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Ik the feel lol Take your time, man, there ain't a time limit on your campaigns development ^^ Yeah! Yeah, agreed. Looking forward to seeing the changes, then.

Err... I know you were. I was saying that I prefer for the enemy base to seem more lively, so putting units off wander entirely isn't very appealing to me. Hence my suggestion to expand the map and relocate S2's base. Your suggestion is also perfectly viable. I'm really curious about what strategy you used. How exactly is the map exploitable? What is the 'cheat' you're referring to?

I dunno what it is, sometimes maps do that crap to me too. There's no way to know if Cm has trouble with my later maps because they're harder than intended, or because we have different strats. I play-test my own campaign on hard mode, so that helps make normal more likely to be fine Maybe he could record his playthroughs...? I'd watch the heck outta that One of the things you could do is remove Carryalls for sides that can build Carryalls, and remove extra Harvesters for sides that can build Harvesters. They'll build 2 Harvesters and 1 Carryall per Refinery by default, and you seem to have kept the default in every mission. That way, instead of tanks, they'll build Harvesters first! You could also reduce the money. In some of my maps, I add up the price of upgrades for enemy structures and adjust the AI's funds so those upgrades will either put them at a decent starting point, at a funds threshold, or completely drain them of funds. They'll always max out their Harvesters, Carryalls, and Upgrades if possible before starting on their normal stuff, and their normal stuff will only start if they have above the amount of funds listed in the respective threshold in AI parameters. Tweaking the AI is cool. Can do a lot with it. Like I said, the mission started really cool. The three AIs seem pretty neat with their respective production facilities, but because they start with all their Harvesters and Carryalls, they can get funds REALLY quickly. Making them build one or two Harvesters will slow them down a good deal. Or, you could do the thing Cm suggested with the build rate - that's a good idea! I'll check out the new version of the map and tell you what happens, eh? Oh, yeah, and didja check out any of my other feedback? Was it helpful? I swear, I had tanks on me as I was placing my Heavy Factory lol. After one Refinery! Maybe it's just me. Hard to tell, indeed I've got a clock near my computer, it was in like a couple of minutes. Crazy. Damn lol. Yeah I had like zero problems on this map. Not even a turret destroyed. Maybe level 3 is the broken one for you? Oh, okay. The day we figure that out is the day even more crazy stuff can be done. Someday! Naww. If you can get an Engineer in there, it's better because it's literally right up the ramp. I got my Engineer in there just fine. The targets to save Saboteurs for are targets deeper in the base, like the Research Center, Starport, Heavy Factory and Light Factory. Stealth is a miracle for taking those out. Sorely needed in the map's present state. I do that sometimes, the placing units behind walls and stuff rather than spawning them in thing, but I need the AI to have units running around its base so it looks good and lively and they defend their stuff. Sometimes I spawn stuff in, or reinforce it, but because my AIs tend to build up quick on their own and patrol their own base, I usually drop units on guard at specific locations instead.

It really wasn't sufficient for me. It's not possible that I would fall THAT far behind. I wasn't that meticulous about selecting the starting and reinforcement units for optimization on this level; I sent all my units ahead and micro'd mid-fight for the sake of speed. The only explanation is that it's still broken, or at least the version I got, which should have been the latest. The unit build rate thing is a great idea. I do that in S9V2. That's something I could suggest for this map. That's funny. Not one Atreides unit got in range of that turret for the entire game for me Did the smugglers lose the fortifications at the front or back of their base for you? Or, he could adjust the event to be like BJ2 where you only get one Harvester if you captured a Harvester with the Refinery, and you get two Harvesters if you didn't. I liked that. Oh, my mistake. I guess you could use another AI (or lack thereof) for the Siege Tanks, Domaithianus. Yep. Text limit's a jerk. They change from simple guard mode to free AI use, if I understand correctly? How do you do that? About the Large Gun Turrets? You'd have to take out EIGHT Wind Traps to knock out their power, and that's if you don't destroy any other buildings that suck up energy. As for the weakness, the only significant thing I noticed was that the ConYard is right next to the infantry only. Perfect for an engineer. I did drop some concrete after capturing it on my run, before selling it, but I didn't use that to build inside their base or anything. That would've just been, y'know, cheap. Blowing stuff up is more fun anyway! For the record, I looked through the map editor after each map was completed (or quit off of). I don't see anything in the events that would qualify as a weakness, and the infantry only in the back is the only useful terrain advantage. I described my process of moving through each apparent potential strategy until I found the one that worked. Like I said, I think the map is super misleading in its presentation and ultimately requires too much precision to complete at what feels to be an appropriate time. When you do re-try it, good luck. I'd like to hear whatever strat you come up with, especially if I really did miss something.

