SC2Mapster

Please reduce collosuss damage or add building that have big vission sight, becaus his range is too big. Remove Protoss Emmiter, change immortal special ability to more shield, but no reduce dmg (shields 2.5x like)

1) population decrease debuff of the protoss emitter need to be redesigned, because it is 99% fatal. the debuff can be changed to something like capping the population growth or reducing the movement of all units.

2) No overlord, or necromancer, or emitter debuff before 45 mins pls. lost 5 out of 5 games because of the above events comming too soon, before even unlocking airport/vehicle tech. If you insist on keeping them in the game, then pls nerf them so they can be easily dealt with with basic cannons + biological army

3) pls dont make two debuffs come at the same time. Give at least a 10 min break for players to take a breath. (imagine you just won a pyrric victory against a wave of necromancer&zombies, hot on its heel come the world recession, with protoss expanding across the map and protoss armys knocking at your door)

Alternatively, for things mentioned in 2 and 3, you can make them exclusive to higher difficulties to satisfy players who would like to cha(tor)llenge(ture) themselves.

4) Dont recommend random spawning of protoss bases. Other wise they can appear in some locations unreachable by ground forces (cliff, abyss). It is probably fine if it is a gateway, but in case it is an archive or an emitter, doomed.

5) the timer for the archive is bugged. It remains there even the archive has been destroyed.

6) need to increase the sight of the cannon to 8, equal to its range.

7) stronger and faster air units.

@draconius15: Go

Agreed. Both necromancers and overlords can be lethal in early games. In remember having both of them spawned before researching ‘armoured vehicle’. Defending against them cost me dozens of turrets and SCVs, which hurt my economy gravely. Unpredictable economic crisis is also a serious issue. It can destroy the economy of your rich, urbanized empire in a matter of minutes, meanwhile you can only helplessly watch protoss bases appearing one after another (because you are bankrupt), which will eventually become the force to defeat you.

P.S How I deal with the protoss expansions in the early game is to spread several SCVs across the map. Once a protoss base appears, send the nearest scv to build 2 cannons next to it to eliminate the threat in the first place. This can buy enough time to construct a mobile force based on vehicle.

A few things that needs to be fixed or litterally taken out of the game.

1) World govern economical crisis. This should be taken out of the game, or change it so you get a god damn reason for having an economic reason. Same as give a timer for it. And make so it can't just appear after 10 minutes of gameplay. Since this has destroyed me multiple times in a row just because apparently my economy and food production was too good so the world apparently gets a fit and all of a sudden my economy is gone, and I have nothing to defend with. So either change it, or take it out since it ain't working.

2) A powerful necromancer has appeared. Which is 100% allied with the Protoss, and before comming to my place had 120 zombies and kept on spawning them from thin air, on easy, this unit overall has 9k hp so it should be a damn Suicidal difficulty unit. Not an Easy unit specially when it takes 1 damage from all sources of damage and deals 120 minimum damage and each zombie does 30 damage 40 against armoured which grows every second apparently.

3) Spawning unfair units. Ok so we set up a command post, we build the first 10 houses with farms we build a barracks and add some defenses. And hold and behold 3 Protoss expantions has appeared 1-2 archives has appeared, and don't forget about the 1-3 libraries that has appeared. All over the map, with way to much hp and too little time to take them out, with basic unit.

So there is a lot of work to be done, a game should be fair, it shouldn't hold your hand, but by god it shouldn't be this unfair, even Dark Souls is not this unfair.

