Custom Map #1726: [PAC] Payback round 1. By: GuardianDragonlord

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This topic is for discussion of map #1726: [PAC] Payback round 1


Author: GuardianDragonlord
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[Niflthaena]

Not even fun as a showcase. Each feature of the map is contradicted by at least one other, and it's impressively laggy - actually getting worse as the map goes on, despite the gradual removal of buildings.

• The map opens with the release of 12 unmoveable emitters, implying player agency is meant to be in the mobile units - blobs, skimmers, air sacs. But the map is absolutely covered by snipers, rockets, and Thors, rendering those units nearly unusable.
• The modded units, fancy as they are, are overshadowed by the sheer volume of Thors, which would require overwhelming force to take down. But the map is limited to the default creep limit of 3.5 - overwhelming force is impossible outside of fairly extreme cheese.
• There's exactly one target of opportunity on the map, which happens to be an ungodly amount of nullified unit spawners. For previously listed reasons, however, the units have minimal effect - they all have to go through the interlocking ranges of various Thors to get anywhere worthwhile. They add to the chaos and lag without providing any benefit to the player.
• The mesh tools are broken, and the map is entirely covered in mesh. In most cases this would be an oddity, but not have a huge impact on the map's playability - but there are literally no cannons to engage the mesh, and the modded towers are ineffective against it. Furthering the weirdness is that Thors - a permanently flying unit - also die to the mesh, rendering it the only effective weapon in the player's arsenal. Even resorting to cheese, the mesh outpaces the player for the majority of the map.
• While the autobuild tools are often useful to guide the player into territory control and reducing cheese, they do not work well with mesh. Any unit killed by mesh, but without creeper covering its space, will attempt rebuild about once per second. As the mesh expands well beyond the creep's ability to keep up, this becomes an enormous source of lag, as wide swaths of the map are repeatedly built and instantly destroyed.
• One side of the map has a stupefying amount of walls - four to five thick, multiple spaces in a row, defending nothing of value. The sheer quantity of wall units is a major contributor to the map's lag problems.

All in all, player choice is foiled at each turn, leaving a map that plays itself in a slow, buggy and deeply unsatisfying way. I'm not even sure how to fix it - making the map fun would involve changing so many elements it would likely be unrecognizable.

[GuardianDragonlord]

Not even fun as a showcase. Each feature of the map is contradicted by at least one other, and it's impressively laggy - actually getting worse as the map goes on, despite the gradual removal of buildings.

• The map opens with the release of 12 unmoveable emitters, implying player agency is meant to be in the mobile units - blobs, skimmers, air sacs. But the map is absolutely covered by snipers, rockets, and Thors, rendering those units nearly unusable.
• The modded units, fancy as they are, are overshadowed by the sheer volume of Thors, which would require overwhelming force to take down. But the map is limited to the default creep limit of 3.5 - overwhelming force is impossible outside of fairly extreme cheese.
• There's exactly one target of opportunity on the map, which happens to be an ungodly amount of nullified unit spawners. For previously listed reasons, however, the units have minimal effect - they all have to go through the interlocking ranges of various Thors to get anywhere worthwhile. They add to the chaos and lag without providing any benefit to the player.
• The mesh tools are broken, and the map is entirely covered in mesh. In most cases this would be an oddity, but not have a huge impact on the map's playability - but there are literally no cannons to engage the mesh, and the modded towers are ineffective against it. Furthering the weirdness is that Thors - a permanently flying unit - also die to the mesh, rendering it the only effective weapon in the player's arsenal. Even resorting to cheese, the mesh outpaces the player for the majority of the map.
• While the autobuild tools are often useful to guide the player into territory control and reducing cheese, they do not work well with mesh. Any unit killed by mesh, but without creeper covering its space, will attempt rebuild about once per second. As the mesh expands well beyond the creep's ability to keep up, this becomes an enormous source of lag, as wide swaths of the map are repeatedly built and instantly destroyed.
• One side of the map has a stupefying amount of walls - four to five thick, multiple spaces in a row, defending nothing of value. The sheer quantity of wall units is a major contributor to the map's lag problems.