Got the update and blazed through the missions. Including the first ones again. I tested on normal difficulty, so here's my two cents: M1V1: M2V1: M3V1: M4V1: M4V2: M5V1: M5V2: M6V1: M7V1: M7V2: M8V1: M9V1: M9V2: I've been writing this up for a few days. Just adding whatever I can when I can. Finally done looking at / beating everything, so this post is complete. I hope my feedback helps you improve the maps that need improvement, and when you're ready on the few maps I didn't play through to the end, I'll try 'em again.

Yo fam, I played your map ^^ I've got some feedback for ya. I played through on Hard, by switching a little after I'd built up from Normal (with Debug mode). Here ya go: MAP LAYOUT: BASE LAYOUT: MAP DESIGN: STRATEGY: So, fun map. Hope my feedback helps I also eagerly await your feedback for my own maps thus far ^^

Oh, pardon me - that's my work lol It has its own threads Sorry to get off topic here!! Here you go: Now then, please comment in THOSE threads if you want more information! I would rather keep the chatter about it here as brief as possible. I was only mentioning it to Domaithianus in passing.

Hahaha XD It's all in good fun. As long as the admins don't mind, I guess it's fine. I look forward to hearing what you have to say. Have fun.

Hey, don't forget to check out my smugglers campaign and/or the new Harkonnen maps! I still need feedback on those, especially the Harkonnen maps. They're the newest Be as hard on 'em as you want. The better I fix 'em up, the better quality campaign it'll be when it's done.

Missions 4, 5, and 7 too? Interesting I'll have to check those out too.

Nipples, huh? Well...! GG no re. But seriously, it's fine I was doing the same thing, if I remember right. lol