Ok, you seriously need to fix this lag issue- there are clearly some triggers going totally haywire and eating up cpu cycles like crazy, especially in single player. There is no other possible reason that it becomes instantly worse when other players leave and that it is so laggy when there is so little going on on the map, especially since the lag for some reason comes in big spikes. I have an i5-2500k overclocked to 4.4Ghz, way faster than the average computer on battle.net, and by an hour or so into the game it literally becomes an unplayable crawl. Post on here or put it in the patch notes when you fix this, since I will certainly not be playing this game again until this is resolved. Here is the replay- a lower end computer probably couldn't even get halfway through without totally puttering out.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47910784/EB2%20dropped.SC2Replay

Couple of things I've noticed on the new patch so far:
I tested this patch on easy to get a feel for the new system of army building.
Colonial militia and pulse gunners are selected as the same unit when you ctrl+click or double click on either one.
Spawns still falling off the map. There was a vault that played the sound bit, but no text, ping, or spawn showed up. Only happened once.
The event where the militia come to help is odd. They seem to get much stronger over time. You might want to scale it down a smidge. They blew through 90% of the boss's base before being killed at around 45 minutes. I had to wall it off so they couldn't get in and keep them from releasing him too soon.
The H key for high rises is still conflicting with the research center, which is also H.
There were other things I noticed, but forgot to write them down in time and have since forgotten. I'll edit this when I remember them.

I second the spam apology. xD
As for the farm-income: I now retract my statements. I have been trying to do a build using the mines as a viable source of income. It's very slow to start, but it does work. At 1.5 hours, I had a steady income of 200k per tick.
I did not realize that this type of economy only gives you the MAXIMUM of what you can export each turn. If you're in debt, you're not actually being penalized for the debt and THEN given your income for exports. The exports are a flat rate that never seems to exceed that limit, so long as you're in debt, and also do not go below that limit when in debt. It's kind of odd and doesn't make sense, but it works in the regard that it does provide room for growth at a reasonable rate. It's really no better than house-spamming. It's just easier to manage. But when it comes to late game and you suddenly run out of power, you're SCREEEEEEEWED. lol. Whole economy SHUT DOWN. That was awkward.
As for the mines disappearing issue, that's definitely a thing.
Also, I don't know if this was intentional, but the bad-stuff generator that spawned in my last match didn't do anything. Not sure what bad-stuff generators are supposed to do.
I checked it and its buff said "good stuff". That doesn't seem right.
The oil well level 2's disappearing are a pain still, but you haven't fixed it yet, so just reminding you, anteep.
And also just a reminder, exporting oil doesn't work in any of my games, so that's definitely an issue.

As for strategies, I feel the multiple economy strats are actually pretty balanced so far and I enjoy each of them. Exporting-economy is a little better in that you never have to worry about feeding people or sustaining a population. One thing I noticed is that I wasn't bothered by the economy fluctuations. For people using the export feature, when the economy is booming or dumps, it should also go up and down in value slightly. It'd make it so either strat would work similarly, but function very differently in build, keeping both relatively close in balance.

Otherwise, no new issues to report until next patch.

Edit: Pulsegunners and medics do not have the option to disband.

I don't think the problem is in the concept of selling food as much as the balance of it. One, as I mentioned, exporting food currently gives you twice as much as it's supposed to. Two, addressing and making negative income matter will also make a very big difference in its effectiveness.

Building on the inaccessible cliffs, as it is right now with just a space crunch, I think is pretty needed. I would encourage either keeping them accessible or making much bigger bases if we cannot build in the inaccessible areas.

A couple more bugs; here is a replay of me soloing nightmare.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47910784/EB2%20Nightmare%20Solo.SC2Replay

First, the enemies keep going towards my buildings on the inaccessible cliffs only to just run into the wall. They should be programmed to only attack buildings they can reach (which of course includes the command center, which is what we need to be protecting anyways).

Second, if a sentry shoots a shot at a mine, dies, and then its shot hits/kills the mine, the mine is permanently destroyed and does not come back. This can be seen at 40:20 (at my mines on the right) and 56:35 (at my mines on the left) in the replay I uploaded.

The multiple voting seems to work in that if I click nightmare and then click suicidal 20 times, it will register my vote as nightmare, so that seems to be only an aesthetic issue rather than functional.

And finally, while I did have fun in said replay, I do start to feel that I do exactly the same thing every game, just making tons of farms, cannons, reapers, mines, research, and power plants.. Perhaps replay value would be increased if more strategies were made viable.

Also, a couple things that I would love you forever for would be 1) being able to upgrade cannons to gun turrets, even if at a premium, so long as I don't have to re-place them down and 2) being able to upgrade level 1 mines directly to lvl 5 boreholes if you have power and the required money.

