Custom Map #332: Distress CH7: Hybrid. By: The Isaldrian Armada

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This topic is for discussion of map #332: Distress CH7: Hybrid


Author: The Isaldrian Armada
Size: 500x500

Desc:
Ticon Industries is finally at the location of where the original signal was sent from, a now broken and horribly infested Farbor. Here they shall face a manifestation of destruction created by humanity's two most feared foes. *USE DEFAULT FLEET* [LEVEL: HARD]

[exy]

I rated your map poorly, and felt I ought to explain why.

To start, I found your dialog and custom ships rather uninspiring, but as those are more subjective, (and ship/story design could take up an entire discussion on their own,) I will not comment on them as they are fairly minor compared to my primary complaint.

For something that billed itself as difficult, I found it fairly easy, to the point of being a tedious slogfest.

There is no early game pressure as the particle accelerator structure forms a highly effective shield from any potential threat, of which there was little.

Even the bottom emitter was trivial as half of your emitters promptly shut themselves off, allowing my HQ to romp around the map edge uncontested while all of the particulate was tied up in the inner loop.  Any emitters/mines that weren't covered by lathing ships were quickly and easily omni'd.  The Ticon Defenses were mostly irrelevant as they can't fire on grounded omnis.  If you can slip one through before the surrounding ground is mired (not terribly difficult, even discounting reloading breaks), even a single omni can quickly lathe through the defenses.

I found myself drowning in amp gems, to the point where I ran out of things I wanted to spend them on.

Even the final assault on the central structure was not terribly difficult, as I mostly found it to be a simple matter of throwing omnis at the mirers until I could control the ground enough to safely park a lathing ship.

Even then, my victory was not complete as the game informed me I still had to collect a stray ship schematic that I had neglected.

Overall, I found it unengaging, as if just going through the motions, but this is just one opinion.  With a rating of 8+, I'm other people do indeed like it.  But even though I felt the execution was off, I would like to emphasize that I did still find the core concepts interesting enough to offer my experience with your map.

[MisterTor]

Looking back at my level, you're right, the level is heavily flawed.
Though definitely better than some of my other levels, I can see where I went wrong.

It's my first campaign and I didn't expect it to get much attention or even a single level above a rating of 6.
Most of my levels are experimentations, and I'm glad you tried it out. (wether you played the whole thing or not)

In the future I will definitely work on avoiding similar problems before pumping levels out. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
(Good dialogue is hard though, perhaps I should just have less?)

Thank you for your feedback!

[E9577]

Nice map: I gave this level a 10.  I usually give nice maps an 8 and maps that are too easy a 6.

[yum-forum]

Interesting game for me, many options to play, very hard central part.
Enjoyable map! Thank You for good work!  :)

P.S. Big ship with very very long time of construction and not so useful. 9/10.
      Will try to play sandbox mode with my fleet.

[Johnny Haywire]

I'm glad others have commented on this map. It's interesting to see varying perspectives & ideas. Maybe one day I'll make a map in this game but for now I'm happy to just play.

1) The big ship DOES take a long time to build. And even as powerful as it is, it would probably be more helpful to scrap some of the not-so-useful ships and make a few more beefed-up ships.

2) Dialogue. This is a tricky one. Not everyone is going to like the same kind of dialogue. But you're also bounded by the nature of the game. So yanno, trying to go all Shakespeare on us isn't going to work. It'd be like trying to do Pride & Prejudice with Particulate instead of Zombies. ("Pride, Prejudice & Particulate"?  :P )

   -One suggestion: You could perhaps have dialogue a bit more concise and/or spaced out. It's annoying to me that the words scroll out so slowly instead of just appearing. It prints out at a rate that certainly seems well under 200 words per minute which is agonizingly slow. But as far as I know there's nothing you can do about that, so perhaps just minimizing the words would help.

3) Difficulty. You could fix that by just changing the description to "Medium" difficulty. Even this is a bit subjective since everyone's at different skill levels. If you make it challenging enough for the experts, you'll most likely lose the masses. A couple of your maps were some of the most difficult maps I've played so far (out of maybe 30 maps? Still new, yanno).

Overall: I really enjoyed your series. I especially liked the way you actually ended it. So many campaigns seem open-ended or they just fizzle out into redacted space. Great job on the campaign, mate. And really - thanks a bunch for putting all the time & effort into it!

;D ;D

[GoodMorning]

There is an option in the game settings for instant dialogue text (added during pre-release, to general relief).

[Johnny Haywire]

AWESOME! Thanks!  ;D ;D ;D