Inspired by the Starcraft II custom map Nexus Wars, in this map you build rooms to continuously spawn creatures that attack your opponent.
Pick a side and your available creatures will show up in the neutral rooms in the middle of the map. The computer uses a custom "AI" (it's very basic) and have a chooses a random strategy out of a few options each game.
Scripted in Lua.
V1.1 Changelog:
- A bunch of balance changes, among other things making mistresses and fairies more expensive and replacing ghosts with trolls.
- Optional Hard Mode, give your opponent more income.
- Added stats room.
- Rearranged example rooms to match the Gui.
- Updated the AI build orders to match the new balance.
I played the version from 2025-08-08, since it had received quite some updates, and it's a fun little minigame to play.
I first tried it at 1.5 difficulty, won easily, so I went to max difficulty, but then I won before I got my second room type. Not sure people will think to try my strat though. Keeper vs keeper is won on max difficulty with just spending all gold on spiders.
Nice improvements to previous version.
Fun idea.
Another option is you could start out with 1 Imp mining a gem square and that is your 'income'. So roughly x amount of gold per minute etc etc. Imps could cost X amount of gold and you have to decide the balance between buying more imps (max 12) or spending on troops.
Would remove some RNG of getting gold from enemy kills and add another level of strategies: Rush units? Rush eco? Find a balance? etc etc
You could also add 'Increase level' box for a cost that increases level of all summoned units.
Or units gain extra fast experience as they fight so they gain levels and more abilities the longer they remain in the fight.
So many awesome ways this map could be evolved. Cheers!
Also I could see an exploit strat where people don't build anything early, let their traps kill the enemies and then send an expensive unit, and without an income like mining imps, the enemy couldn't create any new units to defend.
This can be a very nice multiplayer map! Maybe even turn it into a 4 player version (cross)
I agree with Loobi that Fairy's are imbalanced, A level 10 knight for 16k gold feels worse than a 2500 gold Fairy.
Maybe add a difficulty level (say the AI get's 50% and 100% more income per kill, so they can build a bit faster)
Yeah, I agree the fairies were too strong. They cost 6000 now instead of 2500 (and mistresses cost 8000). Hopefully that should bring them more inline with their power. I added a difficulty setting too, a boost between 10%-100% is possible in 10% increments. A 100% boost is very hard, but possible, at least with the heroes.
I'll look into converting it to a multiplayer map!
Heroes vs Heroes at 50% was quite close for a while, but as soon as I got Monks and Fairy's I could turn the game and plow over the AI.
Maybe you can add 1 or 2 specials or a spell that kills every enemy as a sort of last resort (most Warcraft/Starcraft based maps also have this feature) Not sure how the AI would use this though.
I played it and it was a fun little mini-game. I beat it first as heroes vs keepers, then one time the reverse order.
The start confused me a bit, since I could pick up all 4 boxes. I would have expected to pick one up from either side. I could then also build rooms where I collected the specials, but that did not bring me anything. The first time I played it I also did not figure out what all the units up north were meant to be, only afterwards in the map editor I saw they were standing on rooms. With high walls enabled (the default) you cannot see the rooms in the small 1x1 spaces. So that initial game it took some experimenting on what room gave what unit. Once I got to the fairies I quickly won. Then on the keepers, mistresses were the answer for me, but those were a bit more expensive.
The start was a bit slow, because creatures just hang around for a bit before attacking.
Thank you for good feedback, I've uploaded a updated version where the example rooms are 3x3 and shared by both sides, that should hopefully make things clearer. I also turned the slabs with the mystery boxes neutral after a choice where made, thus making impossible to pick both or build there.
I agree that fairies especially are really strong, I might do a balance patch later where I nerf them somewhat, but that will require a lot of testing. In general I found the balancing really hard to get right.
O, as a tiny request for a next version, layout those example rooms the exact same way as your room menu. That makes it so much easier to compare.
I can imagine that, but I saw the effort you put effort in. I had several times where I was thinking of winning by spanning the cheap units I could afford, only to find the enemy would pull out a higher tier unit to counter mine.