Ditto ^^^

Oh, okay. Lol, that was your intent on M5? Didn't really work out, eh? I just wanted to group everything up, wreck whatever was in my way with focused fire, and capture anything in sight. For the second half of the map, I did a little scouting with them and found the Siege Tanks on the cliffs, but that was it. That's all I really feel the need to scout - the base perimeter. After I've found a point of entry, I start attacking things. You can see a lot of my scouting behavior in the raw footage I put up of either S3V2 or S5V1... in S3V2, most of the map was explored in about a minute, and when I had a stronger force, I went a little further east as I narrowed down where the enemy might be. I stopped at a suspicious break in the cliff. In S5V1, one party scouts the Harkonnen base to the north. Although not included in the raw footage, said base was mentioned in the briefing, and the Harkonnen are implied to be neutral for starts. The other party checked around the map and navigated a few rock islands before stumbling across the Ixian base. Under both circumstances, I had some structures to place or units to build in the meantime, and a fairly fortified starting position, so my units were expendable (though preferably they would be kept alive) and, importantly, some of the most effective scouts in the game. Raiders. Fast and light. In M5, I had no Outpost to keep a better eye on uncovered terrain or my scouts (alt + unit group bind is nice, but only goes so far), my units were extremely valuable since I didn't know if the AI was building up while I was capturing things, I had no way to replace them, and I had even more important units - the engineers - I needed to get into the enemy base presumably as quickly as possible. The stealthies were much more important, I figured, fortifying my main attacking force. I still sent the Fedaykin slightly ahead of the fremen warriors, for the record, but only far enough to identify threats to my strike force just before they found themselves engaged. By doing this, I managed to keep most of them alive through quick micro-management (scatters and focused fire, mostly) while taking out the Medium Gun Turrets, the Imperial Light Infantry, and the Imperial Trikes. Unfortunately, this combat-focused scouting method did not clue me in to the existence of a Refinery so far to the east. On a related note, I attempted to use the Stealth Raiders on M2 to scout on my first attempt, but the spaces they had to navigate were tight and quite close to Ordos turrets or infantry, meaning I had to pay much more attention to them or they would no doubt attract the attention of Ordos forces and be destroyed. After the excessive Combat Tanks wrecked the hell outta me, I kept them in my base on all subsequent attempts, but they did no good there anyway. M3, on the other hand, was quite open and I had a few locations to leave the Stealth Raiders without needing to worry about enemy infantry likely passing by them... but getting them out of the little corner in the southwest was something of a pointless hassle. I like to act with precision of my own volition, but forcing the player to be so precise as a prerequisite for the map, or some part of it, is easy to make... annoying. Like, for instance, you can see I'm precise in my unit group management just before the Harkonnen arrive in the S3V2 run. I pick off Grenadiers in particular with my Raiders and have my Troopers take down the Medium Gun Turrets and Quads defending the Atreides proxy base. When they start sending a few vehicles my way, I do something counter-intuitive by using my Troopers to cover my Raiders from vengeful Atreides forces while my Raiders chew up the production structures. Normally it's the other way around! That was an attack I prepared for; I covered my Troopers as they crossed the map, and the units coming my way were staggered for the most part on account of being produced from factories. I had enough leeway to focus my fire on priority targets, and the successful destruction of the proxy base was the result. Now here's a hypothetical example of annoying precision. Let's say instead of Medium Gun Turrets, I placed some Large Gun Turrets around the Atreides base. Then, instead of Raiders, I started out with Quads. First of all, Quads are slower and less effective scouts than Raiders. I finished a lot of scouting of the edges of cliff walls and the midfield battleground by the time the Atreides started attacking, but with Quads, I probably would not have uncovered so much. Secondly, you may have noticed at one point during my scouting, I take one or two shots from a Medium Gun Turret when I wander a little too close to the northern cliff edge... if it were a Large Gun Turret versus a Quad, it would have killed or severely damaged the scout. Since it's a Raider's explosive-resistant