The Sorcerer's Defense
Overview by PactOfNegation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W-gBk7EAdw
HD gameplay vid by mariehane: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOCzcdtFhtQ
Mini walkthrough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ8LETvB9zM
Your magical experiments have accidentally opened portals to the Outer Planes! This world is now under siege by otherworldly creatures. It will take all of your wits and magic to drive them back and close the portals forever.
The Sorcerer's Defense is a mazing TD for 1-8 players. It was my entry in the 2010 Blizzard Custom Map contest. It features 26 unique tower variants, over 80 towers, 36 waves of creeps, 6 bosses, 8 spells, and a unique randomized resource system that ensures every game will play differently.
How to play:
- From the main Starcraft 2 menu, click on the Multiplayer tab at the top of the screen.
- Click the "Create A Game" button in the bottom right corner of the screen.
- In the search box above the list of maps, type "sorcerer" and press enter.
- Choose "The Sorcerer's Defense" by Riley from the results and click "Create Game."
NOTE: It's a known issue that some people have issues with random crashes while playing this map. If this happens to you, please do me a big favor and copy and paste your crash report to this thread: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/832173739
i think once bnet can hammer out all these official, specific categories for tower defense and the like, map survivability wont be as dependent on being on that first page of popularity.
if you like TDs, you should keep your drop down menus on custom > tower defense. likewise, mapmakers should set their map types accordingly.
So, I am taking it that this project is dead too... All of my favorites seem to be dying.
5. Elemental adjacency bonuses. Building a tower with a fire element next to a tower with another fire element will give both of them a minor damage bonus. This, along with the hotspots, is intended to provide an incentive for players on higher difficulties to pay close attention to which towers are placed where.
Won't that make it so you have less diversity though? Since it will mean you will attempt to stack up on as many of the same kind of towers as possible.
I'm working on a major update now but it'll be delayed for a while as I'll be out of town for a week for a memorial service. :( Expect version 1.4 in mid-November. Some of the features that'll be added:
1. Elemental "hotspots" on the playing field. Build a tower of the appropriate element on the hotspot and it'll get a boost in damage. The locations will be randomized each time, providing an incentive to dynamically adjust the shape of your maze to take advantage of them.
2. Scoring system. You'll receive points at the end of the round based on current mana, lives and difficulty level. Players within a game will be ranked on round and total score at the end of each round, and a persistent high score list will track your best games.
3. Boss abilities. Each boss will have some sort of unique ability such as fast speed, regeneration, or high armor. Hopefully this will make the boss battles more difficult while adding some variety. Some of these abilities may eventually make their way to normal creeps. These abilities will not be present on Casual difficulty.
4. Tower and spell rebalancing. Certain towers are currently a bit weak, others are massively overpowered, I'll be bringing some of the outliers in line. Same with spells.
5. Elemental adjacency bonuses. Building a tower with a fire element next to a tower with another fire element will give both of them a minor damage bonus. This, along with the hotspots, is intended to provide an incentive for players on higher difficulties to pay close attention to which towers are placed where.
6. New unique towers which must be upgraded from existing level 4+ towers. These will have special global bonuses such as decreasing the cooldown on your spells or slightly slowing the movement speed of all creeps. You'll only be able to build one of each, and they'll be very expensive.
7. Greatly increased difficulty on hard and especially brutal. My goal is that a win on brutal difficulty will require exploiting the new mechanics.
The map seems to work fine now, I didn't have a single crash and just played through the game on Brutal, didn't even leak anything except the first few rounds.
Some people seem to claim that it is impossible to setup the maze so the mobs run over the same tile (for example nuke trap) four times. However, it is perfectly doable and quite effective, however, I found it better to have them pass the exact same place trice.
A small bug, when you kill the last boss you get the message "You have learnt a new spell!" even though the game is finished. Overall this is imo the best TD for SC2 thus far. I'm very surprised it didn't fare better in the custom map contest.
EU is running version 1.3, I just checked.
I think I've finally cornered the crashing issue, but the EU version is slightly behind the US version. I've sent the updated version to my EU publisher so hopefully it's up to date soon. If the version displayed in-game is 1.3.2 then you have the newest version, and it shouldn't crash. (If it's still crashing with that version please let me know.)
Crashes quite often unfortunately, so this map is unplayable for now but otherwise seems great.
Should be noted that you want the crash report on a forum where only a very small part of the world can post (namely those in northern america), which seems like an odd choice if you want more feedback. Yet I suppose you got enough reports by now.
Definitely would like to add some more towers, but there are some technical issues with adding too many new types. (Basically I'm running out of command card space.) Right now I'm thinking about adding some special towers that must be upgraded from existing 5th or 6th-tier towers. They'll probably be unique and have special global bonuses attached to them, like lowering the cooldown on your spells or increasing the mana gained from killing creeps.
Right now though I'm focusing all my efforts on tracing the crashing issue. After that I'll be looking at tuning the balance of existing towers and adding a tutorial for new players as well as a couple of other minor features, like a scoring system and persistent high score list.
Amazing map, by the way! I've been looking for a TD like this that involved mazing, waypoints, a variety of towers, and combinations to boot for SC2 and you answered!
Any word on future combos like an upgrade to the prismatic tower? Or 2:1 ratios of elements in a combo which would probably have attack damages of 150%:100%:50% instead of the 125%:100%:75% for 1:1:1 and 1:1 ratios? Think Water:Water:Fire and Water:Water:Water:Water:Fire:Fire.
