Lethal creep/hardcore mode in map maker

[mothwentbad]

Hey. I think sometimes my maps get thwarted because a good player knows how to drop a few blasters in just the right place and snip off the creep way sooner than I thought would be possible. I think a lot more maps wouldn't get finished 8x as fast as I'd planned if you could choose to make any contact with the creep instantly lethal. Call it "lethal creep" or "hardcore" or something. It would make it a lot easier to prevent players from using instant-win strategies the map maker didn't have in mind when making the map, a lot of the time.

[Sqaz]

But that would also prevent you to set up a decent attack, cause if you attack with blasters one of them always touches the creeper a bit.

Instead of trying to prevent dropping blasters, you should try to do it yourself, then you would make sure your maps can't be won that way.

[mothwentbad]

The easiest way to be able to tell is if the game had a lethal creep mode for you to test it in.

Maybe it could even be set at a certain thickness, so you could take damage over time as usual if it's thin. But on some maps, you can rig it so that you never touch the creep. The range bonus would be much more valuable, I think.

[Karsten75]

I think map makers should accept that players will play their maps different that the maker intended. It is that way even with games - ask Virgil, many of the things we do he did not foresee when he wrote the game. For instance, Virgil thinks of this as a minimalist game, one that should be played with few weapons, and towers, not the massively stacked arsenals that some people build on their maps or that is sometimes needed if a map-maker puts 40 or more emitters on the map.

If you are going to constrain players and force them to do things the way you want to do it, then what's the point? The ultimate result of tha twould be that everybody would get the same score on all maps and where's the fun in that?

I sometimes communicate with another guy that writes games and he was intensely frustrated by the way a few players (including me) used the options at our disposal to get high scores.  He played hi game and completed it with a level of <60. By the time I was done with the game, I had a level of 2300+ and there were many, many people that had levels much higher.

The thing you should take from this is that you create something. How people use it is not up to you. If you are over prescriptivist then people will not play your game - people *like* to find clever ways to outsmart the game- and map-makers. AS long as they don't hack the game, but use what is in the game and at their disposal, you should not feel annoyed by that.

[Blaze]

I think map makers should accept that players will play their maps different that the maker intended. It is that way even with games - ask Virgil, many of the things we do he did not foresee when he wrote the game. For instance, Virgil thinks of this as a minimalist game, one that should be played with few weapons, and towers, not the massively stacked arsenals that some people build on their maps or that is sometimes needed if a map-maker puts 40 or more emitters on the map.

If you are going to constrain players and force them to do things the way you want to do it, then what's the point? The ultimate result of tha twould be that everybody would get the same score on all maps and where's the fun in that?

I sometimes communicate with another guy that writes games and he was intensely frustrated by the way a few players (including me) used the options at our disposal to get high scores.  He played hi game and completed it with a level of <60. By the time I was done with the game, I had a level of 2300+ and there were many, many people that had levels much higher.

The thing you should take from this is that you create something. How people use it is not up to you. If you are over prescriptivist then people will not play your game - people *like* to find clever ways to outsmart the game- and map-makers. AS long as they don't hack the game, but use what is in the game and at their disposal, you should not feel annoyed by that.

Yes. If I could up-vote this post I would. Cause it's true: Why constrict creativity? Why stop people from finding new ways to win faster? Thats part of life: Exploration.

[mothwentbad]

A great amount of possible strategy is still possible without dropping the blasters into the creep. There are many maps where different approaches can work. It's just that a lot of maps that I could make in lethal mode, I can't make now, because as soon as I start, I just think to myself, "no, they'll just drop eight blasters on it and be done in two minutes. I can't design it like that at all." So my creativity is limited. I'm sure they'd still find ways to outsmart the approaches that I have in mind when I make maps, but I don't see how it could hurt to have the option available in map editor.

[UpperKEES]

You can revent this in many other ways:

- Limit the available energy by limiting the available space to build.
- Limit the number of blasters by just providing 3 of them.
- Make the blaster tech hard to reach.
- Make the terrain so you can't drop many blasters at the same spot.

Etc. etc.