SC2Mapster

The popularity of this game has taken a hit since the metal mine change. In all the games I play there seems to be universal hatred for the new metal system. I do like how you do not need as many mines to produce the required metal ( I think this helps a little with endgame lag), but with the increased cost of upgrades you basically are just mass producing citizens and farms to raise enough $ for tech because the costs are so extreme (because they increase geometrically, but the player can only grow to a certain level before hitting a limit so eventually you hit a tech wall, not sure if that is intended or not).

Bug: With the random mine locations players can actually have there settler trapped by mines such that they can't move it anywhere.

Didn't know that about the health upgrade. That must have been it. As for the boss being too hard, I strongly disagree. He gets harder the longer the game goes on, yes. But if you're decent and you get a gnarly economy pumping out TONS of resources and you're running with an elite army, you should be able to consistently pump out troops and it'll stop the boss in his tracks. I did that once with darts. Worked like a charm. He'd 2 shot them on hard mode and massacre them in droves, but after sending waves of my own men at him, he finally reached his pre-set kill limit and was defeated. I'm only talking about solo, too. If you're playing solo, then you should be able to take all the time in the world to build your nation to the proper strength required to mass an army and keep pumping out units infinitely.

• Things that I'm noticing that still need some work:
• Unused terrain (I know you're aware of it)
• Wind turbines not being selectable in groups.
• Market should probably remain in the bottom right as another sub-menu, like it used to be.
• When placing a capital, it'd be nice if I didn't have to reselect my CC each time I selected my gov, army type, religion, etc. If possible, do this to all buildings of the same type. All tiers selectable, BUT lower tiers take upgrade priority when clicked on until they reach the same level as the ones above them. Having to reselect each building (or search for that single one that I missed and isn't easily noticed being only one shade darker) after upgrading is an annoyance. In short: allow all-selection of the same building type and prioritize lower upgrades first to resolve upgrade-overlap issues.
• Now, as for events:
• I like what you have so far and I like the ideas you two have mentioned. Maybe add a meteor shower event. It'd be super rare and may not even happen in a given game, but it'd be devastating if you're not ready. An announcement would be made, flashing lights, whatever, that alerts players 10 minutes in advance of the showers. It could happen after the first 10 or 15 minutes of the game (20 or 25 after countdown) so people have a chance to build their tech income first. Make it so that all players in the game (or just one person) can put money into a game-wide upgrade that helps minimize the damage of the meteors that strike. Each one that touches ground damages all surrounding buildings. If there's no shields AT ALL, then it would likely destroy anything it touches. Maybe have 10 upgrades, 1k tech each. Again. Make it a super rare event, but it COULD be fatal if it does happen. Maybe replicate other scenarios like earthquakes that are more frequent, but easier to protect against. Maybe add game-wide building foundation stabilizer upgrades for a set price, same result as the meteor one, but on a smaller scale.

1. Edit: It'd be nice to get some screen shots for the menu so people can see what it looks like. :) Adding some sort of noise when the game starts would be nice since most people (myself included) like to alt-tab out while we wait. I usually don't realize the game already started. It's so quiet. And a bug to fix is the mines disappearing when a player leaves/drops from the game when in possession of a mine.

I've been playing this the past few weeks and I really like the direction it is headed. If you need testers or feedback I'm open to it. I find that opening game is pretty hard with some of the governments that penalize taxes. If I play alone on normal with technocracy/communism I can't get enough militia out to defend before I'm overrun. With a group though the game on normal is too easy excepting the final boss. The barracks spawns are a joke after you get full blown marines instead of militia. For the boss, even with 30 minutes of sitting around with tons of labs pumping tech to upgrade my tanks I find that the final fight on normal blows 30 heavy tanks with 8 of every upgrade out of the water. I'd say decrease the final boss difficulty but increase barracks spawns or allow more spawns per barracks the longer the game runs.

Hey Anteep, we played a couple games today on Hard and lost.

• The recession/depression function made the game a PITA. If you leave it in the game then please reduce the amount of money it subtracts.
• There are some cliffs that cannot be accessed. It would be nice if players could utilize those.
• Are you ever going to add air?
• Perhaps add a stronger defense tower for late game play.
• A cool event would be an outbreak of zombies (infested terran/aberration) or random zerg drops that attack both players and the Protoss

- about Ultimatejim observation: 3.There's still some strange moments when our units insta-regen life....

it happend when you upgrade your unit life, when the uptade is done, it heal all your units every time you do it.