Thanks as always for such great work :) Sorry if me and jim are spamming you too much, haha.

It just feels like it's one or the other in terms of economy. I see everyone doing nothing but farm spamming. It takes up gross amounts of room and is 10X faster than waiting for buildings to fill up. I just don't see why anyone would even bother doing houses if that's the way to go for a win-win situation all the time, especially when they're in debt by the tens of thousands and suffering no penalty for it. There's gotta be a more balanced way to go about it.

And I only mentioned making the cliffs impassable because it seems that anteep is flip-flopping between making them visible or not. Each patch seems to do one or the other and alternate. The old EB didn't leave much space wasted. With the many unusable areas in this one, it makes it so the cliffs are pretty important if you can manage to get vision on them somehow. But once you manage that, you can just make your empire inaccessible to the enemy. Again, there's gotta be a better way.

And the forced spawners would be a last resort kind of thing. If a spawner is forced to replace occupying structures, then that means you've covered every single possible spawn point (highly unlikely) and if you've managed to do so, then it also likely means you're probably not going to cry over one or two unfortunate structure losses. You'll be ROLLING in cash if it ever gets that far and it's inconsequential, really.
If spawn locations were to be marked, I feel it'd give an unfair advantage to the players. I would personally block off the entrances to them and bunker them up, so whenever one spawns, we're already there. Knowledge is power, after all.

Edit: Okay, so I have confirmed that the second game on this new patch I played ALSO would not let me export oil. Last game it started letting me after a while, but this time it straight up didn't work.
Also on the same topic of oil, it appears that oil wells disappear when killed after being upgraded to level 2. VERY annoying when you're basing half your economy off of oil sales. Metal mines work fine, though. Higher level oil wells would be nice, too.
I'm really liking the balancing in this game vs the old one. It costs to keep oil wells running, so upgrading them costs income. Assuming you are able to export the oil, it wouldn't really matter, but that's a topic we've been discussing already, as you've likely seen.

Haha I've got to try that multiple voting thing before it gets fixed.

I disagree about making exports happen before the tax round- if you do that, people like me (who have been building 100% farms and no cities longer than anyone) will just revert back to manually selling it after the tick, which is just annoying. Negative power/money/food should all just be proportioned upkeep, sustaining whatever buildings that they can- that by far makes the most intuitive sense.

I also think you shouldn't make the unusable cliffs impassable; they happen to contain a big percentage of the map's space where you can build, especially along the top. Plus, it's very strategic to build defensive structures on the high ground. It's fine as long as your CC has to be on accessible land, which it currently does.

But ya, +1 for more metal/oil in the right top of the map. If you do force spawners to spawn with destroying buildings, those locations should be clearly demarcated as potential spawning places so we know not to put our power plants there and stuff.

More thoughts after playing a bit. Oil is being weird when exporting. It wasn't working at first, then it was. Not a clue what that's about.
there was literally NO oil or metal in the top right that game. Put more oil/metal spawns up there to even it out a bit.
I'm seeing more and more people doing this "I'm broke, but I can just sell all my stuff and make bank" exploit. It's weird. They make money from farms, but have no population at all. Just the houses they start with. It's not a bad idea, but it's looking more like that's the way to go. Houses are too slow and exporting food just brings money in faster. Then you can get boreholes and oil wells to export even greater valued goods. I have no suggestion atm. It's just kind of lame when they're technically in debt.
Wait, maybe you should make it so they earn money appropriately from their auto-exports, but the debt-ticker happens 1 second later and deducts from their earnings. It doesn't appear to be doing that as it is. I might be wrong since it was late in the game when I experienced debt and just started exporting my goods.
Late game, buildings do the funny visual glitch and start bugging out on the mini map. I figure that's not something you can take care of, but it's worth mentioning if it hasn't already been brought up.
Then there's the issue that frit mentioned about the spawners just spawning in bottom left (off the map) when they cannot be placed or whatever. If it's because they're unable to be placed, I think you should have their spawn calculate a new position so it does get placed properly.. If all positions are blocked, FORCE a position by destroying whatever it is that's in the way (excluding command centers).
Then there's the bit about unusable cliffs. Instead of blocking the ability to build by messing up LoS, how about you just make them impassable. I KNOW there's an option for that. I've used it. Make it so nothing can walk around on those areas and then make it so nothing can be built on them either.
That's all I can think of right now. I'll play again later and let you know more.

