Custom Map #2024: Molten Core. By: Doogie

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This topic is for discussion of map #2024: Molten Core


Author: Doogie
Size: 128x84

Desc:
The Fires of the molten core begin to rise you must put a stop to this P.S. save before Destroying the big red one (you can thank me later)

[Telanir]

I uh... um... at two hours, I'm about a quarter of the way through.
I suggest this map to very masochistic people, the map-maker feeds on your pain and tears. ^-^

One day you'll grow old enough to pass away, as unfortunate as that may be, you'd still probably not be done this map.

No but all jokes aside, this is a really looong, map, a bit difficult but mostly just long. You travel across the perimeter and reach the center eventually. Eventually. Yeah. Oh, and once in a while emitters spawn right around the perimeter probably where you put all your reactors. :)
As for praise, it's a fairly thorough map and contains a lot of CRPL and a lot of hard work from Doogie, so good job mate, you made a nightmare to haunt me in my sleep.

[Tyler21]

I uh... um... at two hours, I'm about a quarter of the way through.
I suggest this map to very masochistic people, the map-maker feeds on your pain and tears. ^-^

One day you'll grow old enough to pass away, as unfortunate as that may be, you'd still probably not be done this map.

No but all jokes aside, this is a really looong, map, a bit difficult but mostly just long. You travel across the perimeter and reach the center eventually. Eventually. Yeah. Oh, and once in a while emitters spawn right around the perimeter probably where you put all your reactors. :)
As for praise, it's a fairly thorough map and contains a lot of CRPL and a lot of hard work from Doogie, so good job mate, you made a nightmare to haunt me in my sleep.

I was fool enough not to check the forum before starting this map. I wish I had, because then I wouldn't even consider to start it at all.

I am struggling with ambivalent feelings about this map, mostly negative ones. On the one hand, Doogie clearly worked a lot with it, and the concept wouldn't be bad in itself.

However, there are some aspects which made the map a terrible experience and extremely frustrating.
To start with, there is creeper spawning on the red areas of the map and you can't do anything with it. Even if you nullify every emitter, creeper continues to flow out of nowhere. Neither terraforming nor AC helps.
Then, I figured out that every big emitter had some a probability of spawning 0-3 new emitters on any part of the map. You can't do anything with this either, there is no way to prevent it (and of course there is no warning either). Since there are dozens of such spawning emitters, you have to nullfiy about addtionally 30-50 emitters during the game that appear out of nowhere and usually destroy a significant part of your base (since you can only build on a very tight corridor).

A side note on this: I seriously don't know why this random spawning mechanics is getting more popular in maps.
It is just super annoying. It's not fun, it's not puzzling, it's not challenging, it's just random luck and sets back your game progress by several minutes. And you can't do anything to prevent it, only to save and load a lot.

And the end-game is really, really evil. When you nullfiy the big red one, about 30 new emitters spawn on the map, covering most of the area (see attached png).
In what universe is this considered fun or challange? This is simply malicious. If I hadn't built a lot of extra nullifiers already (to handle randomly appearing emitters), I would have had absolutely no chance to finish this map.

Normally I would give a rating around 7-8 if the random spawning and the endgame wouldn't be there.

But my feelings suggest that the only fair rating is 1 because in its current form this map is nothing but a cruel joke to torture players and other players should be warned somehow.

[Telanir]

Well this is depressing lol, I actually finished the level.

I wiped from 3 CN's to 1 CN three times over four hours. This map has shown me the meaning of true pain... I unfortunately have to agree with Tyler, the only warning this map gave was to save before the big red. Except I saved at least 30 times, got paranoid that every emitter was going to wipe me again. I will be rating it a 1/10 because this could push people over so bad they'd want to quit CW3. Or just the map. :)



I don't know why I did this to be honest, hahaha.