[Custom Game] Battle for Cerolan: Domination (VERY PRELIMINARY version available for download)

[dandylion]

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/4930/rcfaceoffv12.jpg
Screenshot of the "farm" base with all finished* heroes from both factions: (units are from left to right, top to bottom)
Legion (on left)
Acolyte
Pyro
Sprouter
Guardian
Tracker
Elementalist
Arctic

Hellbourne (on right)
Dream Weaver
Infector
Fury
Unholy Knight
Soul Eater
Lizard Man
Dark Harbinger

Unpictured heroes:
Naturalist
Sharpshooter

*finished being a very subjective term here

Healers (healing or CC focused)
Soul Eater - AOE healing, lifeswapping, fearing baddie
Sprouter - life drain, AOE heal, mitigation buffs, AOE root
Acolyte - Brief immunity, single heals, has a DPS "form"

Nukers (magic damage dealers, ranged or melee)
Dream Weaver - AOE fast nuking, pull, fear
Infector - Healing mitigation, AOE dot, silence
Dark Harbinger - Self-healing, high damage, AOE disable
Pyro - melee, damage amplifying, highly mobile, AOE nukes
Elementalist - AOE nukes, normal attacks amplified by casting

Tanks(yes, tanks)
Unholy Knight - AOE taunt, heal, ally damage absorb, buff
Guardian - AOE damage mitigation, highly mobile, passive taunt

Melee DPS (physical damage primary)
Lizard Man - 1V1 champion, AOE stun, passive DoT
Fury - illusion "tricky" hero, stealth, crit
Tracker - Stealth, traps, excels at 1v1
Arctic - Pet, reveal, charge, global buff

Ranged DPS (physical damage primary)
Naturalist - Boomerang, AS drainer, aura damage buff/stealth
Sharpshooter - slippery, reveal, passive stun proc, mortal strike


What it is...

So this project is in essence a game somewhat similar to the Arathi Basin battleground from World of Warcraft. Ideally, it would be somewhere between 8v8 and 10v10, but as there isn't currently support for that, 5v5 will have to do. The idea is to capture and control strategic points in the map. There will be minimal item usage and no leveling up involved. There are no creeps or neutrals, so it will be pretty much exclusively PVP.

How does it work...

Teams will start off in a fountain area where there will be a single tower, and a really basic shop. After a brief countdown, the neutral buildings in the map will become vulnerable, and capture points are taken by attacking the buildings and destroying them (they respawn under your team's control).

Each hero will be custom made (at least to some degree) and have a fixed damage and effect. There are no mana costs, simply cooldowns. Skills will be able to be improved slightly through item modifiers.

The game ends when a certain number of points is gathered (currently 300). Points are incremented by 1 every 12 seconds based on how many capturable buildings your team currently controls. This means if you controlled all 5 neutral buildings, the game would take roughly 12 minutes, while if you merely controlled 3 for the duration of the game, it would take about 20. With that being said, most games should take between 16-24 minutes to complete. I may tweak this to some degree in the future.

Heroes...
In the beginning, there will be a somewhat meager selection of units under 4 primary categories:
-Tanks (we're talking actual taunting/damage mitigation units)
-Physical damage dealers
--Melee
--Ranged
-Magic damage dealers
-Healers

In 3 of the 4 categories, there will be both melee and ranged units. Tanks at this point are going to be exclusively melee.

Items...
Items at this point will be limited to 4 main categories:
-Spell damage increasing
-Armor/Defensive
-Physical damage increasing
-Cooldown reduction

And consumables:
-Revealing items
-Vision Items
-Health Recovery

Other...
All heroes will have two other innate abilities:
-Out of combat regen
-Teleportation (like homecoming stone)

The teleportation will be on a high cooldown (120 seconds or so).
While attacking or taking damage, heroes will have very little health regeneration, but after 6 seconds of not attacking and not taking damage, will regenerate health at 1% per second.

There will be various juke spots and hiding places, and the heroes will vary greatly in their roles and abilities.