armor taking fire from a Medium Gun Turret, it doesn't deter me from scouting in the slightest, provided I relocate my vehicles quickly enough. Reasonable. More importantly, the scout survives with a nice amount of HP so I can use it to defend my perimeter from Atreides patrols a couple of minutes later. I wasn't at risk of very easily losing or almost losing a unit by scouting, and if I were even less reactive, I still wouldn't have taken TOO much damage. Here's another example. On S9V1, the player begins with an Outpost, power for that Outpost, and six Stealth Raiders. Summers is tasked with scouting out the enemy positions. Four specific locations are revealed. Moriaen and Durant have units all around their bases and the cliffs surrounding their bases, so much of the friendly corner of the map is visible... the four locations that are revealed include the Atreides, Harkonnen, and Imperial Construction Yards, and one Spice field. The briefing makes it clear you can lose your Stealth Raiders while scouting as much of the enemy territory as possible. The objectives pertaining to scouting are listed here: 1. Scout the Atreides and Harkonnen positions. 2. Discover any weaknesses in the Imperial defenses. Bonus: Scout a suitable location for Durant to expand. The AI's build speed should account for the time it takes to scout. Several events can be found while exploring... find a certain unclaimed rock island, and Summers will comment, 'This looks like a good place to set up my own base.' Explore near the revealed Spice field, and Durant is like, 'I can expand here.' Checking just inside the main base entrances will result in Summers relaying information back to her allies about the enemy positions. The entrances are very close to the Construction Yards that are revealed on the minimap. The final location that can be found is outside the walls surrounding the Imperials' main base. There are a lot of ways it could have been done in an annoying sort of way. Discovering all the events could be mandatory, but it's not. The Stealth Raiders can be destroyed, and you'll get your MCV; you'll just lack some information. The map could consist of much tighter paths, or you could start with only a couple of Stealth Raiders... there are infantry that move around enemy territory, there are some turrets and infantry in the way of the base entrances, but your Stealth Raiders are expendable, fast, and easy to get around enemy territory. And, there less events to discover than there are Stealth Raiders. I think you get the idea by now for how I approach scouting and scouting design. I could bring up some combat examples, but I don't want to yammer on too long and it's kind of irrelevant. Getting back to M3, there were three Missile Tanks among the numerous Atreides forces in the way of the Stealth Raiders we start with. Getting some Carryalls through to pick them up and bring them back to base would require the construction of a High Tech Factory, a Repair Pad, the purchase of the Heavy Factory upgrade... the Missile Tanks might need to be peeled away from the group and destroyed, too. Meanwhile, some combat units arrived with the MCV and I had my whole base perimeter scouted by the time I put up a Heavy Factory. I guess it wasn't so much precision as it was simply a hassle. So much so that I actually discarded the Stealth Raiders at the start of the map! I just put them in an inconspicuous corner of the tiny area they were confined to. The only reason I got them out is because after my infantry blew up the required Wind Traps, several Atreides units came after them, causing the S2 units crowding the choke point to scatter. A path was cleared where no infantry would detect the Stealth Raiders, so I navigated them on through. That must be what brought "precision" to mind - navigating the Stealth Raiders through after the way had been inadvertently cleared. That could probably use some adjustment if you want to encourage scouting... or you could nix 'em entirely and give the player a few Raiders to scout with when the MCV lands. That could work too. Oh. Umm... given how level 3 went, I guess I didn't really get that impression. I get that maps don't really need to have continuity, context can be given in the briefing, but I figure I should mention that. Maybe some more fierce attacks on level 3 would rectify that? You know, make the Atreides seem more imposing. Despite the smugglers being quite productive on level 4, the Atreides attacks felt a lot more impactful there. Way more than level 3. Major tweaking, overhaul, whatever works! What you may call major tweaking, I may call an overhaul. Yay. I'll check this out when I get the chance, if only to beat level 2! Good idea, don't spoil yourself. I don't play too much! 3-5 maps could take an hour, hour and a half, easily. Not much time at all!