My suggestions:

1. need air, or at least, a way to be able to see over clift, 2. the boss is way too easy in version 1.9 3. the protoss need to be stronger after 30+ mins

this map gonna be very great! and nice uptades

Couple of bugs I'm seeing: The F(farm) hotkey doesn't work because it's overwritten by the F(fusion) hotkey. Find alternate hotkey. The settlers L hotkey is overwritten by their blink hotkey, which is also L (should change to B for just them or change their light density housing to B for "build" since they're the first houses you get and you won't have to repeat the process again). The M hotkey for mines is overlapped by the medium housing hotkey. Find alternate hotkey. I also noticed that the wind turbines are unable to be selected in groups. If required to remove a high number of them, the chore proves to be quite tedious, especially if replacing them with fusion reactors. More info to come.

So far so good on the recent updates. I have no new input aside from the items I have already mentioned. Btw, I LOVE how tough the new commander is. He's actually scary! It took our entire team to take him down on very hard and it took everything we had and then some. We had units pumping out of factories and barracks like it was the freaking apocalypse coming down on us. I HIGHLY approve. I like the tweaks on the terrain so far. Adding blink to workers seemed like a good compromise to my suggestion. I'll take it. :) As a reminder, there are a few things that still need to be addressed when you get around to it:

1. Nerf the darts. They're just too good for their current value. (unless you already did and just didn't put it into the patch notes)
2. Maybe look into the wave modification I mentioned in the last post.
3. There's still some strange moments when our units insta-regen life. I had my darts attacking a gateway and they were instantly regaining health for some reason. Don't know what that's about. It's brief when it happens, though. Just for a few seconds and then they take damage as normal. Only seen it happen twice.
4. Market, obviously.
5. Oil or other valuable resource, obviously.
6. Alternate energy sources.
7. More religious options (and ramifications if they do things that negatively impact their beliefs, like pig farms in a Judeo-religious setting which means they need more food [assuming they don't eat the pigs, they would go hungrier and need more food to compensate]). It's a thought, but it would add a really interesting element to the game.
8. Air units (and defenses, even for the protoss).
9. I used to enjoy the multi-layered bases from the old one. Any chance we could bring that back?
10. More input to come after the next patch or if I think of anything new.
11. Also, I discovered bullet points. This makes my post SO much easier to read. The posts would just clump all of my points into one big paragraph. That was annoying...

As for what Chaos was saying, though wordy and odd, I do agree on some points. The SCVs building defenses I am fine with, though. Chaos, be grateful that not EVERYTHING is built that way. You must not have played EB1 based on your response...

1. What I do agree with him on is the long range units. I don't remember the zerg having so much range in the first EB. The colossus has a little too much splash, imo. I don't mind the damage or rate of fire, but their splash, if you're able to do anything about it, should only effect the units in the line that it is hitting, not above or below it. SCVs trying to repair walls from them get obliterated.
2. Another easy fix to the wall issue would be just giving them upgrades. Say, maybe, thick-plating expansions? Direct upgrade from the building itself, like farms or houses.
3. And I don't feel the rate of spawning is bad at all. I feel that you should start smaller, though. The probes were a nice touch, but why not work your way up instead of jumping right to the good stuff? Make the spawns very gradual, like before with the zerglings and roaches. It started as just zerglings. Weak, easy to kill (if you bothered defending yourself). Then when the spawn levels, it sends the next level up. Start with probes and zealots (or just probes and then zealots for the next level) and then stalkers, mini colossus, immortals, etc. The difficulty is fine in my opinion, though. Maybe add more levels to the spawners but decrease their leveling speed so it helps to bridge the gap that it'd create. In the end it'd take a little longer to reach high-tier protoss waves, but not terribly so. And the waves would be more understandable instead of suddenly fighting an immortal so early on. I don't know if that was already fixed. I just remember seeing people who barely got set up, fighting a super immortal out of nowhere.
4. The hard boss and complicated consequences seemed intriguing. I think he's on to something with that one.
5. And one last idea from his post that I just considered: I am still not in favor of allowing the CCs to build everywhere. Removing the defenses and giving that to the SCVs made the SCVs worth actually having again, since their only function was repairs and creating more areas for the CC to spam walls and other stupid crap. Though the little spaces that cannot be reached after placing vital structures for economy and city building is an annoying little issue. I remember that it required a lot of foresight to use those spaces before covering them up back in EB1. I also felt that I had much more space to utilize for my base, though. I think a safe way to remedy that issue would be to provide SCVs the ability to build defenses at a very short range rather than directly contacting their location. It'd allow them to build defense cannons in those little unused 1x1 spaces on the cliffs, which are extremely vital in defending against the all-seeing protoss ranged units, without having to physically be there. It's be a very SHORT range, so it couldn't be abused and they would have to be very close, which also makes them very vulnerable for that time, but it could be worth it. I don't even know if that's possible. With the new editor, it appears mostly anything is possible now-days. I'll provide more constructive feedback once I've tested this patch. Gotta hit the hay tonight, though.