What's finished...
-Buildings/Scoring system
-Most of the terrain
-16 heroes (for the most part)
-Out of Combat health regen mechanic
-Graveyard System Complete
-Simple Scoreboard

What's left to do...
-Items (in progress mostly)
-MOAR HEROES
-Balancing (kind of impossible at this point...)
-Finishing Touches

Alpha version downloadable here: BfCDv1000 (http://www.mediafire.com/?5m26ojbz6oeridr)

[Schm0ftie]

Sounds very good, keep it up =)

[dandylion]

Update: Now has a working scoreboard, and 14 playable heroes, most of them with functioning animations. There are still no tooltips, but I plan to be working on that next. Nothing is necessarily "balanced" as it's difficult to test something like that without wider support.
I'll be posting a playable version soon*.

*who knows how long soon is this time of year.

[an7hraxjax]

woot ... working scoreboard ? would like to see it ! :)
sounds great man!

[dandylion]

The scoreboard is so far really simple. As of now it's just the names and the scores in color, but it at least works. I plan to spiff it up later, but UI stuff is nothing I've really explored much.

[dandylion]

Screenshot added and unit names revealed. Will update more later (as in probably tomorrow).

[dandylion]

Hero basic breakdowns added. Still trying to put some finishing touches up before I post the map up for download and trial.

[FlameStick]

Great idea but can i offer some suggestions?

Since its supposed to be like WoW it could be good to add 6-7 abilities on each hero and then later just mod the UI to make it work.
Add some MODS/Skins of the heroes from the MOD section so you can have more diversity and will intrigue people as the new skins/models they never seen ingame its kinda more refreshing than keepeing only the ingame ones i think.

If you need any help feel free to PM me. I am kinda bored atm and would be more than happy to make you some heroes/abilities since im waiting for Map support before i continue working on my map :).

[dandylion]

I've already used some of the NPC characters as models, or alternate models for primary units.

A lot of the NPCs also don't have animations for them beyond the basics (walking, attacking, idle, one ability at best)

The problem with using custom skins and whatnot (which I would love to do) is that they increase the file size of the map tremendously. A single unit's model/skin/effects can increase the entire map size by about 1/2 mb, which seems small, but doing so for 16+ heroes would make it so large, that the map couldn't be hosted on the dream website. I'm already pushing 11mb in map size with just what I have, and while I've managed to shave away a solid 7-8mb already (my file was 18mb at one point), the limit for dream is 16.

At this point I'm really just looking for a solid base. I would be more than happy to add multiple skills later on, but for now I'm happy with where it's at. I can host the map on an external site if you wanted to download it (still needs a lot of tooltips/tweaks) but you could take a look and play around with it if you'd like.

There is some shaving I could certainly do to get rid of more files, but a lot of the effects and sound effects don't "work right" as it is. Without pulling those files and modifying them directly, I don't know of many other ways to get exactly what I want.

Link to map here. (http://www.mediafire.com/?5m26ojbz6oeridr)

[Shadowgurke]

How is this going to work?
Afaik you can only host the games in singleplayer. Are there any plans to change that?

[dandylion]

S2 has announced that it's on their radar, they've had to do some security checking and reconfiguring on their servers to allow players to host their own custom maps. With that being said, we will eventually be able to play multiplayer custom games.

All we know is that it's coming sooner or later.

[dandylion]

Two new ranged units: Naturalist/Sharpshooter added

[Tafelpoot]

Dude, it's awesome. Really really gj !
The respawn huts and the capture point system, very nicely done !
The interface and it's interaction were my main interest and I must say, I'm impressed :)
Finally the map layout, first thought : amazing !
Some small stuff :
- I only played sniper, and i thought he might need some extra turnrate (900 or so)
- ability descriptions yet to come
- how can I see if the scoreboard is working? only one side gets kills :)
- map layout : the map feels a bit big to me atm, the arena is really huge. Maybe some higher base movement speed to increase the action factor ?

Keep it going !

[dandylion]

If you spawn hellbourne units and capture a base with them in practice mode, the Hellbourne ticker does increase. If neutrals capture a base the points on the board don't increment at all.

I may go in a *remake* the map to make it a little smaller. I made it large with the thought that *eventually* there would be 8v8 or higher multiplayer ability in custom maps.

I have gone through and added ALL the tooltips at this point, but I don't believe they're in the downloadable version yet. I plan on putting the new one up later today or on Friday. I've also gone through and fixed a good deal of the animations and effects.