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SQUAD DEFENSE
Choose one of eight squad commanders, each with a unique set of 6+ units available for purchase into their squad. Each commander has a primary, secondary, and passive ability for inflicting mayhem and protecting themselves. You will be tasked with defending your headquarters against 30 waves of troublemakers and rabble-rousers.

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SPECIFICATIONS

• Players
  1-5
  
• Map Tileset
  Space
  
• Map Size
  256x256
  

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INTRODUCTION
You begin the game humbly, with a mining station, miner, construction unit, commander, headquarters, and 500 minerals. You must quickly turn this into a profitable defense capable of withstanding 30+ increasingly difficult waves. In the early stages, one should attempt to build as strong of an economy as possible while still managing to survive. Later on, it will become necessary to have very strong defenses built up.

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FEATURES

• Eight (12 planned for final version; may not end up making that many) unique squad commanders with different abilities and squads available to choose from
  
• Beacon purchasing system for squad units; units priced according to one of six tiers (100, 200, 300, 500, 1000, 1500 minerals)
  
• Squad Commanders and units respawn inbetween rounds
  
• Squad Commanders start with three abilities, each upgradeable five times. Final upgrade generally bestows some sort of increased ability
  
• All Squad Commanders start with a builder unit appropriate for their race. Builders are capable of building defensive buildings with high armor. These buildings can be essential to survival, especially in early stages
  
• Defensive buildings do not respawn if killed, but they do regenerate HP and shields inbetween rounds
  
• Resources mineable from your mining station. Additional workers cost 500 minerals each
  
• Gas is a precious resource, considerably harder to attain than minerals. It is used for upgrading unit abilities and squad commander abilities
  
• Enemy color coding system: green is easy, yellow is medium, and red is hard
  
• Visual display on map of upcoming/current round with round's incoming sends displayed nearby for reference
  
• Mineral <-> Gas exchange system
  
• Many EUD changes to various facets of the game. Unit ranges: on average, ranged units have 1-2 more range than they previously had, though there are more extreme outliers. Certain spell casters have gained attacks or changed abilities. Buildings respond to armor and attack upgrades. Some units have gained splash attacks: Marine, Veteran Marine, Goliath (air), Advanced Goliath (air), Special Ops, Ghost, Grenadier (Hunter Killer), Duran, Duran Clone. And a few other miscellaneous changes.
  

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DETAILS

• Squad Commanders
  • Gui Montag Infantry - Terran infantry build, low health units focused on bunkering up and killing from afar
  • Edmund Duke Artillery - Terran vehicle build, medium health units with good range and damage
  • Infested Kerrigan Brawler - Zerg air focused build with powerful spellcasting abilities
  • Unclean One Grenadier - Zerg melee and range focused build with powerful spellcasting abilities
  • Zeratul Warrior - Protoss ground focused build with late game mind control ability
  • Tassadar Psionic - Protoss ground focused build with strong shields and psionic abilities
  • Special Ops - Terran build, focused on long range attacks and special abilities
  • Infested Duran Hybrid - Mostly zerg build with some terran influence, has a mix of powerful range and tanks
  
  
• Special Abilities
  • Primary Ability - Generally a short cooldown quick attack ability
  • Secondary Ability - There is a greater variety here, but usually these are high damage abilities with greater cooldowns
  • Passive Ability - These are usually defensive abilities with some sort of regeneration and long cooldowns
  
  
• Squad Units
  •• Six purchaseable tiers of units, each commander generally has one unit from each tier available for purchase into their squad
  • Units stats and price scale according to tier, generally late game you will only be using tier 4+ units
  • Units sellable for 50% mineral refund
  
  
• Unit Upgrades
  •• Each commander has appropriate buildings for upgrading their units
  • Weapon upgrades are more expensive and take longer than armor upgrades
  • Unit abilities and squad commander abilities cost gas to upgrade
  

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SCREENSHOTS


Map layout


Squad Commander Selection


Start mining ASAP


Commander Special Abilities described in Mission Objectives


Fight the good fight


Make sure to keep up with your armor upgrades


Storm can be your best friend


Defensive buildings are invaluable during the early game


Always keep detection on hand for those cloaked waves


Anything can be a tank if your armor is high enough!


