Pyramidal Defence

[cohadar]

NOTE: map description in this post is 2 years older than the map attached below. I keep it for historical purposes.
The map is unfortunately protected, I lost the unprotected version a long time ago.

This is a hero-team-survival game.
Survival of the fittest, death to the weak!

Two opposing teams fight each other
who will survive the oncoming waves of creeps longer.

Each team has it's own pyramid he has to defend,
creeps waves try to climb the pyramid and enter the portal on top.
When creep enters portal team looses a life.
Team that first loses all lives, loses the game.
There are 64 lives for each team on startup.

Creep waves eventually grow stronger and get more wicked abilities,
heroes can fight only creeps on their side, or can backstab heroes of opposing team while they are defending their pyramid.
When hero dies it counts as -1 life for a whole team.

Lets see some pictures:

Starting point:

Hidden information:

At the beginning you will get a hero soul at your starting point on top of the pyramid.

Hero soul is a brand new way of picking heroes.
It has 3 spellboks (STR, AGI, INT) in witch you can pick different heroes.
When you pick a hero from spelbook hero soul morphs into a hero.
You can repick by turning hero back into a hero soul. (ability on hero)
Repicking is working only in first 60 sec of the game, after that it is disabled.
In that 60 seconds you can have any number of repicks you want,
you can even try out all heroes and directly see their abilities.

All heroes have 4 different passive abilities based on their primary attribute:

STR - Bash, Cleave, Magic Reduction, Defend (Piercing Reduction)
INT - Focus (more damage based on level), Mana Shield, True Sight, Taumancy (Mana restoration)
AGI - Critical, Invisibility, Evasion, Haste

All passive abilities are on the same button, and they are switched by
clicking on that button.

You can have only one ability active at one time,
So you can for example turn on Cleave when fightning creeps,
then turn on Bash for 1 on 1 Hero Combat, then Magic Reduction if you start to get nuked by enemy heroes....

In addition to this 4 passive abilities heroes have
2 basic active abilities
1 aura
1 ultimate
and +4 generic hero stat bonus ability

Hero pic:

Hidden information:

The first thing I would like to point out is that ALL units (both heroes and non-heroes) have jump ability.
( Hotkey F )

You can jump over cliifs (both up and down) to cross the levels of pyramid faster,
Do NOT go around NOOB

Jumping height/distance depend directly on your hero speed,
the faster you are the further you can jump.
There are also jumpPads around the map, when you jump from a jumppad you can reach much furder.

Extended inventory:

Hidden information:

You can have 12 items on your hero !!!
Press the extended inventory button to swap 6 items between primary and secondary inventory.
All item bonuses will work even from secondary inventory
All item bonuses will also stack directly, there are no orb effects in this map.

You can also double right-click an item to move only that item from primary to secondary inventory.

-------------------
There are 3 shops with items of different power.
Items are divided into classes (INT STR AGI)
So each items will give a bonus to one primary attribute + some item specific ability.
Example: Thorium Shield will give +8 STR and active area shield buff ability.
So this item will be more usefull on STR hero than on AGI or INT one bacause STR will also give additional damage to STR hero.

Do NOT underestimate item classification, each primary attribute point will give you 4 (four) damage points.

There are no stupid +100 damage items in game,
all items have a unique ability that increases hero power in quality more than in quantity.

All items cost LUMBER, and gold.
You will recieve lumber periodically, you will also recieve 1 lumber when ever you kill enemy hero.

For killing creeps you get 1 gold.

There are Corrupted of War and Antient of War at top of pyramids who can upgrade creeps on enemy side for gold.

You will have to balance between getting some items and upgrading your creeps to win.

TIPS:
Do not pick all AGI heroes like all noobs do.
This is not some lame game with tomes where heroes are imbalanced because of their primary attribute, If you see all in your team pick AGI and STR hereos you better pick INT one because your team will lose if you go only for one hero type.

All hereos and creeps also have different/armor attack types
witch means that some heroes will be more effective against some creeps,
There are even some creeps that can only be killed by INT hereos,
also creeps that are totally immune to magic.

All heroes also have auras, if you all pick same hero, auras won't stack,
but if you pick 4 different ones, you will have 4 auras = you will own enemy.

Diversity is the key here.


TRICKS:
Level one shop also acts as a tower, it will not attack creeps,
but it will mess up enemy heroes real good.

There are also 2 fountains at top-mid and bottom-mid parts of the map,
they look like they are not working, but come close with some INT hero and turn on True Sight

CHANGELOG: (for latest version)
* Made it 5vs5 game (it was 4vs4)
* Fixed some AI engine bugs.
* Added 3 new items
* Recoded restorator to use generic INT skillbook

[CommanderZ]

I like the concept. It is in extremely early stage of development though, it needs a lot of work.

- everything is way too sloow. Increase movement speed of creeps and heroes.
- wave 1 kept spawning forever for me. is it intended?
- heroes cann attack while juping. it is very funny to watch tauren making insane in-air tricks with his huge battleaxe :D
- 2-3 small int items are absolute must for tauren. His starting mana is too low.
- ranged heroes are imo a bit OP. The ability to fire from safety (ranged creeps somehow don't attack uphill attackers) is invaluable
- put some mana/health fountain on top of the pyramid. Now it is more convinient to die than to wait for your mana to regen
- change your tileset to something with non-natural cliffs to make it look alot more like pyramid (I can attempt to make some yellowish large stone block tile wihich are real pyramids built from). I have also seen an egyptian doodad pack on this site some time ago.

