Lunar Special Forces Battle.net release 3.2
Currently at Battle.net Release 3.2
A new Special Forces map based on Special Forces 2 by Crayon and others, this map includes new Terran and Protoss heroes. It has some new features as well, including Drop Pod reinforcements for AI ally, new upgrades for both AI and players, and more powerful Zerg static defenses that upgrade throughout the game.
Changes so far:
Release 3.2
- Large number of balance changes and a few bug fixes, focusing mainly on adjusting the difficulty scaling.
Release 2.6
- Added a difficulty voting system that gives Zerg a certain number of stacks of a damage/health buffing aura.
- Added a Terran Hero - The Reaper. Has a Flame Burst ability that damages nearby enemies when used, currently has no visual effects :(. I'm so bad with actors.
- You now start with just a hero, not another unit as well.
Release 2.5
- Adjusted some air unit prices.
- Added some failsafe unit spawning regions/triggers to prevent sniping of bases that aren't spawning units yet.
- Fixed zerg static defense upgrades.
- Added new game mode: No Fly Zone Mode - No Special Forces Air Units Allowed.
- Refined voting system (I think, needs multiplayer testing).
Release 2.4
- Fixed Upgrades for Players 2-6 (sorry!)
- Fixed Zerg temporary hatchery damage upgrades.
Release 2.3
- Fixed Orbital Command.
Release 2.2
- Completely revamped upgrades based on suggestions again.
- All units are bought on either the Nexus or the Command Center/Orbital Command
- You get a hero at the start. If this hero dies you are defeated.
- Spine crawlers and all bosses except the zergling ones are detectors now.
- Many many other changes (can't remember all of them).
Release 1.4
- Fixed Vespene Costs for Special Upgrades.
Release 1.3
- Increased Stalker rate of fire and bonus to armored units.
- Fixed bunker salvage to return full price.
- Fixed some pathing issues.
- Fixed Spawn in the middle buttons.
Release 1.0
- Upgrades are now trained through a dialog system.
- Weapon/Armor upgrades have 5 levels instead of 25, each costing 5 times as much and providing 5 times as much benefit.
- Many other changes I can't remember.
- Try it out on Battle.net!
v16:
- Added Mode voting (Normal/Double/Triple Income) Warning: Double and especially triple income are far far easier. Play normal for the biggest challenge.
- Modified Marauder splash radius slightly (it could only splash on closely packed zerglings before, changed radius from 0.5 to 0.75).
- Visual changes, hopefully better but let me know if you like it more or less than before.
- Added 250mm Cannon scaling with Vehicle weapon upgrades (starts at 1500 over 6 seconds, +25 per upgrade)
v15:
- Archon splash damage reduced (at most 70% of single target damage, decreases further from epicenter, down from 100%), single target damage unchanged so far.
- Colossus base damage reduced by 5 per beam (can reduce more, we'll see how it goes).
- Zealot base damage -7 per swing, HP and shields both reduced by 250.
- Zergling bosses spawn less quickly in the first area.
- The zerg now gain temporary buffs from hatcheries left unkilled for too long. Kill the hatchery to remove the buff. Area directly around each hatchery providing buffs is revealed and a number above it shows how many upgrades it has accumulated. When you kill the hatchery the reveal and number along with the buffs are removed.
- Void Ray replaced with Phoenix for now (it's easier to balance the phoenix anyway in my opinion; the void ray had a difficult time getting charged on anything except bosses so I probably put the damage far too high to compensate).
v14:
- Hydra Boss does more damage than previously to armored units (making it actually do damage to fully upgraded units).
- Ultralisk boss damage increased (especially to armored).
- Final Hive HP greatly increased.
- Lava Bridge removed, left the distance such that you can blink to the island.
- Decreased Zergling Boss HP, reduced damage slightly.
- Increased Zealot HP, shields, attack speed, and base/upgraded damage.
v13:
- Added 5 new bosses, some spawn periodically so be ready.
- Changed all +energy upgrades to be more useful.
