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
Comments
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_ForgeUser4427067 Owner
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Posted Oct 13, 2010Even Casual Mode is too hard, me and my buddy are good at TD's but we cant even get past lvl 15. LoL idk if its just random based on what elements we get or if we are bad at mazing but i find it hard to believe anyone has beatin this. And what is the trick if you did beat it?
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Posted Oct 12, 2010I encountered a weird bug.
http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/7194/screenshot2010101218455.jpg
As you can see, I have 2 spell books. Also notice how I was able to empower two towers at the same time (those front two towers both have the boost aura). I don't know HOW this happened, but it only lasted for the one round. The round after this was back to just one spell book. You still might want to look into it though.
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Posted Oct 12, 2010Ok, now a solution for your traffic jam problem is that you can give creeps a temporary buff that disables collisions. What you can do is if a creep's movement speed drops below X value, then apply this buff to them. If they are slowed/stunned by your towers, then it won't matter if they have no collisions. However, if they are in a traffic jam, then this will clear it up quite nicely and quickly.
I emphasize this so much because this one factor is REALLY bringing down your TD from being really awesome. It's MUCH too restrictive. Along with the giant "no build zone" around the portals.
As for the boss HP, what I would suggest you do is count how many creeps are spawned for that round, and take 75% of their combined sum of HP. So if 10 creeps are spawned with 1000 HP each, then you would want your boss to have around:
10 * 1000 * 0.75 = 7500
I'm just pulling these numbers out of the air, but rather than scaling based on the HP of a single creep, it might be beneficial to look at the combined sum of HP (although these factors can be translated to be more or less the same).
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Posted Oct 12, 2010Woops sorry meant to comment on that as well. The reason a 2x2 square is needed is that with a 1x1 opening it's possible for a traffic jam to occur where units simply cannot move past each other and just get stuck. (In fact, it's very easy and almost inevitable to do so.)
As for the bosses thing, both the HP of the waves scale up as well as the HP of the bosses relative to the waves. I believe on normal they have 3.5x the HP of a standard creep while on brutal it's 4.5x, which may still be too little. Late in development I increased the delay in between the last creep spawning and the boss spawning, which had the effect of making them significantly easier than they used to be. What I'm thinking of doing right now is instead of just giving them tons more HP, making each boss have some sort of unique ability. For example one might move extra fast, another might have lots of extra armor, another might regenerate quickly. This is something likely to be in the next major version.
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Posted Oct 12, 2010Glad you found my comments useful. However, you didn't address the "2 square" pathing concern. Any feedback on that?
One other thing I noticed that I forgot to mention is that I think the area around each portal for its "no build zone" is far too big, and requires too many towers to effectively block off, and maze. It also significantly reduces the potential building space available. About half way through the game I just stopped mazing since I ran out of room, and just kept upgrading towers.
What I meant about the bosses being too weak is that they are weaker than the actual waves significantly. The amount of effort that a wave requires, the boss should be at least 75% of that effort (since the boss appears during the wave). I've been finding the boss to be like 25% of the effort. If the harder difficulties are only scaled up, then that means the same ratio remains. The issue here isn't the base HP of the boss, but how hard the boss is compared to the regular waves around it. Just to handle the regular waves means that I'll overpower the boss easily. That is the jist of what I'm trying to say ;) lol
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Posted Oct 12, 2010Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I think what I'll do is, if there's only one player in the map, waves won't start until you click ready. If there are more players then there will still be a timer but I might add 15-30 seconds to it. You're right that there can be a lot to do and think about, but I didn't want the potential for one person to troll everyone else by making them wait down a long clock every round :)
I've been playing with some random people to observe what they do and I think the basic problem is that the game doesn't tell you how important it is to block off the corners so creeps need to pass by your towers multiple times. Once you figure that out, it's pretty easy to play a perfect game on normal mode. But if you don't figure it out, it's impossible to survive more than a few rounds. I'm thinking of significantly reducing the HP of the first few waves on normal and casual only, so that people who don't block off a corner immediately aren't punished so harshly.
Try it on hard or brutal :) The biggest difference between the modes is the scaling, they start out fairly similar but because much harder later on in the game. Bosses also have greatly increased HP. I'm glad you were able to finish it without too much difficulty on normal, though.
I'll keep an eye on this. Part of it is playing on normal where you can afford to horde mana a bit more than on the harder difficulties, but the current 20% interest rate may be just too high. It is intended that near the end of the game you have basically enough mana to build whatever you want, because essences are the limiting factor.
Excellent idea, I'll see if I can figure out how to implement it.
Thanks again for the feedback, it's very helpful.
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Posted Oct 12, 2010Thanks! You only mentioned EU so it didn't occur to me to check lol
Awesome map. I really like how polished everything is. The only thing I don't like about it is how you require a 2 square gap to prevent blocking. This REALLY limits possible maze formations, and also makes it difficult for players who are experimenting with new mazes (especially since the timer between levels is so short).
I think it would be nicer to be able to dictate when you want to next level to start rather than have it start automatically. The current time is such that I'm forced to move VERY fast....between placing towers in my maze and reading the descriptions of potential towers to make to figuring out what is the next element and best one used against it, etc.
I found the balance of the game to be decent, but a bit off. The game starts off brutally hard, with VERY FEW options to finish the first couple rounds without any leaks. I pulled it off, but only after several attempts at different builds. The later rounds were much easier, probably do to the maze and more powerful towers available.
I found the bosses to be way too easy. You should at least double the HP of the bosses. I was able to kill all of them in the first pass of my maze with little difficulty. The final boss' HP should be at least tripled, I think, since I killed him when he was only half way through my maze on the first pass. Btw, I played on Normal difficulty.
The interest gained per level is far too high. You currently have it set to 25%, and I think 5% or 10% would be a lot better. In the later levels, I was gaining MORE from interest than kill bounties.
http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/6762/screenshot2010101214153.jpg
Not sure why we gain a "new spell" when we kill the final boss (or gain minerals for that matter).
The maze you see in that screenshot is most likely similar to what most people would have (who have finished the game) due to the 2 square pathing requirement. Again I highly recommend going down to just 1 square for pathing to allow for more flexibility.
The information that you have in the help file, I think you should have a dialog window that appears during the tower building phase that has the same information for the "Next Round". It's too annoying having to go into the help file every single time just to see what's coming next.
Overall, EXCELLENT TD, and I enjoyed it very much. It's quality and polish is on the same level as Element TD, and I really hope your map becomes more popular :) I suggest dropping the players down to 1 for your map for awhile, and tweak the difficulty so that all players can easily remain in the game for 5 mins. Then you'll be able to get tons of people to "boost" your map. Once your map reaches the first page, then "update" it with some proper balance, and all 8 players.
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Posted Oct 12, 2010It's on both NA and EU realms :)
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Posted Oct 12, 2010I'd really like to play this but I'm on US bnet. Any chance of you bringing it over here? I'm willing to host for you if you need a US host.
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Posted Oct 11, 2010I'll be releasing the unlocked map at some point in the future. Until then you'll need to play it via battle.net. Once you've played it online at least once, you can play it in offline mode via the "Play Vs. AI" button. (This is true of all custom maps.)
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Posted Oct 11, 2010so isnt there any other way ? I would like to play it offline .
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Posted Oct 10, 2010Wow, this looks fantastic. I was getting really bored with normal TD's due to the lack of gameplay variety, and how passive they are. Yours looks really innovative. I can't wait to play it.
fxandrei: Since a download link is not available, you must find it in-game on battle.net to play it.
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Posted Oct 10, 2010im kinda confused. i cannot find the download link anymore.. whats wrong ?