All in all, player choice is foiled at each turn, leaving a map that plays itself in a slow, buggy and deeply unsatisfying way. I'm not even sure how to fix it - making the map fun would involve changing so many elements it would likely be unrecognizable.

everything what you have said is valid originally I was trying to make the map is clean and playable as possible but it proved to be impossible when the map became so unstable that it became no longer playable so I've been bug testing it and fixing everything to the point where it was finally playable so what you see right now is probably the most polished version I could get to get to right now the map is basically a first attempt at this game mode and I will need time to talk to the mod authors to make the mode actually functional for the next version

[heritor]

Okay, so:
+ playing as the creeper against all these new units is fun, and definitely presents a different challenge.
+ more people making PAC is goodt.

- This map feels like you're trying to pick up where I left off in the lag stakes; 10fps on 1x speed. I'd have to do testing to make sure, but at least some of those units are doing something that's causing it to drag beyond all reasonable expectation.
- Without the indicator message, you have no way of knowing how much ERN power you have.
- No start message means anyone who's never played PAC or the various modifications before would be completely lost.

[knightace]

The mesh-map wasn't fun...but with the amount of defenses; the only way to really make headway the map. I like what this was going for; but it turned into autopilot lag.

All I ended up doing is initially field-gen forcing the creeper to free the bottom right quadrant...then dropping down a single unit - the egg gen. After that I just did nothing. Occasionally I'd pop 500 eggs then go back to doing nothing until the map was defeated.

...and even the 500-egg pops failed to defeat the map before the mesh did. Making this feel like an Idle game. :(

[Niflthaena]

everything what you have said is valid originally I was trying to make the map is clean and playable as possible but it proved to be impossible when the map became so unstable that it became no longer playable so I've been bug testing it and fixing everything to the point where it was finally playable so what you see right now is probably the most polished version I could get to get to right now the map is basically a first attempt at this game mode and I will need time to talk to the mod authors to make the mode actually functional for the next version

Coming back to it this morning, I'd like to apologize, both for tone and content; none of what I said is actually helpful feedback on the core design, it's just map minutia. If you'll indulge my trying again:

• The laser and tesla turrets look pretty, but I'm not sure they lend anything important to the design. They're basically just cannons with different stats; slower but longer range, and without the full range of utility cannons have. There's also less counterplay - the increased range means there's less ability to take them out with maneuvering, it's just "overwhelming force" or "precision attack with units". There may be something that can be done to make them useful in a design sense; without 4rpl modifications, one option is to keep them in a place where they can support choke points of traditional towers, but are themselves vulnerable in a way the choke points aren't.
• The missile barrages aren't very effective - their explosions might be tuned wrong? - but besides that, global attackers are a risky design. The best counterplay one can have against a global unit is choice in when and how to take them out of the picture, which means either the towers or their fuel need to be somewhere away from the final objective - otherwise they're basically just a "creep tax".
• The orbital strike towers have the same problem, but dialed up - they do far more damage and have far less warning, so there isn't even the option of trying to evade them. CW4's game design has a major element of "avoid or counter", rather than taking attacks head-on, and these towers don't allow for that design. Perhaps they could be altered to have limited range,  or even targeted range - a specific area that they can target or fire within, rather than randomly bombarding the whole map?
• Thors are also major offenders of the principle of counterplay - they are, by design, a "god unit". Effective against everything and weak to nothing. They're acceptable as something for a human player to work towards, but working against them is an exercise in frustration.
• Bombers have a lesser version of the Thor problem; they bombard an area with impunity, but they have a home base to target. As the Creeper has no anti-air capability, air units are fundamentally problematic to PAC maps. There is a Sleeper tower that can target flying foes, but it has impunity in the other direction - humans have no ground-moving units to target it. A true solution would be some unit design where both Human Air and Creeper Anti-air are vulnerable to something the other side fields.
• Creeper anti-air might actually make the missile barrage towers interesting, if done right. Human anti-air missiles are a simple place-and-forget design, and aren't an interesting model to follow, but human shield towers are a lot more interesting - they deflect skimmer stun projectiles (without negating them), and can both deflect and soak up eggs if used right, but require a lot of mobility and awareness. There may be something useful in there, I'll think further on it.
• There seem to be two paradigms of PAC going on here. There's the traditional "spawn and guide the creep" paradigm, and there's also the "use units to support the creep" paradigm with the numerous creep-costing spawners. Having both at once is going to be risky - they lend themselves to dramatically different maps layouts, and coercing them into the same map will likely result in one paradigm being dominant over the other - either there's so much creeper already on the map that specific spawn / stash / guide areas aren't useful, or there's too little for the mass unit spawners to function. Balance may help, but it'll need some large-scale experimentation.
• If at all possible, try to keep the flood cores out of the final design? A well-balanced map doesn't need them, and trying to use them results in a huge loss of both time and power while waiting for them to be useful; the combination leads to having little or nothing to do while waiting. Generally speaking, any game element that promotes waiting idly should be avoided. (Idleness is the key here; things are okay taking time, as long as the player has other things to do in the meantime.)