EDIT: Okay, this legitimate PISSED me off. Small game size only gets 1 vote per person, right? Only 3 people voted this time out of 5. One person somehow smashed the button and got 3 votes for no ai and it trumped the other two people who voted. That needs to be fixed. Multiple votes for one person is pretty dickish.

What I think would be a good compromise to the army issue would be to scale their cost with their upgraded value. Yes, you upgrade them to the point of being unstoppable, but can you now afford them? Most of the time, yes. Some people may go bankrupt, though. I figure do exactly what you were doing with the tech. Double the price for each upgrade. 20 credits, doubled each upgrade, would be 10,240. Seeing as how most normal players should be earning over 150k a tick, even the tanks would be afforable. My money is usually in the tens of millions (I don't actually know how much since it just reverts to .".." after too much), so I can afford any army come end of game, even with the scaling cost. It'll cut WAAAAAAAAAY down on unit spam and make people think twice about upgrading their armies. Win-win in terms of balancing. The ONLY issue I can see with this would be killing the HQ in the end. But then again, I can do that solo as it stands on very hard mode. Maybe, JUST MAYBE, it'll force people to coordinate their armies and take him down together - How it's supposed to work.
Frit brings up a good point about people abusing the market system. I mentioned this a loooooong time ago. I mentioned there should be penalties (aside from being "broke") to the people who forego a reasonable economy and base their empire solely on the production and sale of goods, like gradual degradation of building foundation. The old EB functioned just like that. Buildings started to break down the longer you were in debt. You should make that a thing again. As for power, I'm okay with how it functions right now. Everything shuts down for a tick and then slowly restarts. That works fine. Yeah, it's going to hurt you economy, but it'll grow back pretty quick. I also don't mind the long build times on the more critical buildings. They're big, expensive, important buildings. Of course they're going to take a while.
I haven't had a chance to try the July 8 patch still and won't until tonight, but those are mostly in response to frit

Ya, I guess after playing some more, I should just mention-

The tech upgrades I guess do get out hand- I built 249 research centers and was still only able to get to the 800k upgrades. I think you just need to put a max upgrade in- in theory you could allow the research center to be upgraded, but that would require more city/farm upgrades, and it's an endless, exponential circle. You have to draw the line somewhere, and perhaps making the 50k or 100k upgrades the max is a reasonable choice.

Everyone gets reapers. Even without oil, if you're massing something, you want something small with long range (more units shooting at once time) and fast (for such a big map). Personally, with such a big map, I think the only way to prevent such dominance would be to make it so all units are around the same speed and larger units have really good splash to make up for their size. Real splash, though, not the super-slow-projectile kind which no one wants to use!

I also think some higher-end defensive structures would be a good idea, since essentially all good players seem to only spend their armies on offense, not defense. Especially if air units are added, very strong anti-air defenses would be critical. And relating to my last point, I think slower units would only be made viable if you could build strong defensive structure.

Decreasing the supply limit would also be helpful in preventing lag, since if you have a game of 6 players there will be at least one player that can't handle two 500 unit armies flinging themselves at each other.

Speaking of lag, the bug I mentioned before seems to start happening right after the protoss commander dies. After he dies, it slowly and slowly gets more and more laggy, even if there are other people still there. Once the last player besides me left, though, it quickly shot down from 20fps to 0fps, so it seems like it "accelerates" to 0 fps faster with just 1 player.

