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| Thread: GK's HotA Maps |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 · NEXT» |
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gnollking
Supreme Hero
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posted July 27, 2021 02:06 AM |
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GK's HotA Maps
I love creative work. There is nothing more I enjoy than receiving feedback or reviews for whatever it is I am working on. For some years now I have been on-and-off creating maps for HotA, and I think it's finally time to have a proper thread to share them. To preface this, I am not a competitive player. I prefer hot-seat multiplayer or single-player story-focused / challenge maps and campaigns. So that is what most of the maps here will be focused on. Without further nonsense, here's the catalogue of maps available for download.
Ad Nauseam (XL) - Download
 
Four ancient Elemental Lords have crashed into the world and taken over the underground.
Threatening to destroy all life, they have to be stopped.
Who will succeed, and what will they do once they seize the power of the lords?
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Maps below were made before HotA 1.7.0 and have not been tested on or updated for the latest version.
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Skill Arena (S) - Download
 
Fast 1v1 arena scenario designed for interesting fights.
A test for your most important skill, RNG.
Intended for all random starting options on Impossible Difficulty.
Based on the various "skill test" maps.
Breaking Point (S) - Download
 
Assemble and transport the legendary "Ironfist of the Ogre" back to your starting town to win.
Two of your age-old enemies have allied and are out to stop you, and you cannot lose your town to them.
Stitch in Time (S) - Download
 
New mysterious lands have appeared in the middle of two reigning kingdoms.
The race is on to explore and conquer.
Designed for 1v1 with PvP neutral combat.
Rising Waters (M) - Download
 
Four player free-for-all map with plenty of towns to fight for.
The water holds lots of resources, but something uninvited has risen to guard them.
AI opponents are boosted. Monster/plague weeks disabled.
Doomsday (L) - Download
 
Six player free-for-all map rich with resources.
Multiple combination artifacts to assemble available near each starting position.
AI opponents are boosted.
Custom Map Editor
While working on these maps, I developed my own command-line map editor, more details in this thread.
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gnollking
Supreme Hero
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posted July 27, 2021 02:08 AM |
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Map Editor
The maps linked on the original post are the few maps that I feel are ready for a full public release, but I also have a lot of different work going on with various other maps. If you're interested, here's a link to the GitHub repository: HoMM3-Maps. My plan is to use this post as a base to post updates on my most recent project (and I am also planning to post the finished maps to Maps4Heroes.com in the near future).
The HotA map editor has a few dumb limitations about object placement, such as placing reefs on solid ground. If you're interested about the ways I make my maps I have my own EdObjts.txt file available for download in the repo (or a direct link here), just place it in your HoMM3/Data folder in order to have a more consistent order of objects in your map editor and enable you to place any object you want anywhere, including the "void" underground.
WIP XL 6-person FFA map
 