Granted the learning curve is steep enough, this would be a neat expansion set of towers :)
Speaking of the learning curve, this one is more complicated than anything I've seen before. It's one thing to figure out that there are 4 spawns rather than just 1 (esp. when pressured to skip the tutorial), but the sheer volume of tower choices is crazy and boggles the minds of newcomers. Maybe for the first round, since you can't even afford combo towers (125), you could just show the basic 50 tower (MP only). And maybe in the tutorial, you can visually show something being built via clicking those 6 essences in the bottom right corner. :)
EU update should be live now.
Hopefully EU update is soon many people leave every game because we dont have enough time to build between rounds and the 5 second movie between every round is really annoying.
"Using a model that forces creatures to walk all the way through the kill zone part of the maze, I think I can prove that the maximum is twice for this td."
I'm going to echo this. Given the space restraints and the minimum walkspace for mobs, there really isn't a way to merge all 4 lines into a closer hot spot so that mobs can go through 2x roundtrip. The mobs will walk past the hot spot 4 times, but effectively only pass the sandwich lane twice as you can see in the 2nd picture (with towers). What starts out as a quest to make a long maze becomes 4 shorter mazes, with each lane only minimally stalling the mobs (without towers to deal any DPS in the area anyway). Towers dealing AOE damage will not strike as many targets since mobs will be running in every direction.
If you just stick to the usual enclosure of just one waypoint, you maintain one unified maze: common pathing to all spawns. If you only effectively get two runs anyway via the 4-lane mazing, then you might as well go this route. In total, they will go through twice "roundtrip".
But between splitting the map in half and just enclosing one waypoint, there's advantages and disadvantages to both. On brutal difficulty, you may find it more manageable to do the latter so that your towers can focus on eliminating the outer 3 spawns first, then the inner one last. Splitting the map in half is almost the same though your towers may get confused on which mobs to target first, which means a higher chance of leaking if youre not careful.
Unlike most TDs with waypoints, mazing is and unfortunately has to be much simpler for you to survive the early rounds. Since the towers only have 4.5 attack range at most, the overall maze wont need to be more than 3-4 walls thick with the 2 outer ones for stalling; towers cant reach across another wall anyway. To counter that, I make my walls two towers thick for density.
Using a model that forces creatures to walk all the way through the kill zone part of the maze, I think I can prove that the maximum is twice for this td.
Actually, you can make them have to walk by four times. All you need to do is to block off one side completely. Then the mobs have to go through your maze counterclockwise once, AND clockwise once. For example, if you block off the path between the bottom right and the bottom left, you can force the mobs to walk counterclockwise through your maze to get from bottom right to bottom left, and then back through clockwise to get to the rest of the corners.
Just uploaded a new version with many fixes:
This should put the stuck creep bug to rest permanently as well as hopefully end or reduce CTDs for people.
yo your map crashes and or units get stuck every game - its been unplayable - great game but fix your technical issues which are ruining your map;...
Posted a crash report. I get them consistently, so if you want more, I can get you more reports easily.
If you build a maze that has four lanes converging in one center point each creep will need to pass by towers in the center region four times. With some mazing on the other side you can get that number up to 6. I think that may be the maximum, but it's hard to know for sure.
Thanks for the other input, the difficulty curve is something I'm keeping an eye on. I think I will be adding some extra gameplay elements that are only enabled on hard and brutal to make the game more interesting for veteran players. One thing I'm considering now is for towers to have bonuses or penalties depending on the elements of their neighboring towers; for example, tower with a fire element would increase the damage of nearby towers with fire elements but decrease the damage of nearby towers with water elements.
I'm also thinking of adding a couple of unique towers that must be upgraded from existing level 6 towers. Instead of just doing lots of damage they would provide global effects like lowering the minimum speed of all creeps, giving all your towers a chance to crit, or decreasing the cooldowns on your spells. Hopefully this would make the late game a bit more interesting.
I like it.
comments and comments on comments:
I don't think the pathing size is a problem. Just being different from other maps, it took me a few times losing on the first few levels to figure out how to set up the maze, but I don't think it in any way diminishes the game to have larger path requirements.
This map very much does force you to get a maze going as early as possible because until there's a maze set up, it's hard to not leak. Being hard from the start isn't necessarily a bad thing, but one issue I've had with both this td and a lot of others is that getting all of the way through is no harder than getting 2/3 of the way through. That suggests to me that the difficulty curve isn't quite perfect. I think that the current difficulty peaks around lvl 25 and that if you intend to keep all 36 levels (and I know that i'd hestitate to shorten it if I were you) then you should make it a little easier at the start.
Starcraft 2 has an inherent tendency towards sci-fi, so fantasy storylines are rarer and welcome.
The towers are very diverse.
Graphical effects look good. I especially notice "Shatter!".
I didn't notice much difference between Normal and Brutal. By the end on normal, I had around 3k mana and couldn't spend it fast enough, whereas I was typically spending all I had to use 5-7 essences on Brutal. I'm not sure if this was because of different income values or because of better spending practices on the harder difficulty.
I didn't notice at first that certain abilities were free. Since slow, empower, and barricade are essential, it might make it a little more noob-friendly to draw attention to these.
Great work all around. Good luck in the custom contest!
Btw, I couldn't come up with a maze that forced the enemies to fully walk through the kill zone more than twice -- which is sufficient to beat it . What is the maximum that others have found?
edit: Using a model that forces creatures to walk all the way through the kill zone part of the maze, I think I can prove that the maximum is twice for this td.
Check out the mini walkthrough video (the link is above) if you're having trouble. Keep in mind that, unlike many other TDs, leaking one or two creeps once in a while is not going to set you back too far, because the limiting factor is essences, not mana. Plus getting an extra life with a perfect round means if you leak one creep every other round you're still doing fine.
The randomness of which essences you get should not at all prevent you from succeeding. The key is effective maze design, strategic use of spells, and tower synergy.