- Limited non-boss zerg spawning to 150 (can change if needed).
- Added zerg unit counter.
- Sentry/ghost attacks ignore armor (needed for one boss).
- Increased nuke build time to 50 seconds.
- Increased Overseer HP
- Once you kill the rocks opening up the middle of the map, you can choose to spawn either in the base or in the middle.
- Added a trigger for the final fight if you get too close to the hive (both so you can kill the hive and so it's harder to cheese)
- No unit costs over 3 supply now (we'll see how it goes).
v12:
- Medivac Heal rebalanced: Heal rate decreased to 15 hp per tick from 30. Relative energy regen rate decreased. The tooltip is now accurate. Medivacs now have 1000 energy (up from 200), 2.8125 energy regen (up from 1), and use 1 energy per 3 health instead of 1 energy per 30 health. This means it costs 500 energy to heal a Marauder to full (1500 hp). It'll take around 177 game seconds to get back to 500 energy again, assuming no healing is done. Overall this has made them heal more slowly and regain energy more slowly.
- Infested Terrans now deal less base damage but when fully upgraded are unchanged (30 from 50 unupgraded, 75 upgraded).
v11:
- Fixed Protoss Ground weapon upgrade prices.
- Reduced Fungal Growth duration to 4 seconds from 8.
- Reduced Neural Parasite range from 7 to 4.
- (poor zerg, getting nerfed into oblivion :D)
v10:
- Difficulty Scaling added based on active players in the game.
- With 5 or 6 players there is no change.
- With 3 or 4 players the first zerg upgrade wave is disabled.
- With 2 players the first two zerg upgrade waves are disabled.
- With 1 player the first three zerg upgrade waves are disabled and you start with 1500 minerals.
v9:
- Infestors will autocast Fungal Growth on Biological units and Neural Parasite on Mechanical Units. Lowered number of infestors spawning slightly.
- Added Overseers to the waves, they autocast Infested Terrans now as well.
v8:
- Psi Storm and Snipe scale with upgrades.
- Added clock so you can see how long until the next day (and zerg upgrades)
- Changed day length to 240 seconds from 300.
- Rebalanced upgrade costs in anticipation of multiplayer (cheaper now in most cases).
- Limited Protoss to 10 shield upgrades.
- Completely changed the upgrade system, each upgrade level has its own upgrade now, with a maxlevel of 1. Blizzard's limitations on the number of upgrade buttons on one command card forced me to spread the upgrades out a bit.
- Most upgrade buildings have more upgrades on a second page now.
- Terran air upgrades were moved to the starport.
- Many tooltip and hotkey fixes.
v7:
- Changed Marauder drops to Stalker drops.
- Added Deep Disruptors upgrade to Forge, increases Immortal range by 1.
- Added Overcharge upgrade to Forge, increases Archon Range by 1.
- Added/fixed Jotun Boosters upgrade at Armory, increases Viking Range by 2.
- Limited Supply to 75 per player.
- Increased Ultralisk base damage and upgraded HP
- Increased Kerrigan's upgraded HP
v6:
- Changed Zerg upgrades: -Upgrades occur every 300 (game time) seconds, coinciding with midnight on the map. -Armor only upgrades to 25 max now, introduced HP upgrades that increase zerg units' max HP by 50 or more during the upgrade periods.
- Changed Hardened Shield on the Immortal to reduce incoming damage to 100 while shields are up.
- Added a Heal pad in the middle.
- I have HP upgrades ready to implement for Protoss/Terran if necessary, however I'm waiting to see if it's actually needed first. Everything except the final fight is easily solo-able at the moment, and probably someone who knew what they were doing could beat the final fight solo as is.
- Edited repair costs for all Special Forces hero units, they no longer require vespene gas.
v5:
- Now localized with Xhatix's tool (thanks!)
- Added Day/Night Cycle (every 300 seconds, may change later depending on feedback)
v4:
- Decreased player armor/weapon upgrades max level to 25 and increased their prices.
