GitP WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne group (thread II)

[The Orange Zergling]

I've been pretty sick for the last day or two, so I may or may not come to the session today, and if I do I'll probably leave early. Unless something goes horribly and unexpectedly wrong I should definitely be able to come on Sunday, though.

[Gamerlord]

Actually, I might be able to attend today's round, but only like at 4:30 or something like that. I will put myself online Skype when I am around, send me an invite to the chat when you are setting up a round.

[Winterwind]

And reminder once more - tomorrow is our melee session. Hope to see you there, too.

[u-gotNOgame]

I'd love to come, but there's this thing. It's, uh, called "life". She's a cruel mistress but sometimes you just can't say "no". My apologies guys.

-UGNG

[Winterwind]

Oh, phew, almost forgot to post it - tomorrow's our next custom map session! Hope you all come!

Whether I can come myself, I'm not entirely sure yet. Might be I'll be going to visit my parents (where I have no WC3-capable computer).

...it's late and I'm rather tired, so my apologies for not sending out the reminder PMs today.

[Woodzyowl]

http://www.mediafire.com/?5tp5kc4nvkc7xrx

[Winterwind]

And reminder: Tomorrow is our next melee session. Hope to see you all there.

[Gamerlord]

Question about undead:

The usual build order is item shop/graveyard/ziggurats/ crypt right?

[Inhuman Bot]

Question about undead:

The usual build order is item shop/graveyard/ziggurats/ crypt right?

There's an altar in there somewhere.

[Gamerlord]

There's an altar in there somewhere.

*facepalm*

Oh yeah, that.

[Winterwind]

Question about undead:

The usual build order is item shop/graveyard/ziggurats/ crypt right?

No, it's not.

The usual build order for fiends is:
- Crypt and graveyard simultaneously. You want a crypt as soon as possible so you can get more ghouls for lumber collection (and will need it for units anyway), and as for the graveyard, you need it for fiends, and it takes a long while to finish, so best to start it early. Before starting the buildings, order another accolyte to be built and send the accolytes to the mine and the ghoul for lumber.
- Second accolyte. As soon as you can afford it after starting the two aforementioned buildings. You need your gold supply up as soon as possible. Do not build another accolyte; you don't lose out on much gold by pulling out an accolyte from the mine and sending it back, and this one point of supply will screw you up royally.
- Altar. You need a hero out as soon as possible; that you push it back so far is just to ensure you will be able to have fiends to support that hero right away.
- Ziggurath. You will need more supply, fast, as soon as the altar finishes; you build it after the altar because the altar takes longer to finish, so by starting it now you ensure they finish almost simultaneously. Place it right between the necropolis and the gold mine, that's the best spot for it.
- One ghoul for lumber. This is the moment your crypt will finish, so you can get one more ghoul for lumber, which has priority over further buildings. Get only one for now, it will suffice.
- Item shop. Starting it now, it will finish long before your hero (and you don't need it any sooner than when your hero comes out).
- Hero and first crypt fiend, as soon as your ziggurath finishes. Where hero pretty much defaults to Death Knight with Death Coil, unless you're going for something wacky.
- If you are up against an Orc, an Undead or a Random player, morph the Ziggurath to a Nerubian Tower. If they decide to harrass you and you don't do that, you will inevitably lose workers.
- Order a second Ziggurath.
- Order a second fiend. You will now be at 20/20. That's why you don't want a sixth Accolyte; if you got it, you'd be stuck at 18/20 and would have to wait for the Ziggurath to finish until you could get a second fiend.
- This will be the moment when your hero finishes. Buy a Rod of Necromancy from your shop. If you are up against a Night Elf or have already seen a Blademaster, get Dust of Appearance as well. Use the Rod to summon skeletons at your Graveyard. Go creep something green with your hero, your first fiends and the skeletons. Order your crypt to send new units to your hero.
- Once your second ziggurath finishes, order a third fiend.