And you thought my post was long, Anteep? Hahahaha! Chaos, you're ridiculous... And thanks for responding, Anteep. It's good to know there's map makers that pay attention and can handle constructive criticism if it helps them make a better map.

This includes copy paste of my SC2 review, It is harsh, but I post it here so because I care about this map and am deeply displeased by recent changes so...

"This WAS my favorite map, played every day. Now it utterly sucks as of version 0.4. The wall nerf ruins game play utterly. Used to be different. Now it's just starcraft again like every other map. Multiple places to build structures from is VERY frustrating.

I won't bother playing anymore because game breaking changes are made while bugs are left alone, (Communism house upgrades STILL full price) Gateway at the start (wtf?), making spaghetti god even MORE op yet taking away walls, etc. Now it's all split second build orders like SC2. Empire Builder was created to resemble Sim City. Sadly, version 0.4 basically removed food as a factor, turned defense set ups to Starcraft defaults and made enemy units hit harder than they really should.

There is now literally no way to stop a dart rush without dart rushing yourself, because of wall nerf. Way to kill your game, alienating your dedicated player base. Oh and toss insta-regen is annoying and stupid. LOL full heal is just dumb. Always was. " =(

If you address these issues, I'll almost surely come back to playing EB2. I loved this game before. Until then however, I'll just stick to Fire Emblem and BarCraft.

Also, here's some other shit I got to say. If you're going to nerf them so hard maybe turrets shouldn't cost so much upkeep, since you literally have to have them up all the time now. Defense management is relegated to SCVs repairing walls of bunkers, since enemy units can just shoot right over walls and generally ignore them. Might I point out, that this was not the case in the first Empire Builder, the enemy units did not shoot over the walls. or at the very least, not to the extent yours do. This wouldn't be such a huge problem if turrets, you know, non-mobile gun emplacements with their only purpose being to shoot that cost all this money and resources, had a range at least some what greater than the average unit. Instead we get units that have range approximately equal to, or vastly exceeding turrets in most cases. Build a wall, make turrets on the cliff is much less interesting I'm afraid.

Right now the game has wayyyyyyy too much military focus and not enough Sim City focus. Amping up combat during Simmin' ruins much of the point of Empire Builder in my opinion and steers it much more in the competitive RTS direction, but if that's the route you choose, you're really just going to end up with a shittier vs pc match of Starcraft 2. Please don't suck the uniqueness out of this map concept and go back towards the Sim City aspect. If you want more challenge, how about more of a fight at the end? Maybe spawn multiples of those Protoss Commanders or additional bosses and challenge afterwards. But in the meantime, let me build my cool ass city, I don't play empire builder to spam SCVs to repair my bunkers. That's just a crappy version of Starcraft. ESPECIALLY WHEN you can make only SCVs from a structure you only get one of and can't move at will (which is ABSURD if they're you're gonna have SCVs as the only defense builder by the way, absolute NONSENSE I say! What about my expansions and other investments?! You really going to make me have to walk SCVs over there every time they get destroyed by your shoot over the walls with ease bad guys (unlike EB1)?

I understand your concerns about wall spam, but making it buildable only from SCV is utterly NOT the way to fix the problem. How about you make walls work properly and then increase their build time? Perhaps some upkeep? Maybe make them not suck so fucking badly vs mini colossi? Also, how am I supposed to quickly maintain and rebuild a wall, without an army of scvs (which seem to use upkeep like military units in EB2??) AND still get the "Sim City experience" EB is supposed to deliver? At the moment, the game has devolved into ghetto Left 2 Die K experience.

Figure something out for a market place, maybe make exchange deals with other players vs flat buy and sell to a mysteriously rich global market with infinite money. Merchants and Mercenaries uses a set up where merchants can set the price for thing and people can buy them, but the money doesn't come in until someone buys it. This could make a fascinating economy set up where a particular player goes "into the business" of manufacturing a specific good, say metal, then puts 5000 metal on the market for say 10 cash each. That player will have to adjust their price according to what other players are willing to pay, if they're willing to pay. It'll allow players to dump their excess materials somewhere and add a new layer to the game play.

Also, please come up with more sinks for things like metal and money, something I'll consistently want to invest those two things in that isn't troops or housing. Perhaps a large number of highly expensive (ranging from somewhat reasonable priced early-mid game upgrades all the way up to prices in the millions) in both cash and metal infrastructure upgrades for your city as a whole. Have some enable some new buildings and turrets, abilities, etc. How about a space laser attack or a nuclear explosion-tier mine to deal with "desperate" situations where one is attacked by lots of dudes?

Many, many people were already turned off by this game because of how hard it is for some to learn and how easily they die when they don't know what they're doing. Complicating it by requiring two different means of building structures and then buffing an enemy offense that was built around the premise of having easy to build walls and turrets, is not going to bring new players into the game, especially when it's so unwieldy to play now. Worse, you're simultaneously driving away the regular players that have stuck with the map, because the Sim City/Civilization style game they came for is no longer present.