- Fixed Krazy Kerrigan attack animation
- Increased Krazy Kerrigan health.
- Added checks in the wave start triggers to make sure the building is alive before spawning units from it.
- Fixed a few trigger problems I'd missed.
v3:
- Reduced Void Ray upgrade damage
- Fixed roach armor level not increasing
- Fixed zerg armor upgrades
- Changed lighting to nighttime theme
v2:
- Increased zerg armor upgrades significantly. (needs testing)
- Increased zerg damage upgrades slightly.
- Decreased protoss shield recharge slightly.
- Fixed some enemy spawn triggers (probably more to fix here still).
- Fixed a couple small texture issues.
Here's a video from the first version, and part of why I increased the difficulty a decent amount in v2.
Comments
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_ForgeUser1435127 Owner
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Posted Jul 6, 2010The hydra boss has a huge amount of health (around 16000 before upgrades I think), but I didn't think the other bosses were too out of line. I wanted the hydra to be a high HP very slow firing boss. To top it off, I made it so every point of armor reduces its damage by 50. So at 25 armor (probably more than you need) it'll be doing 750 instead of 2000 damage, every 3 game seconds. If you use a couple immortals up front to take hits, you don't even need the armor upgrades. You could also use a couple Thors to stun/do decent damage. I need to add scaling to 250mm cannons though, I've been forgetting to do that.
I agree though, the game takes a very long time on solo mode. The best solution would be to find a way to increase the money you earn in solo mode, so I might look into that.
Also I'm planning on removing Immortals/tanks as starting units.
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Posted Jul 6, 2010On solo I found the map took too long to play (i played over 40 minutes before giving up)
And bosses have way to much health for solo play it was shocking
Also, I think the immortal is the best starting unit by a long shot
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Posted Jul 5, 2010Here's what I did with zealots: I decreased time between their attacks from 1.2 seconds to 1 second, Increased damage per swing to 40 from 30 (apparently makes a large difference because they can kill roachs in 3 swings at first then), and I made the weapon upgrade give them 5 more instead of 4 more damage. Then I massively increased shields and slightly increased HP.
So yes, I probably went overboard on that, but I'll dial it back a bit. It's hard for me to figure out exactly where to put the dot on this one, but I think they actually should be fairly tough, and just not do quite as much damage. I just wanted to give them a chance to survive melee with the zergling bosses, but maybe they should have support of higher damage units to actually kill them (in other words, I could make them a tough but lower damage unit).
In the 6-player version of the game, the zerg get upgrades a lot sooner and end up with a lot more hp/armor/damage overall. I wonder if the zerg being able to out-upgrade you and destroy you if you don't push out and win before a certain point would be enough?
Based on your ideas I could do some kind of a hatchery buff after a certain amount of time, where it gives all zerg units +5 HP/damage upgrades until it's destroyed. Another possibility is maybe every 120 seconds or so after you reach the middle, each hatchery gives +1 to HP/damage upgrades as a temporary bonus until you kill that hatchery (so the more hatcheries up for longer, the harder it will be to reach and destroy them).
I'll keep working to balance stuff out, and I really appreciate all the feedback. Thanks a lot.
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Posted Jul 5, 2010So I just beat it with zealots, archons & colossi and a single immortal. AoE is sick. Added some sentries to take down the roach. What I'm thinking is that you need to do something about the gameflow. Right now, the player has all the time in the world. Do you even have to kill the bases behind the rocks? At what point is it better to move forward than to just camp the spawns for money? Something like: if you dont complete this objective right here pretty soon, you will lose. Perhaps every hatchery at some point should provide increasingly more powerful bonuses, but when destroyed takes them away? I dunno. Anyway, I didnt really camp this game either as 75/75 with my above unit combo had very few losses, so I just moved out, killed everything then pretty much a moved into the hatchery.
Btw, I think zealots are just a tad too good now. I mean, 2 of those things can pretty much hold the beginning for a looong time. You do realize they do two hits right?
BUT! This IS the only map I've have bothered replaying so that should be a big plus!