Power overwhelming :3


Units tend to overpower buildings in the long haul

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PROGRESS

• IDEAS (100%)
  
• TERRAIN (100%)
  
• UNIT PLACEMENT (100%)
  
• TRIGGERS (95%)
  

UPDATES

• 7/9/2017
  Started production
  
• 11/21/2017
  Thread creation. Beginning alpha testing. Half of the squad commanders have been implemented. 30 rounds of enemies in place at the moment. ~100 increasingly challenging waves planned as a future feature. This part of the game should not be beatable, the goal will simply be to get as far as possible.
  
• 11/22/2017
  Fixed bugs involving units respawning after the death of Headquarters. Still need to clean up strings to reflect current accurate values.
  
• 7/17/2018
  Many improvements since the last posted version (we've come forward 30 updates). Most display strings now accurately reflect incoming wave stats. Two heroes added: Special Ops and Infested Duran. Many balance changes made. Made several quality of life updates. Upgrades no longer cost time as most found delays to be irritating with the sheer amount of upgrades necessary. Added Mineral <-> Gas exchange system for those times you need one or have too much of one. Added visual display of upcoming/current round sends below the map's round counter to make that information easier to track. Not quite done with production, but almost there. The last feature I definitely want to add is an end game sequence to test the strength of builds. I also want to potentially add the Veteran Marine and Fenix as Squad Commanders, but this may or may not happen.
  

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Made with the Map Production template.

Attachments:

Post has been edited 7 time(s), last time on Jul 17 2018, 11:01 pm by Ultraviolet.

I love the concepts you've got here. It reminds me of the old "Dawn of the Dead" maps.

This looks great. Can't wait to play it. I like the concept a lot, and it seems to already be quite polished in terms of design. I like how it gives you wave stats and warnings about cloaked waves incoming.

I remember version .025 when he hosted it public for the first time. The creator is extremely friendly and has made a game that I still play solo consistently. I look forward to see more in the future and I hope that the creator resumes work on it as this is a rather genius idea for such a simple platform. The inclusion of three new heroes (Compared to what I saw before) Now the Tank, the Defiler, and Tassadar have completely changed the way of war due to the units and abilities they get. They don't all feel unique sadly, the abilities in this case, but I am sure with time and the completion of all heroes that a nice stable sense of difference will be applied. 5/5 man!

Any updates on this? I'd love to try out a final release.

Hey guys, sorry to have seemingly abandoned the project. Admittedly, I lost some steam for the project, and have been fairly busy with life. However, I'm still interested in making a final release, although potentially with fewer features than originally planned. I have a short to do list for updating the current product, which includes 8 heroes and 30 waves. I would still like to make some form of end game sequence that tests the strength of the best builds, I just need to decide how best to approach this. As far as new hero creation goes, I found myself noticing the same issue you did, Azarael, the heroes all felt too similar. I would be excited to hear any suggestions of how to make the heroes feel more unique in their abilities. Right now I need to make some updates to the current product I have, and will post this version shortly.

Updated the OP with the current release version. I'm going to be trying to implement an end game sequence within the next couple of weeks, and from there the game will essentially be done for me. Still debating creating more heroes. I've been beginning work on another production, so I'm excited to release this project and move forward. If anyone is interested in testing with me and giving some final suggestions, let me know. I'd be happy to hear some fellow mappers' thoughts.

Since you gave a nice review for Walking Dead, I would like to return the favor for this map.
-Was first expecting commander abilities to be manual cast, but its cool that they are somewhat smart-casting.
-Early waves can be tough with bad preparation. Fresh players will very often lose, even in that stage.
-Indeed, one has to completely rely on the commander in early-game. The "Special Ops" ghost seemed to struggle because of slow speed and no splash.
-Commanders' auto-attack in late-game has next to no value compared with the abilities. Perhaps add a shop item to EUD-increase their attack speed or damage bonus from upgrades?
-Because of the extreme importance of defensive buildings, their cost seems a bit high.
-What if players had control over their unit spawn point? Each field is large enough to benefit from an invincible observer (or other small unit) to control the spawn location.
-I see that the Special Ops Kerrigan and Stukov can cast EMP Shockwaves. I've been trying to add button-skills to units in my maps, but am unsuccessful. Perhaps you can explain how to do it correctly?

