a clan and groups feature- you can read the full article here if you're interested. We've created a sc2mapster group for Heart of the Swarm- if you're in the beta, make sure to join! The groups feature will be coming to Wings of Liberty in the future, at which point we'll open the same group there. This should provide a quick and easy way to round up some fellow mappers to test out your new game, or just play the newest arcade releases.