This would have been the start of the fiend build order which you would do no matter what you want to do next, whether to tech or mass. I generally go for tech (because I find it more interesting and generally speaking less risky). The build order for that is:

- About now you will have 220 lumber (or soon). As soon as you do, order your Necropolis to upgrade to Halls of the Dead.
- Order a fourth fiend. You will be at 26/30 supply now.
- Order a third Ziggurath, and while it is being built, reset your Crypt's rally point to the forest and order two Ghouls (so you will be at 30/30, until the Ziggurath finishes. This is the second reason why you don't want a sixth accolyte.). Once you reach T2 (i.e., once your Necropolis finishes upgrading), you will need more lumber, so get the Ghouls now.
- While waiting for the Ziggurath to finish, your resources will accumulate a bit. Use this to order your first upgrade for your fiends. I usually go with the attack upgrade.
- Once the Ziggurath finishes, reset your Crypt's rally point to your hero and start ordering more fiends. Get the other upgrade for your fiends, and order another Ziggurath.
- When your Necropolis finishes upgrading, your first priorities are getting a Lich and getting Burrow for your fiends.

That's for crypt fiends, mind. If you want to go for ghouls, the build order is quite different (starting with altar/crypt, and following with ziggurath, shop, mass ghouls, ziggurath, more ghouls). I'd recommend using fiends for now though; it's much easier to get used to, and in team games you don't really want ghouls because of how much AoE damage is to be expected.

[Cynan Machae]

Just to let you know guys, my computer kinda died and I had to sent it back to MSI for repairs, so the bot won't be available in the channel for 2 weeks or so.

Same for me, won't be able to come to sessions (but I was only making rare appearances in custom session anyway )

[Winterwind]

So, reminder, tomorrow is our next custom map session. I hope you all come in great numbers.

I will be off to that visit to my parents that I didn't make last week, so I won't be able to show up, but I hope you all have lots of fun.

EDIT (26th February): And reminder again, tomorrow is our next melee session. I'll be back by then, so I hope to see you all there.

[The Orange Zergling]

So, due to the pool of 4-player melee maps we have getting a little stagnant, I've been giving some thought to making one or two of the things myself.

This is all still hypothetical, but I was thinking of doing one of two things. I can make either:

-A perfectly normal 4p melee map with no custom data of any kind, using only creeps, items and mechanics currently found in melee
-A 4p map that uses melee races and tech trees as normal, but with custom (either entirely new or a mix of new and old) creeps, items and maybe even overall map mechanics such as special terrain types that affect units on top of them.

Normally, I would immediately go for the latter option, but that has the downsides of being potentially confusing for players who are used to the established mechanics, dramatically changing the available or useful strategies for each race and possibly screwing up the racial balance.

No guarantees on anything yet, but if I were to start this project, which might you guys prefer?

[Spartacus]

I always like change. Anything to shake up strategies is nice, as it gives me a more level playing field to compete with those who've played for longer. My mechanics are decent, but my build orders, for example, are weak.

[Gamerlord]

So, due to the pool of 4-player melee maps we have getting a little stagnant, I've been giving some thought to making one or two of the things myself.

This is all still hypothetical, but I was thinking of doing one of two things. I can make either:

-A perfectly normal 4p melee map with no custom data of any kind, using only creeps, items and mechanics currently found in melee
-A 4p map that uses melee races and tech trees as normal, but with custom (either entirely new or a mix of new and old) creeps, items and maybe even overall map mechanics such as special terrain types that affect units on top of them.

Normally, I would immediately go for the latter option, but that has the downsides of being potentially confusing for players who are used to the established mechanics, dramatically changing the available or useful strategies for each race and possibly screwing up the racial balance.

No guarantees on anything yet, but if I were to start this project, which might you guys prefer?

I like the idea of the second, but in practice I would probably never be able to attend because Sunday is starting to become a bad day for me to attend stuff.

[Winterwind]

No guarantees on anything yet, but if I were to start this project, which might you guys prefer?