Ironically, testing more can result in worse balancing issues I'll explain when I get to that reply. Kinda? Oh, I see. Then that's quite fair, but like you said, the Ordos doesn't have enough deterrence early on. Do you like the idea of Light Infantry and Raiders alone, or something, and then stronger stuff to take out the turrets shows up when the engineers arrive? I agree with the circumstances on this map making reinforcements an ideal choice for map progression. I just think reinforcements tend to be misused, often overused, in general. And speaking of reinforcements, did you consider the suggestions about the Harvesters? Great! Did you also consider dropping a transmission in for the second set of reinforcements, or do you suppose that's superfluous? Fair enough. I'm not sure ramping up the difficulty is a great idea, since it's level 1, after all... but having less Troopers will certainly discourage an early attack, and at the very least it could prevent the absolute destruction of the enemy base before the transmission and reinforcements show up. Point about the second outpost? You mean... when I noted there was just one Raider there, and otherwise the same amount of forces as the first outpost? I thought that was fine. 'It's a fine increase in difficulty from the last outpost, slightly more, nothing substantial.' I guess one more Raider couldn't hurt, though. That sounds much better. Yeah, I dunno what the heck happened if you were only getting five tanks. I wish I got a better screenshot, because even when I bumped the difficulty down to normal (since you tested it on normal, I figured it would be balanced for normal), I still got rolled over. It became overwhelmingly obvious something was broken, which is when I looked at the map settings, and identified the problems I mentioned. What you did to nerf them should help a lot. You could also set the AI to build two Harvesters for each Refinery. If they don't start with any Harvester, they'll spend Solaris and time pumping out a Harvester first, rather than an early Combat Tank. The additional path could still be helpful. If I can get a few Raiders behind their attacking units and use them to chew up enemy infantry in the back, it makes a difference. You may notice that my maps tend to be really open in some places. This reduces the issues with unit pathing, allows the player to maneuver their units better... one good example of a non-linear map is S5V1. There are several unclaimed rock islands you can deploy your MCV(s) on, there are some obstructive cliff walls, but there are multiple paths around them too. And, there are quite a few ways to approach the enemy base, both literally and figuratively. I go into more detail in one of my replies to Cm on your other thread And I even dropped a link to some raw footage of a hard mode run there. Oh, yeah, and remember when I said earlier that testing more may result in worse balancing issues? Speaking from experience, after I've designed a map that's meant to be tough and I put it out, other folks are like "MEHHH OVERTUNED" and I'm like "but this and this and this." Since we need to test our maps often while designing them to debug and fine-tune the AI, we naturally learn a strategy for that map very well. It's therefore a good idea to 1. get more opinions, 2. tune the map so it's a little easier for you, 3. consider carefully the various choices you may imply the player should make, or compel the player to make, and 4. come back a while after you've made the map and try to beat it again with a foggy memory. Cm does that last thing too, it's useful to check against preknowledge, especially if your memory is crappy like mine. That will help a lot, especially if the path you opened exposes more Spice. I figured that was the reason behind the high tech on such a low level. I figure that folks who play my own maps will already be familiar with D2k, but I try to ease the tech level up anyway. It gives the player time to adjust to my mapping style and AI tuning, allows them to adjust to my mod's different settings, and I feel more comfortable with the map progression pacing as technology slowly rises. The Combat Tanks added on their own by S4V1 bring the player into a new state of mind after the previous few missions containing light vehicles and infantry, and then on S5V1, I throw all sorts of non-combat units or support structures like Carryalls, Engineers, MCVs, Repair Pads, or Medium Gun Turrets into the mix. It's nice setting up a proxy base someplace inconvenient for the enemy, and then pumping out those armored tanks to both defend the location and assault their forces. I also design the maps with attention to the tech level, like S5V1's Spice fields are spread out or behind cliffs, but you can build Carryalls on that level. There's a Spice field that should last nearly the whole map, if not the whole map, right next to your base on S1V2. And on S3V2, you can't build Carryalls, but you start with a couple because the mission takes place in a smuggler Spice mining base. I digress. I totally agree with the adjustment of map design, tech level, or whatever you must change to reduce tedium. Sounds good. So, no more walls are gonna blow up? Oh, really? I just kinda slipped them on through the Atreides units. There was a spot where they lacked infantry, so I could get them through no problem. They just kinda seemed like random units without any other purpose. I think you could remove them, they won't be missed. Speaking of Stealth Raiders, I notice you place a couple of stealthies on several levels. There are two on level 2, two on level 3, you even get two Fedaykin on the 5th level. What's up with that pattern? Not that I don't use patterns, myself, the starting squad of light vehicles in the smugglers campaign is usually four Raiders and two Quads... but Stealth Raiders in particular aren't commonplace units like those, they're pretty special and really overpowered in the early game for scouting. So, I was wondering about them. Yeah, the beginning was surprising and I did feel a sense of urgency. Good job on that one. Right. Well, as long as it's cleared away eventually, it should make the base structure better and more open. Does this mean you also added a little bit more room in the smuggler base? "I'll be gentle," he says, as he rolls over me with eighteen tanks on level 2. Okay, that sounds good. The initial deterrence will provide some fun and stuff to blow up while we're building up, and then we'll have some leeway to go and blow up the Atreides base. Ayy. Like I said, just because I pick apart the details doesn't mean I don't like the map or have fun. Stuff like the three worms on BJ4 (I think it was level 4) is annoying, and level 2 being broken was pretty disappointing, but otherwise stuff's been fun to varying extents. A little too far? XD The reinforcement spam is totally OP. Like, I didn't even have to build anything anymore. I'm not recommending this, this is just an example, but sometimes all it takes to 'turn the tables' is a decent amount of reinforcements for the player coupled with some diminished enemy strength, like all their reinforcements from that point on are somewhat weaker, or they get into a fight with another faction, which wears them down somewhat. An overhaul, huh? Sounds serious. Did you already notice and plan to implement certain things I recommended? :o

/wrists Oh, that's cool. It was very annoying bad luck T_T Pls nerf worms Oh, maybe I don't remember it then. Yeah. If you go back and change up the campaign, I look forward to seeing what's fixed.