Custom Map #752: Stolen Fire. By: Exodus Legate

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This topic is for discussion of map #752: Stolen Fire


Author: Exodus Legate
Size: 480x480

Desc:
The AI is in the final stages of reverse-engineering Spire technology to add to it's already potent arsenal. We cannot afford to let the scales tip further in it's favour- we must raid the facility and put a stop to this immediately. For unknown reasons, the AI is not currently backing up it's data offsite- as well as destroying the shipyards, we also need to capture the primary databanks to ensure as much damage as possible to the AI's efforts. Hint: I strongly recommend NOT summoning the standard HQ.

[Exodus Legate]

The rest of the description (I am AWFUL at being succinct):

Warning: Contains some EXTREMELY large ships.
I have had no issues, but they might cause some lag on older computers.
Inspired, again, by AI War.
Thanks to GoodMorning/Pusillanimous for some PRPL help.

[PaulG]

I can't even play the last ship :(

[Exodus Legate]

I can't even play the last ship :(

Have you desummoned your HQ(s)? The game doesn't like more than one warp-in ship on the player's side at any one time, so it has to be warped out first- I did hint at that in the text, but I probably wasn't clear enough...

Or is it some other problem?

[ChaosMaster130]

Alright that was a cool map.  8)
And the cathartic factor once I got that final ship was excellent.

[Exodus Legate]

Alright that was a cool map.  8)
And the cathartic factor once I got that final ship was excellent.

Excellent. :)

[isoyama]

Painfully slow. Abundance of MK7 is not fun.

[Exodus Legate]

Painfully slow. Abundance of MK7 is not fun.

Sorry to hear that. What do you mean exactly by painfully slow? Ship build times, rate of advance through the map, amount of time spent waiting for things to happen, the game simulation speed being slow due to too much stuff being in place?
As for the Mk7's... Well, to be honest, I think that may be a matter of taste- I personally really don't feel they're too much of an issue for the ships being used here.

[PaulG]

I can't even play the last ship :(

Have you desummoned your HQ(s)? The game doesn't like more than one warp-in ship on the player's side at any one time, so it has to be warped out first- I did hint at that in the text, but I probably wasn't clear enough...

I'm missing something here. How do you do that?

[Keeper Decagon]

I can't even play the last ship :(

Have you desummoned your HQ(s)? The game doesn't like more than one warp-in ship on the player's side at any one time, so it has to be warped out first- I did hint at that in the text, but I probably wasn't clear enough...

I'm missing something here. How do you do that?

"Desummoning" the HQ is pretty much self-destructing it.

[PaulG]

I can't even play the last ship :(

Have you desummoned your HQ(s)? The game doesn't like more than one warp-in ship on the player's side at any one time, so it has to be warped out first- I did hint at that in the text, but I probably wasn't clear enough...

I'm missing something here. How do you do that?

"Desummoning" the HQ is pretty much self-destructing it.

That was my first assumption - but on doing so the game immediately ends as a fail?

[Exodus Legate]

I can't even play the last ship :(

Have you desummoned your HQ(s)? The game doesn't like more than one warp-in ship on the player's side at any one time, so it has to be warped out first- I did hint at that in the text, but I probably wasn't clear enough...

Hmm. Acquiring the big ship from the top left is also supposed to remove the defeat condition from your HQ being destroyed in order to allow you to desummon your regular HQ and bring the big one in- I imagine the game would be almost unwinnable without that.
Have you got the most recent version of the game? I understand that not having the latest version has a habit of causing issues with scripts not running the way they should...

I'm missing something here. How do you do that?

"Desummoning" the HQ is pretty much self-destructing it.

That was my first assumption - but on doing so the game immediately ends as a fail?

Hmm. Getting the ship from the top-left is supposed to also run a quick script to turn that defeat condition off- I imagine the game is pretty much unwinnable without it. Have you got the most recent release version of the game? I understand that can cause issues with scripts sometimes. One thing I did notice when I replayed it (after upload, unfortunately) is that sometimes the defeat condition only ends after the game has been unpaused a moment after the end of the conversation- It didn't go that way round in testing, or I would have put a delay in.

[GoodMorning]

I'd been looking forward to this, but had forgotten it was coming up. It was worth the wait.

Spoiler

Eventually, I just parked a ship with a Port module behind the top-left and built waves of Omnis from there. I still don't know if it can be taken properly.

[close]

Legate, I can only speak for myself, and I appreciate the need for a worthy opponent for such ships and know that the scale of campaigns increases as they progress, but...

When one (very speedy) "medium" particle can destroy a stack of every Omni I can muster, it becomes annoying fast. The particles were so large that MK7s would target a single one.

Thanks very much for keeping to a reasonable particle count, and giving us the tools to deal with it, but the Omnis and missiles didn't scale with the rest of the map.

That said, the end was very satisfying. I appreciated the options in attack order.

I wonder if taking out the top-right Emitters when the top-left fell (same script) and letting that cannon go to work on the big ship would have been similarly satisfying.

Thanks for a very good game.

[Exodus Legate]

I'd been looking forward to this, but had forgotten it was coming up. It was worth the wait.

Spoiler

Eventually, I just parked a ship with a Port module behind the top-left and built waves of Omnis from there. I still don't know if it can be taken properly.

[close]

Legate, I can only speak for myself, and I appreciate the need for a worthy opponent for such ships and know that the scale of campaigns increases as they progress, but...

When one (very speedy) "medium" particle can destroy a stack of every Omni I can muster, it becomes annoying fast. The particles were so large that MK7s would target a single one.

Thanks very much for keeping to a reasonable particle count, and giving us the tools to deal with it, but the Omnis and missiles didn't scale with the rest of the map.

That said, the end was very satisfying. I appreciated the options in attack order.

I wonder if taking out the top-right Emitters when the top-left fell (same script) and letting that cannon go to work on the big ship would have been similarly satisfying.

Thanks for a very good game.

Good point about killing the top-right emitters at the same time- I did test that cannon out on the big ship- it'll punch about 3/4ths of the way through the outer arms, so it'll soften it up well, but not kill it- in the first runthroughs, the top-right emitters had a much lower speed, and thus their particles stayed confined in the top-right area, and thus the cannon would fire on the big ship while on it's outer leg, but I neglected to consider the change to how far they would get within their timer when I made them faster- I think killing the big ship with the new ship and some help from the rest of the fleet works okay, but I suspect you are right to think that combining the ship and the cannon would have been more fun- that was the original plan, but it got lost somewhere.

Killing the top-left is intended to be hard, unsuprisingly- I actually nerfed that area ten times in testing before it got to the point that I could do it. Full frontal assault can take the bottom half or so, but I used a similar method to you to kill the back ones- changing the fields so that it was possible was the final nerf I used- before that, the whole back area was full of stuff as well. The original version had double the particle spawn rate, 50% more particle cap, and 25% more speed!

The sheer speed of the particles was intended to give particle beams a chance to really shine in the map, but I agree that the combination of speed and particle health did make things a bit too hard for omni's to be moved around- I used the build-in-situ method on the metallic land a lot here, but it takes something away from complexity to do that so much, and the speed also interacted quite badly with the metallic land, too.

Missiles... Yeah. I probably should have toned down the particles slightly, and included some weak emergent to give them a role.

Still lots to learn, but glad you enjoyed the map.

[GoodMorning]

To be clear - very good map, just a few minor thoughts. Most of which you had already had. Thanks for making it.