Power is a problem in that everything you own is shut down if you don't have enough problem, but money is the other way in that everything is totally fine if you don't have enough of it. Even before you added in exports, my strategy has been to build mass amounts of food and sell it (I re-bound down-scroll to left click so I could sell hundreds of thousands rapidly), abusing the fact that I could have a -20k upkeep but just sell the food and build the buildings I needed before the next tick. With exporting, this is made even easier; with a -500k upkeep, I still always had my food balance at the beginning of the round in money to build stuff with (which is how I got the 249 research centers I mentioned). I would recommend making money, power, and food all act so if you do not have enough, it pays the upkeep for the most important things and for what it can, but then skips the rest. Heck, you could even let the player prioritize the distribution, if you feel like getting fancy with coding.. a simcity-ish/Age-of-empires-ish game I played when I was really young called Caesar III actually let you do that with the water and electricity and stuff.

I also think build times are an issue. The actual units are so darn inexpensive compared to the masses of money you have at the end, it's basically a contest as to who has more barracks and who gets to each others' CC or barracks first. The upgrade to reduce the time is a great addition, obviously, but I would personally prefer expensive units that are limited by how much money I have as opposed to being always able to pop out maxed out armies the second the previous one dies. Ultimatejim is getting at the point that he would like his "bigger base" matter at the end, but in the way of more upgrades; I explained already why I think upgrades should have a cap, so I think it the "bigger base" can matter by actually being able to produce a bigger army, with a much higher cost to build. Perhaps fixing the meaningless-negative-upkeep issue would also fix the army size thing, but making the upkeep lower and build cost higher 1) puts more value on the outcome of the fights and 2) makes it harder for players to accidentally build way too much on accident.

I understand the long build times on things such as the school, clinic, and university- it makes it so the investment of saving up has lag time before it kicks in, which is great. However, things like urban development, the clinic upgrades, and the power plant especially just have obscenely long build times that really don't seem to serve a purpose.

Other bugs: selling food in the store seems to give you 0.5, but exporting gave me 1 credit per food. Both research center and high density housing are bound to the hotkey "H". Sometimes near the end, if there are buildings where the protoss building was going to warp in, it still shows the message, but it pings the left bottom of the map and there is no building to be seen.

EDIT: Also, about some players starting near metal and some not starting near any at all.. I think in theory it would be fine for people to go out and get them, but in practice it is really only possible on hard difficulties if there is free metal that you can protect with high-ground cannons leading to the mines. What I ended up finding the most effective was just running around and upgrading them, extracting as much metal as I could until they died, and then I could use my metal-costing units to defend my metal mines. I guess this just needs to be tried out a little more to see how big of a disadvantage it ends up giving the player. It also seems there is usually not much metal in the right top side of the map.

Fantastic work, as always!! Were you already working on the export system before I mentioned it, or did you really add it that quickly? That's pretty impressive either way :)

Frit, I agree about being able to sell higher amounts. That would be useful. The market menu is kinda weird because it's transparent, so it's hard to read it and the "OK" button is partially covered by the other buttons. If it could function like the new import/export, that would be perfect. (If you already did it, cool. I didn't actually get a chance to check it out just now).

Scaling tech upgrades would be better than hitting a brick wall. If I have the resources, I'd like to stay above the rabble rather than everyone capping at the same point, even if my empire is 3X the size of someone else. Even with research centers and tech % upgrades, I'm barely getting 7k a turn. At 100k an upgrade, you'll be waiting another hour just to get enough for one row of upgrades.

Air units would be cool, as we've talked about. If all you added was oil level 2, that will probably need to be increased like the metal mines are. Oil isn't abundant and only being able to support a dozen or two darts isn't what I had in mind for vehicle support. I don't know what the new oil upgrade did in this patch, but I'll check it out later. I don't imagine it will make enough of an impact, though.
Making vehicles stronger than infantry is the right direction to go if we're going to be massively limited with them.

It says protoss reveal themselves when attacking, but I'm not seeing that. they're still hidden and out of range of my turrets from the very beginning. If this is going to stay, maybe add a longer range turret or an expansion to the turrets that give them a mortar ability or something. That'd actually be pretty cool. It'd vary up the defensive structures and make them useful late game against different targets. If that is something you actually do, maybe give the mortars target priority on the longer ranged units, like colossi.

