Custom Map #6731: Skipping stones. By: Aesher

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This topic is for discussion of map #6731: Skipping stones


Author: Aesher
Size: 128x128

Desc:
A proof of concept experiment. #Thanks Cornucanis #Thanks Yum-234 #Forge No Singularity #AC Only

[Aesher]

Hopefully I can create something more interesting from this proof of concept.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

[D0m0nik]

Spoiler

You can just fly over some full sprayers to the emitter so the island hopping idea does not work for me. I just landed 6 full sprayers and then destroyed them which flooded the emitter in one big hit.

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[cornucanis]

Cool concept map, it's awesome to see more people experimenting with game mode! As for map strategy, Dom is right,

Spoiler

You unfortunately can't give the player sprayers on CWDig maps unless you balance the whole map around suicide sprayers, as suicide sprayers are simply too powerful in this mode. I found that out myself when developing the map CWDig Kamikaze and had to rebalance the map around the mechanic.

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I also have a few tips for you regarding working with the game mode:

I noticed the terrain all increased by 1 height at the beginning of the map. It seems like you probably enabled the terrainmod.crpl script by mistake. That script is intended to either raise or lower all terrain on the map by a given value, I found it helpful when rebalancing maps with varying terrain height. If you set terrainmod's value to 1, it will raise all terrain by 1 on the next frame which seems to be what happens when the map is starting.

If you were trying to make the terrain more "powerful" (similar to how 1 terrain blocks 30+ levels of creepers on yum's maps) you can do this by changing the "multi" variable under walldigger.crpl. It's set to 10 by default because I didn't want to confuse people with odd numbers, but the values yum uses in modern maps (30-50 usually it seems like) feel much nicer, especially if you'll be including red towers in your maps.

Finally, I just wanted to say be careful with the map sizes! Large maps are ok if they're mostly void like this one, but large maps with lots of terrain cause performance hits with this game mode. Unfortunately doing terrain work with crpl is quite taxing and it's a central aspect of this mode, so just keep in mind that land size is important when evaluating performance. Void tiles are ignored by the algorithm, so having lots of void tiles doesn't affect performance thankfully  :)

Thanks for the map, and I hope you enjoy working with the game mode!

[Builder17]

Cool concept map, it's awesome to see more people experimenting with game mode! As for map strategy, Dom is right,

Spoiler

You unfortunately can't give the player sprayers on CWDig maps unless you balance the whole map around suicide sprayers, as suicide sprayers are simply too powerful in this mode. I found that out myself when developing the map CWDig Kamikaze and had to rebalance the map around the mechanic.

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Hmm, I wonder if manager core could get all sprayers on map and prevent player from selecting any sprayer?

[Aesher]

I'm still getting used to the scripts (I had noticed the increased terrain height too, but ignored it.)

With this map it was more about getting the star gates to work (and finding out what the settings were) than testing the terrain or balance, although Cornucanis you are right that flip/AC-destroy emitters are weak against suicide-sprayers (something I had never thought of before.)

Lastly I'm just trying to get ideas out there and interesting maps.

[cornucanis]

I'm still getting used to the scripts (I had noticed the increased terrain height too, but ignored it.)

With this map it was more about getting the star gates to work (and finding out what the settings were) than testing the terrain or balance, although Cornucanis you are right that flip/AC-destroy emitters are weak against suicide-sprayers (something I had never thought of before.)

Lastly I'm just trying to get ideas out there and interesting maps.

Understandable, it definitely takes time to get used to building maps with this game mode! We're happy to offer tips if you need any  :)

Hmm, I wonder if manager core could get all sprayers on map and prevent player from selecting any sprayer?

We could do that.. It would make the sprayers a bit less useful though if the player can't move them around or change their settings. It certainly might be worth considering that option though if we want to give the player stationary sprayers at some point to prevent them from blowing it up  ;D