Edit: I think AoE should be toned down. Maxed colossi do ,what, 140x2 dmg in AoE and Archons close to 200 in a MASSIVE radius. I mean, mutas are a non issue.
Edit2: HAHA! Voidrays. Remove them. They kill everything. Instantly. Like. NP.
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Posted Jul 5, 2010Just completed this map and i am very impressed overall it was really fun only boring bit was the first 15-25 mins where i had to build up a big enough force to push out but after i pushed out the map got 10x better and was really fun and challenging. as it was my first time i cant say if my setup was op or not but once i had 25/25 uprades on my marines and colossus i felt pretty unstoppable and that was only a 60 food force up untill i broke down the final wall and went up to 70-75.
Defintly up there with the best Scenario maps out there.
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Posted Jul 4, 2010The expensive starting units is a carryover from the Special Forces 2 by Crayon. I don't necessarily have to keep them here.
I do think zealots need to be buffed though, and actually in the next version I'm nerfing marine damage slightly (they can really just rip through stuff, especially with stim). Marines were probably better than a tank anyway despite (or because of maybe) their lower cost.
Zealots don't end up being better than immortals in the same way. I'll increase their base damage and health since they're a melee unit.
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Posted Jul 4, 2010Eww bugs... I'll try and squish em. Also I'll make the zerglings a little slower till they get the speed upgrade (currently after the midpoint of the game.
I really should probably just remove the lava mechanic, it's not very easy to get the timing perfect on the lava, at least with the method I'm using. I'd have to make multiple regions of varying sizes and trigger death at the exact moment the lava reachs the edges of those regions. Sorry that messed up your speedrun.
I hadn't noticed the mega hydra damage problem, I'll try to figure out what's going on there.
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Posted Jul 4, 2010A bug fu for the rising lava. 74 pop stalkers dead in a heartbeat =( Was gonna do a speedrun but now I have to start over =(
The mega hydralisk lists 2000 damage on the attack card, but inflicts 0 damage. Edit: Not vs ghosts she dont..
The mega zerglings are faster than ghosts. Kinda hard opening. Acutally, they spawn too early imo.
Imo, buff zealots.
Immortal as starting unit? 2500 value VS 1000?
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Posted Jul 4, 2010(continued from last post, sorry)
didn't even heal them just remake them when they die. Dont even bother with upgrading armor, its a waste. They slowly pushed out, and took the camps. Queens would maybe kill 1 marine, but by that time (about 30-40 mins into the game) i basically had infinate money from earlier and just pushed the rest slowly but surely. The three queens at the bridge killed like 5 marines.
Fix the food cap. if battlecruisers are only 2x as good as marines, they shouldn't take 6x the food because it maxes too easy/
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Posted Jul 3, 2010I had max food (75) & max upgrades battlecruisers in about 15 mins. Then for the next 20 mins i sat there while my battlecruisers litterally couldn't push out of the base there were too many units attacking. This was when i just killed all the local camps and the dropships started comming.
I switched to marines and made 75 marines max upgrades. I don't even heal them just
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Posted Jul 3, 2010Archons getting 2 armor per upgrade was a really dumb idea by me that I forgot to remove later on.
I attempted to add a hard cap on the number of zerg units that could spawn, excluding queens (this is in game now). I had trouble actually testing to see if that worked, and I'm guessing that it did not (currently tried to cap it at 200 zerg units on the map at one time). I'll work on fixing that, as I didn't want that many units up due to the massive lag it causes.
I'd love to do variety in bosses, and add more of them. That's a great idea that I'll work on ASAP. Ultralisk boss incoming IMO. I could even add periodic boss spawns if I feel like I can do that without destroying balance completely.
The infested Terrans in the main base was a decision I made to limit cheesing, but with no spawn limits it just goes way too far. Once I can limit the number of zerg units total spawned, it should fix most lag issues.
I'll probably do the amulet change as well, possibly for sentries and ravens too. Medivacs can be pretty crazy with high regen so I'll have to think of a better upgrade for them.
