Custom Map #4422: Ghosts of Mars. By: BrainyBear72

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This topic is for discussion of map #4422: Ghosts of Mars


Author: BrainyBear72
Size: 256x256

Desc:
This is my first map submission. For anyone who is a Sci-Fi fan, this one's for you. It is kind of large, and there are surprises that may catch you off gaurd. Save often. Help Comander Abraxis avenge his parents who died years ago.

[stdout]

Strange. The totems on the bottom left wouldn't activate until I moved my forge down there. I can't see a reason why this would be.

[Karsten75]

I must have done this map bass-ackwards. However, the totems *did* activate for me without moving the Forge.

[darkcloud]

Easy start, base at top-right survived quite easy, and just moved from there. 

Liked references from SC2 (was that a medivac unit?)

That got me thinking - can we merge tower defense and CW3? :)

[BrainyBear72]

Greetings ALL. I thank you for your kindness. :) Since this was my first attempt, I didn't know how anyone would like it. I am glad there is a positive response. 
@Darkcloud - You are partially correct with the Medivac reference. You see that pilot woman is actually Corporal Colette Ferro the dropship pilot for the movie Aliens, WHICH then was used by StarCraft as an homage, WHICH I then used as a double homage to both of them.  You can find a short clip on YouTube. "Aliens pilot quote". :)
My references in the story: Creeper World 3, StarCraft, Star Wars, Star Trek TNG, StarGate SG1, Ghostbusters, Aliens, Buck Rogers in the 24th Century, Battlestar Galactica, 2001 a Space Oddessy, Ender's Game, and Dr. Who, and actually John Carter (being located on Mars). I don't know why that movie bombed, I kind of liked it and didn't think it deserved the beating it got. Maybe that was just Disney's fault for the massively overly expensive production budget???

As for any totems not working until the forge was moved??? I have no idea.

[D0m0nik]

Great first map! Totems worked fine for me as well, must have been a little glitch.

Spoiler

If you wait a few mins you can drop a CN just below the Thor pick ups and then fly it over and collect them with a colletor. Makes the map a lot quicker.

Spoiler

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[toolforger]

Good base idea and overall pretty good execution, but there were some things I didn't like, in no particular order:
- It's too large, so it soon became laggy. The idea could have been executed on, say, 150x150 map. Also, I spent half the time just advancing, which was boring.
- The scripting seems to indicate that one should take the lower-left corner pretty soon, but I don't see a way to do that. (I don't like riddles in general. I also don't like to improve on a single map over and over, that's not strategy, that's just bowing to the whims of the map designer, so this point may be entirely subjective.)
- Hiding terrain features under prebuilt units, or stacking multiple units on the same position, that's all just cheating.
- Stacking multiple towers at the same position makes it impossible to plan for the spore onslaught. That's just map designers messing with player strategy. (I actually liked the challenge to keep the sheer mass of spores and the varying spore release patterns.)
- Energy packs become useless after a certain number of power zones has been filled with reactors. Having to build a siphon, wait until it is built, then destroying the pack just to be able to move a mortar onto the power zone is just annoying. Also, energy packs under emitters and spore towers make it annoyingly hard to read what nasty stuff is hidden on that PZ.

Hope this is useful feedback to you :-)

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the SF references.
I laughed at the first few ones, then it became meh, then the name dropping started to annoy me. I guess that's pretty subjective.
Also, the "my parents are avenged" line is pretty lame. Revenge isn't usually satisfactory. Plus the whole story about the parents dieing is quite incompatible with the official storyline, which is a bit irritating given that there have been attempts to unify the story (but even that felt a little forced).