Originally Posted by
Krizzie
I do see how they can be overpowered, but I see that as a map problem and not as a specific room problem.
You forget that you need an army first to obtain Skeletons and strong heroes like a Wizard. Killing a level 10 Wizard needs a couple or at least one powerful creature like a level 6+ mistress. (in 1st person mode you could beat a wizard) So it's not that you can have one captured and tortured within the first 5 minutes of the map and then rape everything on the map 10 minutes later.
You would need to research both Prison and Torture Chamber, then attract a Mistress, then train her and then you can start looking for a lonely wandering level 10 Wizard, which would be easy prey. You would really need to make a map that wants the player to capture and convert heroes.
But this isn't true at all. Just three level 4 orcs can take down a single level 10 wizard. Then a few minutes later they can do so again, and again. Hero parties are just 8 heroes strong(game limitation), so if you have about 12 creatures you win easily. Than you have 20 for the next party of 8, then 28 for the next one and that means you don't even have to be careful anymore.
This is not some crazy or rare situation, it is in EVERY map which lasts more then 10 minutes, has a prison and is more than just a single fight at the end. Even the original campaign suffers from this.
Originally Posted by
Krizzie
That is the whole point isn't it? Making good maps. I get the idea you want to make the terrain map in 5 minutes and then spend a ton of time in the text files balancing everything. I would look at it from the other way around.
If you build the Autobahn, give the player a ton of money to buy Ferarri's, Porsches and other Supercars. Then you're probably suggesting you want the player to go drive them on there as fast as they can.
What you're saying is that you want to have the Autobahn, the money, the Porsches, the Ferarri's and the other supercars. But they can't go faster than 30 miles an hour else it's unfair. So when the player enters your autobahn you all give them a chip which limits them to 30 miles an hour.
Almost all the points I mentioned were map related or basic script related. I never went that far to suggest alterations to the game. Which is in my opinion not needed, clearly you see that differently.
First of all, I don't like making maps, I like playing them. I just made a single one, to assist the topic I made on how people can make the best kind of maps with the game how it currently is. Because right now - with these rooms as powerful as they are - people are having a really difficult time making good/fun maps. Right now in 100 situations you can think of, 97 of those will be no fun because the player gets too powerful because of these rooms, leaving just 3 options to make a good map. Say, a puzzle map, a first-person map, and a map without those rooms. If the rooms would not always be so powerful, out of the 100 situations you could think of, 60 would work, making sure we'd have 20 times the fun.
To stick to your metaphor, I think the prison is kind of a drag racer, a super fast car in a straight line. If you give people that car (let them play with a prison) you can only have them play on straight racetracks, and if you want to make a more diverse racetrack (F1, Indycar, Rallytrack), people crash and burn. (Most maps crash and burn).
And I'm seeing all carwrecks, so I'm arguing to perhaps give this car not as big an engine, a break and a proper steering wheel. This way we can have all types of tracks (maps)
Or - in fact - have some flexibility. Because currently, all maps with a prison, lots of heroes and enough gold to support an army are bad maps. If a prison would be not as powerful (all the time) those maps would be good maps - and we would have more good maps to play.
Originally Posted by
Krizzie
Since you mention the last map of that campaign, especially that level is made very poorly in both map and script. (Compared to the other maps in the campaign) I think my autobahn example fits perfect here. The creator clearly wanted the player to have everything, have infinite time to make the best army ever and then walk over the Heroes like they were never there. If that isn't the idea of that map, then the maker should go back to the drawing board with that one.
Maybe you shouldn't keep adding heroes since that isn't the route of making a map hard. Instead you can limit things. If you lower the amount of creatures a player can have you wouldn't need a lot of heroes.
As I said before if you have only 1 or 2 gem sides to mine from (or no gems at all) then you can't sustain a big army for long. Getting a massive Skeleton army takes time, creatures which need to kill/stun the heroes and a lot of money to train them and pay them. So a lot of factors which you can play with to not be able to have tons of skeletons. And still be able to have the Prison and Torture Chamber.
You mentioned it particularly on that map, that's why I referenced that, but I had the exact same issue on many maps of the campaign - basically on ALL the maps with a prison. For example the level where 'blue is too weak', which you mention too. Blue gets more creatures than the player does, but as you have a prison by the time you face blue your army is 10 times as strong.
Map with two or more rival keepers on it by default are already to easy - get all the creatures of the first keeper you defeat, so the second one is a pushover.
Training heroes is never a problem - you never face low level heroes because otherwise they would melt away against your trained creatures. So they come pre-trained, like skeletons.
Even if you forget training, Paydays are no problem either because heroes are not more expensive then creatures. If a map has enough gold for 15 creatures to receive 10 paydays, that would mean you could also have 15 creatures, 15 heroes and 5 paydays. Or 45 heroes and 15 creatures, just one payday and win ever fight straight away because any fight your 15 creatures would have taken some time to clear would be waltzed over by your army of 60.
Originally Posted by
Krizzie
Giving an option in the script saying there's only 10% chance of getting a skeleton sounds more like an excuse to not have to do those things, than actually "fixing" a room.
Right now you only get a vampire in 10% of the cases. Everything you say would be just as true if every corpse would get you a single vampire. You would need a lot of gold to train and pay for those vampires, and it would still be possible to make a 'good' map taking this situation into account.
I would argue though, that in just at most 1 in 100 maps it would be most fun to have 1 corpse per vampire. Perhaps in 10 in 100 maps it would be most fun like it is now, with 10 corpses per vampire. 30 in 100 maps it would be most fun if the player doesn't get any vampires (happens now in most maps, no graveyard), but perhaps in 10 in 100 maps it would be most fun if only once every 50 corpses the player gets a vampire.
Giving the mapmaker flexibility on how powerful the graveyard is, allows him to select the most fun possibility for every map type.
The mapmaker now already has this script option on the entrance room - he can determine which creature types are available and how many are in the pool - to give him flexibility in design. I am pretty sure that if every map had a creature limit of 30 creature, and every creature would be available(if you have the rooms) the game would be not as good as it is now. This script option to determine the effectiveness of the entrance rooms gives the mapmaker a lot of flexibility and makes the game better for it.
The same is true for the prison as well, if you would give the mapmaker more flexibility in the effectiveness of the prison, he could make many more map-types that are fun to play and the game would be better for it.
Originally Posted by
Krizzie
The thing I would love to see is to be able to make maps/scripts random. Not 10 Orcs in the pool but 8 - 15 Orcs in the pool, each time you play the map that can change. You could even go further by doing it with rooms, spells and workshop items. Sometimes you get the Prison, sometimes you don't etc. That makes maps challenging (and also increases the replay factor by a lot)
Actually it is already possible:
Code:
ADD_CREATURE_TO_POOL(ORC,Random(8,15))
ROOM_AVAILABLE(PLAYER0,TREASURE,1,random(0,1))
I don't really see how this would help much though, I would be already happy with a map that's really fun once. If the second time would be just a tiny bit different, well OK.
Originally Posted by
Krizzie
I've said it before, check the map "Swedish Spirit" in one of the custom campaigns. (it's the first map of the campaign so just go of the list and you'll find it soon enough) It's a very good example of a challenging map without making the player overpowered after a while. It's a shame the rest of the campaign doesn't come close to the quality of that map. I can understand it took quite some time to make it.
I think I remember you advising that map before, couldn't find it last time. I see it is the first map of the Twin keepers campaign, I thought that was a bit of a 'puzzle map', but I'll give it a try for sure.