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Posted Jul 3, 2010Couple of things: First, nice progress :) I really liked the storm change. Might wanna make the Amulet upgrade give extra regen and not +25 energy?
Second: I would have easily beat the map solo if not for two things: 1) the 3 Queens = a good thing, as it is by design. They ate my troops mighty quick. More of this :) 2) MAAAAASSSIVE infested terran buildup in the main base. In the end I decided I had the moral victory as I could easily hold the spawns, but couldnt push into the base due to lag.
Is archons supposed to get 2 armor per upgrade points? They get riddic imba very quickly, as 1 archon with 1 archon worth of shield upgrades is pretty much invincible through most of the game.
Overall I still think armor/shield mechanic is kinda iffy, as you can easily tank up your troops and just camp spawns for massive money before going around sniping bases one by one (when you see that zerg upgrades are catching up). IMO more bosses would be nice, or some dynamic mechanic that require the player be on their toes. I'm thinking units that have to be forcused when in a specific state, bosses with high regen, units that only die to spell damage, aoe effects that require you to move your troops Something like that? I would also suggest putting a troop limit for zerg that when reached trades future troops for upgrades or few but very powerful units, to avoid lag.
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Posted Jul 3, 2010Do you think more/stronger detectors would be a good idea? Or more difficulty in getting nukes? I recently added overseers, I could buff their HP/make them more common on the map. I could actually do a build time on the nukes, which would limit how quickly you could nuke, or I could greatly increase their cost, making you use them only when you're flooded with minerals. Or I could be really restrictive and add 1 gas to their cost so you can only nuke a few times in the game, at the cost of possible upgrades.
I didn't really expect nukes to be that effective, but maybe increasing detection would make them a lot harder to use at least.
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Posted Jul 3, 2010In the end i just got 2 ghosts + cloak + mass nukes. Nuked everything down and 1 of my ghosts had like 800 kills.
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Posted Jul 3, 2010I think that's actually a problem with the medivacs. I haven't done any balancing on them and I did notice they were pretty powerful at one point. I don't think you'd be able to push through as easy without the medivacs, so I'll look into reducing their efficiency.
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Posted Jul 3, 2010Hey!
Finished this map yesterday. At first i got 2 marines and waited infront of my allied bunker until i was able to get marine 3 and 4. From there on i simply owned everything with 2-3 medivecs and mass marines. I just maxed out the weapon upgrade - didn't research a single armor upgrade and had to problem beating the map.
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Posted Jul 2, 2010Hi, i've tried the new version and i think is better playable for 1 player alone.
I dont need to use cheats :P
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Posted Jul 1, 2010Do you mean ground weapons as well? If so that's a bug, I'll check on it. If you mean armor/shields, My reasoning was that since protoss have to buy both armor and shield upgrades to be effective whereas terran only have to buy armor. So I ended up making the cost of 1 shield upgrade + 1 armor upgrade = to the cost of one terran armor upgrade.
Since making that decision, I've noticed that shields are pretty powerful, so I reduced the number of shield upgrades to 10 to counteract that.
I'll look into it either way, and I'll consider at least increasing the price of the protoss shield upgrades. I just don't want protoss to be way behind economically. I'd rather balance them in other ways (slower shield recharge perhaps).
Edit: I'm pretty sure you meant the weapons since I just checked and they're definitely priced wrong. I'll get that fixed ASAP.
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Posted Jul 1, 2010All protoss ground upgrades after level 3 only cost 250. Not sure if this is intentional but it doesn't make sense if it is.
Also, neural parasite is a BITCH to deal with. Fungal growth isn't as bad but it's still pretty powerful.
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Posted Jul 1, 2010I just played through with the difficulty scaling, and I had no trouble finishing with just marine marauder medivac. The zerg don't upgrade nearly as far, so the last fight wasn't bad at all.
Both fungal growth and neural parasite are super annoying, but I'm not sure what I'll do about them. Perhaps reduced duration on the growth and reduced range on the parasite.