WarCraft III Maps by Antistone
Little Map Ideas
These are general concepts, not fully developed.
This is a structure for a competitive tower defense-style map, where the difficulty automatically scales until one player succeeds the the other fails.
Some collection of runners spawn (simultaneously or in series), and each runner (or type of runner) can be separately upgraded in some matter (increased in difficulty). Any given runner spawns for both player at the same time (each player gets their own copy).
If both players succeed in killing the runner, the runner is upgraded, and then respawns (possibly after a delay). If one player kills the runner, but the other does not, then the player who failed to kill the runner loses a life (or a point, or whatever) and the runner is not upgraded when it respawns--until the player who isn't killing it gets his defense improved enough to kill it, he will continue to lose lives. If both players fail to kill the runner, then neither loses a life, and the runner respawns without upgrades.
Thus, if the waves are too easy, they'll get upgraded; if they're too hard, they inflict no penalty, and they don't get harder until the players have upgraded their defenses enough to handle them. One player can damage the lives of the other by maintaining a competitive advantage, even though the players do not directly interact.
This method has the additional advantage that if there are several types of runners, and it is possible to specialize in fighting one over another, players can "attack" each other through specialization in one particular type (thereby ensuring that type dies on their side unless the other player does the same), and the difficulty of each type of runner will automatically scale to the success of the players' defenses against it.
This is a structure for a competitive survival-type map, where the difficulty automatically scales to the performance of the two players (or teams) until it finds a point where it is too difficult for one side, but not the other.
There is a long, linear (but not necessarily straight) path along which combat occurs, with the two teams' bases at its two ends. Monsters spawn on this path, between the two bases. Additionally, there are a series of control points defined along this path, which can be "captured" by either team or by the monsters. A control point is "captured" when at least one unit of a particular team is near it, and no units of other teams are near it (where the monsters count as a third team for this purpose), and control points must be captured consecutively. Notice this means that the border between teams' controlled areas will correspond to the front line of fighting; heroes capture more ground as they push the monsters back, and the monsters capture more territory as the heroes fall back.
Monsters spawn midway between the two most extreme control points they own, and half travel towards each base. The fewer control points the monsters currently own, the more rapidly they spawn in (this should be calibrated such that, if they are in danger of running out of control points, they should start spawning faster than the heroes can possibly kill them, to ensure that they always have some territory).
This means that if both teams of heroes are killing the monsters faster than they spawn, pushing them backwards and claiming more territory, the monsters will start to spawn more quickly, increasing the difficulty for both teams. Conversely, if both teams of heroes are unable to kill the monsters as fast as they spawn, they will be forced to give ground, and as the monsters gain more territory they will spawn more slowly, lowering the difficulty for both teams. If one team is able to advance while the other team falls back, the spawn rate (and thus the difficulty) will stay the same, but the monsters will move towards the base of the losing team, eventually attacking and destroying it. Thus, as long as one team is able to withstand a higher speed of monster spawns than the other, they can place pressure on the enemy team and force them backwards, eventually defeating them.
Note that, since difficulty is adjusted by varying the number of monsters, area-of-effect skills will need to be very tightly controlled to maintain game balance.
A map wherein one player plays a thief with a rogue teleportation device trying to locate and steal a particular set of items from various buildings and the other player(s) try to track him down.
Detectives can also teleport, but can't figure out a location that the thief teleports to until exactly five minutes after he teleports unless they can find the exact location that he teleported from. The thief will leave behind various evidence (prints, DNA, dropped possessions, etc.) if he isn't careful, which the detective can collect to catch him more quickly, and if the detective can infer what the thief is looking for he can get there ahead of the thief and cut him off.
Meanwhile, the thief needs to get in and out of any location in under five minutes to avoid being caught (possibly less time later in the game) and needs to warp out from some obscure and/or hidden location so that the detective(s) cannot trace him in under five minutes and start catching up. He wins if he can find and grab all of his target items before the detectives catch him.
Based on the concept of Knightmare Chess--your hero's inventory is used to hold up to a certain number of "cards" that can be used for various strange and spectacular effects, and then you can draw a new card to replace it (give the "cards" a nontrivial linked cooldown). Cards might do such things as adding powerful buffs or debuffs to particular units, adding or removing experience or resources, replacing all the workers of all players with tier 1 melee units, changing the victory conditions of the game, etc. The general idea might work in an AoS as well.
There are a lot of maps on battle.net which look initially like ordinary melee maps, but are in fact rigged so that one side cannot reasonably lose. I thought these maps might not be so bad if it were rigged in such a way that one could not merely win through having 100 Tauren in the first minute of the game, but win with style.
Some ideas which have been developed toward this end:
Most of these ideas might also be well-suited to use in a silly but balanced map where the goal is to put your opponent into absurd situations.
All concepts and ideas on this page may be freely used by another in implementing any WarCraft III map. If you implement any of these ideas in your own map, closely following the descriptions above, please email me so that I can take a look.