I do like the change where your truck reveals everything in a wide area, even cliffs. It was a good compromise to being able to see everything to begin with.

And is there a way to play this solo and save it for later? I can't get enough time to play a whole game some days, so I can test everything by myself with no way to save and pick it up later. Is that something that would be in your power, to implement a way to save a solo/private game? I don't know how that works with the new crappy hosting system in Bnet2.0.

Also, HOW are you guys putting breaks in your paragraphs? I can't figure it out. I press Enter and my post still gets crammed together. Let's try plain text!
I'll have more information later when I get an honest chance to try the new patch. Off to the movies, now!

Ultimatejim and GlornII did a great job covering the biggest to-dos on the map, so I won't repeat them too much, unless it's supporting their opinions. Excellent work so far, btw! I think it just keeps getting better every patch.

Anyways, for bug reporting purposes: I noticed that after everyone had left but me and I kept playing around for a little bit, lag started to kick in- some cycles I noticed the fps dropped by a good 25%, until about 10 minutes after everyone left it had gotten down to 1fps. I would guess that there is some sort of trigger loop going on or something.

It also seems that when you don't have enough power, literally everything that requires power shuts down. It would make more sense to be able to still power some things.

The necromancer and archives still appear in No-AI mode, and other protoss structures keep appearing after the boss is defeated, too.

And ya, making it so you don't have to reselect buildings when upgrading them would one of the best adds for sure. It would also be nice to add sell 10k, 100k, etc. food for when we have massive stockpiles at the end of the game, or perhaps an auto-sell-everything-above-X feature. More areas could use use of high ground terrain against low ground enemies- I seem to notice more and more of these viable popping up, so keep up the good work. Perhaps some more defensive/long range defense would also increase diversity (instead of just whoever has the biggest army wins), and perhaps some way to better keep vision of areas of the map to keep track of enemy movements.

And random opinions: I don't use vehicles because oil is scarce, I think mine availability is great as is, I think unit diversity needs to be encouraged more instead of getting the "best" units, I think the gap between windmills and fission plants is a little too wide, I think the insane upgrade cost increases are actually GOOD (for preventing players getting way stronger than others).

Couple of things since recent patches I'm noticing: Oil doesn't have the option to upgrade currently. I'm sure you noticed. Vehicles are 95% unusable due to this. Also on the subject of oil, the metal and oil spots on the map sometimes spawn duplicates when killed by another player. We had a position that started with 1 and ended up with 6. It's not a bad glitch, all things considered. It's probably not intended, though. Also, I noticed that upon building my first research center, my tech income DROPPED rather than went up. Don't know why. I had all the basics and one fully upped tech lab. Went from 97 to 22 or something to that effect. They also upgrade from research centers back down to tech lab 1. Obviously not as intended. Glorn has a point about the windmills. They're too big for being so useless. They're not able to be upgraded and you cannot select more than one at a time when you're replacing them with reactors. They're a bit of a hassle. I like the additional ramp on the right of the boss area. More accessible. Nice. As for Glorn's comment on scaling upgrades, I kind of agree. Once the upgrades reach around 100k a piece, I stop bothering. They're not worth it and they're too expensive. I'd take his advise. Geoinline, I have no issue affording anything. In fact, most games I end up with around 100k pop and despite all my expenditures, I STILL can't spend enough money to go back into debt. You just gotta know how to do it. It's a balancing game and you need more practice if you think it needs to be fixed. Now, the TECH needs fixing, yes. Other areas don't really need it. The metal is not an issue, either. I have no issues affording what I need to afford and there's definitely enough metal on the map for everyone. If you need metal that bad, take it from someone. ;-) And about the settlers getting stuck: There's a blink option for a reason. Use it. I reiterate my point from a previous post about the menus being a hassle as well. It's really frustrating to re-select everything every time I click on an option. My mouse is flying across the screen, trying to keep up with how much I'm doing it. The CC in the beginning is the very first example of having to re-select the same building a half a dozen times (exaggeration). But when upgrading buildings en masse, if it's possible, not having to re-select everything would be kind of awesome. More info to come. Gotta run.