I'd also say, go with the latter. Don't introduce something that completely dominates the way the game is being played and totally skews the dynamic into some direction (I'm specifically thinking of island maps here, which do just that; don't do that), but things like terrain that has special effects etc. sounds like a very nice diversifying change.

I like the idea of the second, but in practice I would probably never be able to attend because Sunday is starting to become a bad day for me to attend stuff.

Awww...

[The Orange Zergling]

Alright, thanks for your input, guys.

I'd also say, go with the latter. Don't introduce something that completely dominates the way the game is being played and totally skews the dynamic into some direction (I'm specifically thinking of island maps here, which do just that; don't do that), but things like terrain that has special effects etc. sounds like a very nice diversifying change.

Yeah; I was just going to go for things like shallow water reducing movement speed and stuff like that. I'm probably going to go for a Sunken Ruins map because the tileset is so pretty and it has a lot of potential for creeps and items and mechanics and stuff.

[Inhuman Bot]

Alright, thanks for your input, guys.



Yeah; I was just going to go for things like shallow water reducing movement speed and stuff like that. I'm probably going to go for a Sunken Ruins map because the tileset is so pretty and it has a lot of potential for creeps and items and mechanics and stuff.

The obvious answer is add Naga as a race. Their hero options would be Royal Guards.

[nooblade]

I wonder if you could apply some gradient math to movement speed so that it's slower to go up a hill, so that putting towers or ranged units on a hill makes them more effective, or so that you can really control an engagement when your forces are charging downward. Although that would normally go quite a bit deeper in the game engine. And maybe the changes wouldn't be universally desired. Yeah, it's not really feasible or marketable, but I still want it.

I *might* be getting something that can play Warcraft 3 sometime soonish. This free computer has been delayed for months now. Not that I'm suffering from poor time management or boredom or anything, but it'd be nice to do a couple of fun simulated war kinds of things again.

[Winterwind]

Sounds great, nooblade!

Also, reminder: Tomorrow is our next custom map session. I have a bit little time today, so my apologies for not sending out the reminder PMs this time.

[u-gotNOgame]

I wonder if you could apply some gradient math to movement speed so that it's slower to go up a hill, so that putting towers or ranged units on a hill makes them more effective, or so that you can really control an engagement when your forces are charging downward. Although that would normally go quite a bit deeper in the game engine. And maybe the changes wouldn't be universally desired. Yeah, it's not really feasible or marketable, but I still want it.

Someone's been taking a few too many multi-variable calculus courses... I think that would be awesome, but I'm not sure Warcraft is built for that.

-UGNG

[Arcanoi]

Someone's been taking a few too many multi-variable calculus courses... I think that would be awesome, but I'm not sure Warcraft is built for that.

As far as I can tell, you could just make high ground and low ground give different buffs (Through use of Auras, I guess?), with units with the High Ground buff dealing more and/or taking less damage from units with the Low Ground buff. You could probably include several levels if you wanted to. No multi-variable calculus required, just simple logic statements.

[The Orange Zergling]

As far as I can tell, you could just make high ground and low ground give different buffs (Through use of Auras, I guess?), with units with the High Ground buff dealing more and/or taking less damage from units with the Low Ground buff. You could probably include several levels if you wanted to. No multi-variable calculus required, just simple logic statements.

Yeah, that would work just fine. Instead of auras, you could also just put regions everywhere and spawn dummy units that cast buffs on units inside of them; either way would be rather fiddly, though, unless plateaus were perfectly square or round, because auras are always circular and regions are always square.

WC3 also has, built-in, a miss chance for units firing up cliffs. By default I believe it's 25%, but it can easily be changed to anything from 0-100%.

[Winterwind]

However, either of those would modify your movement (or whichever other properties one might choose) depending on where one was, rather than how one was moving. With these solutions, a unit in the middle layer, for example, would always move at the same speed; what Nooblade wanted, the way I understood him, was for a unit to move faster when moving downhill and slower when moving uphill, even as they both passed each other at the same altitude.