[superbrias]

~snip~

• If at all possible, try to keep the flood cores out of the final design? A well-balanced map doesn't need them, and trying to use them results in a huge loss of both time and power while waiting for them to be useful; the combination leads to having little or nothing to do while waiting. Generally speaking, any game element that promotes waiting idly should be avoided. (Idleness is the key here; things are okay taking time, as long as the player has other things to do in the meantime.)

Just to add, their original design and inclusion in PAC maps by the Flood's creators was specifically so people who like to trade "time" (read: even a lot of it) for winning at almost no skill level required. originally they cost a lot less (by about a magnitude) and people just used em to cheese because they were so good (if only because that map did include thors, so even at a still somewhat big but not outrageously expensive price Flood just easily won out over any other design) so they were tweak into a "win no matter what because the enemy can't end me anyway, but at great cost" solution to the difficulty problem.

I am alright with the idea of people spending 2-4 hours winning a map at a slow unskilled pace just because I am a bit of a turtle-er myself and don't exactly find much fun in needing to react fast primarily when the game lends itself to seeming like turtle is valid. On that same note I wished default creep limit was unset just so someone would have to go out of their way to add that especially because I feel it is a TERRIBLE mechanic in a PAC map when it only limits you, especially as it's story is the creeper "being content" and/or "feeling unthreatened" and even on the normal maps I feel its a terrible difficulty crutch.

[knightace]

~snip~

• If at all possible, try to keep the flood cores out of the final design? A well-balanced map doesn't need them, and trying to use them results in a huge loss of both time and power while waiting for them to be useful; the combination leads to having little or nothing to do while waiting. Generally speaking, any game element that promotes waiting idly should be avoided. (Idleness is the key here; things are okay taking time, as long as the player has other things to do in the meantime.)

Just to add, their original design and inclusion in PAC maps by the Flood's creators was specifically so people who like to trade "time" (read: even a lot of it) for winning at almost no skill level required. originally they cost a lot less (by about a magnitude) and people just used em to cheese because they were so good (if only because that map did include thors, so even at a still somewhat big but not outrageously expensive price Flood just easily won out over any other design) so they were tweak into a "win no matter what because the enemy can't end me anyway, but at great cost" solution to the difficulty problem.

I am alright with the idea of people spending 2-4 hours winning a map at a slow unskilled pace just because I am a bit of a turtle-er myself and don't exactly find much fun in needing to react fast primarily when the game lends itself to seeming like turtle is valid. On that same note I wished default creep limit was unset just so someone would have to go out of their way to add that especially because I feel it is a TERRIBLE mechanic in a PAC map when it only limits you, especially as it's story is the creeper "being content" and/or "feeling unthreatened" and even on the normal maps I feel its a terrible difficulty crutch.

Agreed about the creep limit; it's so frustrating as PAC. That said, the maps I hit it on didn't have "Fieldgen' available. With fieldgen there's probably not as much an issue 'cause you can just throw the existing creep as a weapon and then generate more where you really need it. But I'd still just as soon not have the limit.