Kerrigan Survival
Key
Blue - Pertains to builders
Red - Pertains to Zerg
Two Zerg players, one on Offense one on Defense team up to hunt down 10 Builders and Support.
Overview, Builders must play aggressively to win, You cannot reliable wall off your base and hide behind it all game. You must be active and play intelligently to win.
Mechanics:
- All players generate mineral income per 3 seconds. Buildings can be constructed and upgraded to increase the income. Each Builder has a different income structure/method
- Builder upgrades for units go to 3 attack and 3 defense. Each upgrade increases the potency of their units.
- Builders Must kill the zerg team before all builders die. Game ends when builders or Kerrigan die. If only supports are left alive Zerg still wins.
- Limited Vision
- Players and zerg must both deal with limited vision radius
- Gas is gained by killing the enemy team's units and structures. This is true for both builders and zerg. Gas is used to increase the income output of builder's structures and to research certain tech.
- Both zerg players receive gas for each unit's bounty.
- Zerg players share upgrades, but must individually build tech structures to spawn certain units
- Zerg players can spawn units based on a mineral cost
- Zerglings will spawn every 3 seconds from the center of the map and randomly run through the map attacking any builder it comes in contact with
- Zerglings have a default vision radius of 0
Offense Zerg:
Kerrigan - Melee range - no AA
Abilities:
- AOE Psi Storm(zerg)
- Global Unit Teleport
- AOE unit Speed increase aka bloodlust
- Scan
- Fungal Growth
Dehaka - Melee Ground - Range AA
Abilities:
- Cloak(increase movement)
- Abduct
- Scan
Defense Zerg:
Zagara - Range - Moves Slow off Creep
Abilities:
Spawn Creep Tumor( Creep tumors give zerg vision )
Global Teleport(On creep only)
Snare
Spawn special unit: Only Zagara can produce overseers, which can be sent around the map to scout for builder's bases.
Builders:
Scientist: Bio army with Hero Units. Income ticker every 3 seconds that is upgradable and output increases with chrono
Artanis: Hero builder that relies heavily on micromanagement and simultaneously supports allies with cloaking. Income is generated from units built from nexus.
Ascendant: Income ticking structure every 3 seconds. Moves slowly, but has 5 charges of blink, which recharges. Can spawn a cloud, which cloaks all units and structures in a radius beneath it. Only Overseers, Zerg scan, and the primary Zerg heroes themselves have detection. Can produce flying units and Hybrid, ground units
Spirit: Fast moving attacking tower builder. Income is gained through a bank (deposits increase the amount of minerals every 15 seconds based on interest) or stock markets (at the cost of gas minerals are deposited and the amount in the market randomly fluctuates) Can only attack through towers. Towers are upgradable
Nomad: Mobile expendable army, must play aggressive as income structures are tied heavily to gas gain.
Ares: Large harvesting stations that when populated by Income generating works produces minerals on ticks of 3 seconds. Ares is a flying transport that cannot be hit in melee combat. Terran Mech Army
Engineer: The reaper unit type, which enables to traverse up cliffsides. Produces large amounts of income ticking structures, that can be relocated if discovered. can produce flying units, and ground units
Support (Up to 3 builders may pick support per game)
Dark Templar: Permanently cloaked, gains income by building structures that increase the amount of gas and minerals gained per zerg unit/structure killed. Can upgrade tech that allows pylons to produce cloaking field(for other builders)
Prophet: Has a variety of wards that help support other players, vision wards, explosive wards, chrono wards, stasis wards. Income is produced from income wards that must be placed around allied builder structures. Can wall off builders with cloaked structures
Stukov: Large Disposable Army, income is gained from building structures that increase the amount of minerals gained when spawning infested units.
Nova & Tosh: Two controllable hero units that gain income from a slow ticking structure that increases minerals per 3 seconds. Another structure gives off gas when tosh or nova kill zerg units within a large radius around the structure. When Nova/Tosh gain gas, they can spend it to upgrade their shared stats. Damage/Range/MovementSpeed/Health/Energy/AtkSpeed.
Additional Info
This version contains a working ranking system. Winrate estimation calculations and Leaderboard. A -balance command that players can use in game to see the winrate of all Roles. As this is a previous version, data is not consistent with that on the arcade.
If you have concerns about load-time for any game that you make and using this as a framework, it is reccomended that you remove the leaderboard or reduce its size as it causes considerable loadtime for individual players without powerful machines or with laggy connections.
My personal thoughts on balance
The meta in this game isn't hard to understand. Players with experience beat those without. For the most part, balance in this version is pretty good. Nova&Tosh and Stukov can be extremely punishing to new zerg players if they're exceptionally good, but at the same time it's really the case for all the builders.
Cheese as a concept is possible in every game with multiple strategies. Cannon rushing on the ladder can work at a master level. When you take a player at master level and put him up against a bronze player and you cheese him with cannons, he's gonna have a really bad time. Does that make the game unbalanced? It depends.
You have to decide whether or not you're balancing for players to keep playing and have fun with depth and strategies and multiple playstyles, or do you want to balance for new players to get acquainted with the game well and keep playing. There are other relevant factors as well such as age of the average player, and amount of time it takes for the lobby to fill with players.
Balance for Kerrigan Survival
This particular game, at time of writing, still has an audience despite being exceptionally punishing for new players. This is because it is easily the most unique cat and mouse style of game produced from the sc2 editor. It has unique mechanics for builders that, having played cat and mouse games from brood war as well as warcraft 3, that I've never seen before. They keep the gameplay very interesting.
New players will be crushed by two experienced zerg players, and vice versa. This will never not be the case. I'm writing this for some encouragement/guidance for anyone who wants to improve this version. I've never heard of a game that was killed by balancing with buffs. I have heard of many games and played a few myself that were killed with nerfs. Keep the fun things, make the other things more fun.
Final Thoughts about Custom Games
I uploaded this game because I love the cat and mouse genre of games, and there currently don't seem to be any good ways to learn how to make that style of game. By all means overhaul the builders and zerg and use the same map, or vice versa. On the arcade, the genre is all but dead. Clones of sheeptag and vampirism and others from WC3 and SC are still there, but nothing nearly as fun or unique. I am bias, I think pobes vs zealots is garbage.
While I can attribute some of this to being blizzard's fault with the way that the botched the arcade at launch, and still continue to do so (ffs blizz let players see how many are waiting in the lobby or make the lobby finder larger) another big reason for this is due to insufficient learning aids. In up to wc3, you could open up any map right off your hard drive and do whatever you wanted to it. Sc2 introduced the 'feature' of authors being able to restrict it being downloaded. This is easily the thing that I personally attribute to overall poor quality of games on the Arcade. The arcade has custom games, which are a mod of the main game.
Custom games are mods, and mods are made by being able to tweak original files and release it for everyone to use. Sometimes mods are awful and destroy the game, the community of players see that that version is garbage and stop using it. Sometimes a mod is incredible and quickly is adopted. The original creator can now either use that version or piss and moan about how 'unfair' it is to use that version, or with the improvement, can make their own touches on top of that or work around it. Collective improvements are what make games amazing and fun to play.
If you want to use this game, slightly tweak it and release it, I encourage you to do so as I do with totally overhauling everything. I only request that you upload your version back to this database so that people can tweak it from there. It's only a request though as it's not up to me. In my experience modding communities need to learn together or else there's less fun and great things that are made. Good luck :)