I would very much like to see the protons to get immensely stronger over time, regardless of whether the players destroy gateways or archives. I don't mind the enemy being immensely powerful later on in the game, but as it in now, if you focus military the ENTIRE game you destroy the barracks and archives, etc. and are left disappointed with enemies that are utterly gimp. If you don't focus military early game and try to sim your city like you used to, you end up spending the entire game up keeping walls, military and shit and rushing to fend off archives. The Protoss move along way too fast and are crippled far too easily late game. The end game base should be many, many, many, times more powerful and heavily armed. Perhaps the base should have "walls" that block entry to the core (make it like a tunnel? One entrance?) that when destroyed, spawn a mini-boss and, get this, use area trigger to count the number of player military units, then spawn a number of protoss units ~ to that. Make it some serious shit to be trying to go end game. The boss should also be exponentially more powerful. An non-upgraded army should not be able to kill him so easily. Also fix this regenerating hp shit, it's stupid and misleading. Basically what I'm saying is:

1: Slow it down, let me sim mai city. Far less Protoss attacking far less often with far less power for the first portion of the game. Make it less crazy to defend my base early and early-mid game. This'll make the sim city aspect more prevalent and ensure new people aren't so quickly overwhelmed.

2: Stronger Protoss late game, equivalent to slightly better than the fully upgraded protoss guys we got now and then some.

3. MUCH MUCH WAYYYY stronger Protoss defenses. More of them. Less entrances to protoss base. The final attack should be a major battle and assault, not lol steam roll a dozen photon cannons and a nexus.

4. More bosses, stronger bosses. Killing the base too early before your ready should ensure utter and absolute destruction.

5. The instant full heal hp/sp thing is fucking stupid. Just give them more hp and more shields and cut that shit out, seriously.

6. HUGE CONSEQUENCES for destroying parts of the enemy base. Counter attacks, big army spawns, etc. Make it some serious shit.

The synopsis is, I want to advance my city in a unique spacey environment with my pals. I don't want to play ghetto Star Craft. I already play that game. Please consider this, as I know for a fact many of your REGULAR players feel the same way I do.

Aight, this first part is going to be a copy and paste from my review. I realized that you don't intend to read those and there's a lot missing from the game, so here's my input: It's fun for a little while, but once you figure out how to get an economy going quickly, it's just the same boring monotony after that. There needs to be alternate ways to build an economy like before with markets and banks. I like this version, but it needs more character. I do like many things about this version, like the protoss leveling up, the refined look over the old one, the addition of religions, being able to build directly from the CC (though, I actually think it's a boon), and such. Things that need fixing: Add more religions and tweak their bonuses. Giving people free bonuses with no consequences seems hoaky. Add draw-backs. Allow houses to detonate. Slow down vehicle movement curve. When they get too fast, they start spiraling and have this funky arc that makes them difficult to control. Make it so that the hellions aren't super insane. They're a little too powerful for as cheap as they are and how fast they move. I spammed them and won with ease. Fighting other players was a piece of cake. ADD OIL! (or other valuable resource. Spice it up!) I really do miss oil, though. I felt that added a major factor to the game, especially concerning the economy and then keeping your vehicles powered. It made it so you couldn't build too much of one thing (like hellions) in order to balance it. Add air units again (and anti-air). More power options (nuclear, etc) More defensive upgrade options, like better turret range or different types of ammo. Maybe a bigger map, too. I feel this one's a little congested. Make Mr. Boss man a little tougher to kill (the zerg version had many more defensive structures). The old mineral patch that allows you to advance tech was also a neat concept. Maybe apply map-events with limited times where they appear and provide the resources for tech upgrades, but the protoss also want them. Also, I mentioned before that building other structures from the CC was a boon. Well, it's cool and all, but in a PvP setting, that's really overpowered. I'd stick to SCVs, honestly. That and the map could use a revision. Lots of unusable space makes for very limited basing choices and choke points. What you have now works well, but it's lacking a lot, like you already said. I'm looking forward to the next update. Can't play it until then, though. Just too dry and easy.

mini colossus is good, pressure is always good.

bad thing about this map is I can not find anyone to play with in ultra hard.

Totally agree with crossover. not only do they fire from too far but also the fact that none of your units or turrets have a sight range or fire range that comes anywhere near that of the colossus. Your gonna keep rebuilding turrets at high costs or you have to have a large infantry force on hand and rush in every time one comes to your base. Please remove them or make it so they cant target stuff on higher elevations

The new Mini Colossus have ruined the playability. This needs to be fixed asap, they can fire too far, and they fire over ANY terrain...