[cohadar]

I already had complaints about it being slow,
but it is only the first waves, each next wave has +10 movement speed.

Wave one infinite spawn is a bug,
it never happened to me thoy, and I played this over 20 times on bnet.
What did happen is that first wave is skipped and game starts from wave 2.

This happens when there are loading delays on startup (people alt-tabbing)
Possibly because I initialize some things at zero-second of map starting.
Will check it out.

Best thing to get to a tauren is armor,
this is a team game remember, you can get one of your INT teammates to
use rejuvenation stone to restore your mana,
and you can always use fountains in the middle-top/bottom

Ranged heroes are not overpowered,
it is just that melee heroes cannot play without support,
they need a team-healer.
In pro game if you don't have a melee hero == you lose.

Creeps attack uphill, I just have a lower acquiry range than the actual attack range on some of them.
It is a mistake in design, will be fixed.

There will be no fountains at top of pyramid,
I tried that and people were just hoping up-and down the pyramid to heal,
it kills gameplay,
get healing/mana restoration items or suffer the consequences.

Dying is not convinient - your team will lose one life.

I will not change tileset, it would make tree-shops to look silly,
I will change game name instead.
This mostly because someone made a game called "pyramid escape" or something and people get stupid sometimes...

I am open to new name ideas.

Instead of pyramid tileset I need a corrupted tree doadoats,
I want to put some trees on pyradis here and there,
but I want the side with corrupted shops to have corrupted trees,
using ashenvale dead trees just looks lame,
I need a purple skin for trees...

[cohadar]

Well new version.

It is coming really slow but at least it is rolling...

[TEC_Ghost]

Not to bad, terrain is kinda bland atm might wanna spruce it up :)

Other then that seemed pretty solid so far, good features set it apart from most hero defenses.

[thenewguy]

Looks great, but 3 agility, 1 strength, and 1 intelligence hero seems to be a good combo.

Its looks like there is no incentive to pick a support role because you will get less gold, and as such, be less powerful, discouraging people. The incentive to win is not good enough for B.net people.

[cohadar]

Actually gold is used only for team upgrades, so it does not matter who in the team makes most the kills because all will get even bonus.

Items on the other hand mainly cost lumber and lumber is received periodically.

I specially designed this map to favor support classes,
a bunch of killer heroes will always lose against a team with a good support player.

Anyways new version is heavy under development,
and I still have a couple of tricks I did not show before...

[cohadar]

New version.
I have finally completed all game engines.
This game now has a ton of quality but absolutely no quantity.

For that reason I am officially starting to gather a development team.
Any help is welcome from simple comments to proper beta testing,
from giving ideas to creating items/spells to be used in the map.

People who want to get more involved will receive a development map
with most game engines implemented so they can create stuff that can be directly imported in game without modifications.

I hope we will all have fun creating/playing this.
Cheers.

[Pyrogasm]

You wanted me to join the development team... yet you know I can't use vJASS.

Why? I'm useless for anything except scripting.

[cohadar]

Not true, you are of more use than you think.
You being on Mac is absolutely no limitation.

CSData as you know translates very good to ABC
and you already have PUI for Mac don't you :D

Besides I always need someone to test if the map has problems for Mac users don't I?

-------------------------------------------------------------
I am currently adding a support healer hero.
His abilities as planned are:

Healing touch - heals 5% of units total HP (autocasted)

Protective shield - basically abbadon shield from dota

Spirit link - a custom ability that connects lives of healer and target friendly hero and keeps them in balance. (lightning between the two is always visible and breaks down if they get too far away from each other)

??? - need idea for ultimate spell.
-------------------------------------------------------------

So pyro if you are up to it, I could delegate Spirit Link spell to you.
(Any spells you make for pyramidal defence is free to be published on your spell request list)

[Pyrogasm]

Oh what the hell; I suppose.

I'd be basing the Spirit Link ability off of Chains of Solidarity, but you'll have to tell me: what exactly do you mean by "in balance"? They will always have equal % life or something?

[Deaod]

Ultimate for your hero:

Infuse Life (Guild Wars anyone? :P):
Your hero looses 50% of his current life and ally target hero gets healed to maximum life.


I'd like to apply for beta testing... can't promise i will have lots of time, but i will do my best. Maybe i can also give you some input on heroes and items.

[cohadar]

Originally Posted by Pyrogasm

Oh what the hell; I suppose.

I'd be basing the Spirit Link ability off of Chains of Solidarity, but you'll have to tell me: what exactly do you mean by "in balance"? They will always have equal % life or something?

Yes I knew about chains of solidarity, that is why I offered you that spell :)
and yes I meant % life.

Originally Posted by Deaod

Ultimate for your hero:

Infuse Life (Guild Wars anyone? :P):
Your hero looses 50% of his current life and ally target hero gets healed to maximum life.


I'd like to apply for beta testing... can't promise i will have lots of time, but i will do my best. Maybe i can also give you some input on heroes and items.

Infuse Life seems to plain, but maybe something like drops his life to 1 hp but heals all allied units to max :D
Think about that massive/all direction...

All input and comments is always appreciated.

[cohadar]

New Version - 2007.12.30b

Happy New Year.

[Pyrogasm]

Haven't started the spell yet.