I think the way to do this would be to just spawn an invisible dummy unit for every regular unit and have them cast buffs that increased or decreased movement speed once every 0.5s, or so; calculating the gradient alongside which the units were traveling should be doable, assuming triggers can retrieve the altitude of the ground for any given point on the map. Which I think they can. The bigger problem I see is that, for any bigger number of units, I am not sure at all if the engine would be able to handle it; you'd have to calculate the movement gradient for every single unit in the game, twice a second (more often if you want it to adjust more smoothly; I'm not sure 0.5s is enough for that).

[nooblade]

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure that the engine could handle it, assuming that the rest of the game is a melee match. In the fireball demo that I wrote and tested, there were 2 dozen trigonometry calculations, collision detections, and forced movements at a rate of 50 per second, and the result really looked like the units received a move order. Less than 0.02 looked really choppy there, but it might work here.

Also, I got a little disillusioned with dummy casting in the time I spent with editing. Creating a unit is the slowest thing that the warcraft engine can do, so I'd prefer to avoid it, or at least have dedicated dummies that don't get destroyed when possible. If I were to do it, I think I would use addbuff (UnitAddAbility technically, in the editor, but applied with an ability in a way that it gives a status condition maybe with some effect and the little icon too--I call that addbuff) to indicate that movement speed changes are taking place and then modify the units themselves. Or another option is to have only one debuff for moving uphill. I used addbuff and removebuff for the "burn" condition that's applied when a fireball hits (and required a little logic in the case of being hit by another fireball while still burning) and it worked great. Those were fun times and I think a valuable method of using the editor.

The real problem would be the terrain map and the gradient there. The whole thing might work for a very simple circular hill, maybe even without much math. If you move tangentially to the circle or away from it or at some small angle to the inside, then there's no debuff. It would just be trig. Maybe you look up the result in a table before applying changes if you want really variable movement speed. The result might turn into a "King of the Hill" custom map (maybe make it warcrafty somehow by adding heroes). But with complex maps you'd have to rip the terrain out, analyze it with lots of gradient math in a program, stuff the results in a matrix, and manipulate that thing from inside the editor. But if it is possible, then it has the advantage of doing most of the gradient calculations beforehand.

[Winterwind]

Also, I got a little disillusioned with dummy casting in the time I spent with editing. Creating a unit is the slowest thing that the warcraft engine can do, so I'd prefer to avoid it, or at least have dedicated dummies that don't get destroyed when possible.

I didn't mean the dummy unit should be destroyed; I meant one should create a dummy unit for each real unit as soon as the real unit spawned, and keep the dummy unit around until the real unit died.

But your solution is way better anyway.



Also, reminder: Tomorrow is our next melee session! Hope to see you all there.

EDIT: Urgh... sorry for not showing up. I got kinda entangled in a massive SC2 session with my RL friends who just wouldn't let me go.

EDIT (10th March): And reminder: Tomorrow is our next custom map session. Hope to see you all there!

EDIT (12th March): Phew, almost forgot to post this: Reminder, tomorrow is our next melee session. Hope to see you all there, again!

[SirSigfried]

All of those in the US are currently going onto Daylight Savings Time tonight.
So keep that in mind if we are early/late to the session.

[Winterwind]

It stays 4 PM for you nonetheless; it's us foreigners who have to adjust and come one hour earlier.

Thanks for telling me, I'd definitely been late otherwise. Not sure I'll manage on time anyway, but at least now I have a fighting chance.

[nooblade]

That computer I mentioned is here and I have the necessary things set up. I should be able to join you on Friday, barring disaster or forgetfulness, but I have a few duties before then. But my Fridays and Sundays have usually been open. But if I get too bored with the maps you're playing, I'm probably going to want to fiddle with the editor more.

The new box is nice. It has more engineering software than the computers at school. Also I might get used to playing Warcraft 3 at maximum graphical settings. It looks good, I guess? I'm more interested in seeing if some editor operations are running more smoothly, like how changing names or deleting some objects would cause an unusual strain.