Thanks for the return feedback, I appreciate it


I've honestly been a little torn here. My original concept was to make the abilities manual cast, but for the sake of ease of use and giving players more time to worry about other things I made them auto cast. Unfortunately, this takes away some of the sense of control over your commander which can be less fun.


I've noticed this too, although I thought perhaps it might add to the replayability. I suppose there's a fine line between being challenging and frustrating. My intention for the map was for it to be fairly challenging, though. I essentially practice playing the game as best as I can and see if I can beat the game with every builder. I've done that with all of them, so I know it's possible. Usually when I notice new players losing, it's because they haven't found a good corner to start out in. I don't really want to reduce the difficulty, perhaps if I added a training message for players to point them towards easier commanders this could help reduce the problem? Each of the commanders plays a little differently, and some are more straightforward and easy. I think Gui Montag and Infested Kerrigan are easy starters.


Throughout the production of this map I've struggled with making the lower tier units actually worth purchasing. It seems like because of the level of upgrades necessary and the base strength of the commander, by the time it's worth purchasing units, tier 1 through 3 units are often outdated. I experimented with making the higher tier units slightly weaker before, perhaps I could take that idea further to make lower tier units more relevant. I actually EUD added some slight splash to Special Ops' attack to try to help with that. Since he is intended to be the T6 unit for the Veteran Marine commander, I didn't want to overbuff his weapon. His primary ability, Bats, is intended to give him some early game protection and splash. Without upgrading his primary ability, I have a hard time surviving the early game with Special Ops.


I would like to be able to implement a system like that, but I see some issues coming up. I'm pretty sure any attack speed upgrade or damage bonus will be applied universally, this means that one player upgrading the attack speed or damage bonus of a unit would affect that unit's performance for all players. Worst case scenario, a player could upgrade their attack speed maximally, then another player could do the same upgrade but only to the first level, and the first player would be stuck with a first level upgrade on something they had maximally upgraded. Upgrading those stats would also make any waves using those units more deadly which could affect the balance of the game. I tried to reduce the cooldown on the primary ability as much as possible to account for its inherent weakness, but it still tends to be a weak ability. For many of the primary abilities, I could simply add an extra attack for the final upgrade to double the damage of the ability. That might help.


Would you believe they used to be more expensive? My intention was for them to be important, but also sort of a risky investment that you have to protect. If they die, they're gone and you're either out some minerals or dealing without that building. Units on the other hand, more fragile, but they come back, making them a safer overall investment. But you need both (especially with bunker based builders). I feared making the early game way too easy if I made the defensive buildings too cheap since they are near invincible early on.


I never considered that, but it wouldn't be too much work to implement and could really improve player's quality of life. I like it.


I use the Korean English translated 'EUD Editor V0.8.72' combined with Tarferi's EUD translator to do almost all of my EUDs. For button skill changes, you have to be sure to change the requirements of using the ability so that the new unit is capable of using the ability. Depending on how many units I want to be able to use the ability, sometimes I'll just give the ability requirements that everyone will fulfill (like owning a nexus, or something like that). You also, of course, have to change the buttonset. Be sure to pay attention to all the fields, including the But. count field. Also realize many units share button sets, and sometimes modifying one unit's button set will affect many. In fact, when I was modifying the button set for Kerrigan & Stukov (shared), I found it would ruin the vulture's button set, so I had to set the vulture's button set to use Jim Raynor (Vulture)'s button set. I think I had the same issue with zerglings when I was modifying Unclean One's button set. Ultimately, it's kind of a frustrating task that often requires weird workarounds. Be willing to put a fair amount of time into testing if you're going to mess with it. In fact, Kerrigan has the irradiate ability, but it shows up as EMP shockwave before irradiate has been researched. Kind of frustrating as it's deceptive. I may return her to being a hero unit so irradiate is just researched and players aren't confused. I uploaded the .mem file for the updates I made to add EMP shockwave to Stukov and Irradiate to Kerrigan. Let me know if you have any questions about it, I'll answer them as best I can (if I can). Truly we're working in territory I barely understand