This is the map I would consider my greatest work to date. A 6-player FFA XL map with a special victory condition full of events, rewarding side quests, and story to last many many many replays. Never before have I taken on such an enormous project and gone so far in my history with this game. I want this map to be perfect. I have been working on it through many versions of HotA, coming up with ideas as the days go by. If there is one thing I want people to recognize my name for on the community, it will be this map.
If you play my maps and come across any mistakes such as object placement or typos ingame, please message me on this thread so I can update the maps for everyone to enjoy! I would also love to see any feedback related to the finished & published maps, please be as honest as possible about visuals, story, events, guests or everything else! 
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Mortarial
Hired Hero
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posted July 27, 2021 08:03 AM |
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gnollking
Supreme Hero
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posted July 27, 2021 09:21 AM |
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Mortarial said:
All links are dead.
Should be fixed now.
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fred79
Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 27, 2021 08:41 PM |
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another map creator with a passion for perfection. we need more like us. i will check your works out as soon as i have the chance. 
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fred79
Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 30, 2021 05:59 AM |
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the hota map editor keeps crashing when i try to use it to view maps. so it looks like my curiousity will have go unsatisfied for now.
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gnollking
Supreme Hero
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posted July 30, 2021 07:42 AM |
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fred79 said:
the hota map editor keeps crashing when i try to use it to view maps. so it looks like my curiousity will have go unsatisfied for now.
any map or just mine?
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fred79
Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 30, 2021 08:28 AM |
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i believe it's any map, but i'll double check tomorrow. hitting the hay now. or at least, will try to.
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Mortarial
Hired Hero
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posted August 05, 2021 03:58 PM |
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Last few years I am not interested in actual playing H3, so I can't tell anything about the gameplay and the balance of these maps. But the visual style - it is fascinating! Natural looking environment, terrain mixing, a LOT of different decorative objects, which look harmonious on every your map and leaving as less empty space as possible, while keeping the area out from looking like a corridor - that's the way I like. Nice work! Keep 'em comming.
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gnollking
Supreme Hero
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posted August 29, 2021 10:51 PM |
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Been working on a lot of the smaller neutral areas in my XL map, I'd say I'm nearing almost 70% of the decorations and objects placed in total. I like to finish that completely before adding in the resources, rewards and monsters, in order to place them as fairly as possible for all playable factions.
The map will also contain completely new, customized heroes for all of the playable colors; 4 might heroes, 4 magic heroes, plus 4 prisons available quite close to the starting areas (plus extra prison heroes scattered around the map). The reason I wanted to do this is to have pretty much every available hero as your starting hero the potential to be your main, without any bad starting skills such as Eagle Eye. Sadly custom patches for HD mod are disabled for HotA (which I dislike a lot), so there won't be any new specialties, only new starting skills, spells and portraits for my hand-picked heroes.
This also adds a lot of extra creative work for the map, for which I've been working on several google sheets listing all the heroes with their skills, specialties, biographies and other notes. In total there's about 80-90 heroes to design, some of which are finished quite fast and others taking a bit longer. I also use these sheets to balance all the starting areas, listing the available dwellings, banks and other such objects in order to not get completely overwhelmed by the map myself
Mortarial said:
Last few years I am not interested in actual playing H3, so I can't tell anything about the gameplay and the balance of these maps. But the visual style - it is fascinating! Natural looking environment, terrain mixing, a LOT of different decorative objects, which look harmonious on every your map and leaving as less empty space as possible, while keeping the area out from looking like a corridor - that's the way I like. Nice work! Keep 'em comming.
Thank, appreciate it!
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Centurion
Hired Hero
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posted November 07, 2021 06:56 AM |
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These are absolutely beautiful maps man. When I play with my bros next I will suggest one of these depending on how long we want to play. Did you ever finish the 6 player FFA? I'd like to give that one a go next time I'm in the mood for a scenario
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gnollking
Supreme Hero
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posted November 08, 2021 01:20 AM |
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Centurion said:
These are absolutely beautiful maps man. When I play with my bros next I will suggest one of these depending on how long we want to play. Did you ever finish the 6 player FFA? I'd like to give that one a go next time I'm in the mood for a scenario
Thanks man, I try to make my maps full of details to explore and focus on replayability, the 6 player map is still under development and will probably be for quite some time. It's like a piece of work I return to every now and then, and I plan to have it so full of details it's kinda daunting to work on .
The maps that are finished right now I just keep looking at every now and then feeling like they could be more polished, and there's definitely some things that could be worked on more.
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Centurion
Hired Hero
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posted November 08, 2021 04:50 AM |
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Epic man! I'm a little tired of working on my maps, right about to pour a drink and load up Doomsday. Looks like exactly the type of map I enjoy, customs can be so much more thoughtful than what shipped with the game.
Haha ahh too bad, I look forward to the release. But creating these is half the fun too
Edit: Ahh man, what a great map!! I played as Ramp and finished 2/4/1. You pack so much adventure into each space. So even your starting island feels like it's got so many things to explore. Honestly it's the best map I've played, I was engrossed lol. I played on 160% but next time will do 200%. The quests for the 10+ of upg lvl 7s was fun but it felt snowbally. Maybe on 200% the AI will be able to do their quest before I get to them. So much fun!
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gnollking
Supreme Hero
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posted November 14, 2021 01:44 AM |
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Centurion said:
Edit: Ahh man, what a great map!! I played as Ramp and finished 2/4/1. You pack so much adventure into each space. So even your starting island feels like it's got so many things to explore. Honestly it's the best map I've played, I was engrossed lol. I played on 160% but next time will do 200%. The quests for the 10+ of upg lvl 7s was fun but it felt snowbally. Maybe on 200% the AI will be able to do their quest before I get to them. So much fun!
Thanks a lot man. Doomsday is quite an unbalanced map I feel, after a few plays with all the factions and seeing how the AI does there are certainly some changes that it would benefit from. (Stronghold is busted!) But hearing this is really awesome, the best motivation there is to improve and keep working on on new maps. Thanks a lot  .
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bloodsucker
Legendary Hero
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posted November 14, 2021 12:40 PM |
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Great idea to publish your maps, thank you.
I don't understand one thing, though. You say you have created completely new heroes, what does that mean? New IDs added? New specialties?
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gnollking
Supreme Hero
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posted November 22, 2021 08:14 AM |
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I have updated the main post to have a download link for a ZIP file for all the finished maps so far, making it a lot easier to download the full collection. Getting the maps uploaded to maps4heroes is still some time away. As a little update, I'd like to say that the XL map is well on its way to finishing and I am also working on a new M-size map with a unique twist I haven't seen before in any other map. Expect this medium map to release in the coming months or so and the XL map soon thereafter.
bloodsucker said:
Great idea to publish your maps, thank you.
I don't understand one thing, though. You say you have created completely new heroes, what does that mean? New IDs added? New specialties?
I have done nothing with the heroes that is not possible without the default map editor. I will only change the portraits, descriptions and starting skills of various heroes and will provide a .pdf file to explain the origins of all the heroes when the big map is released. The major thing I want to accomplish with this map is to have every single starting hero to be viable, each with a custom backstory and options to develop throughout the map, with no "bad" starting skills that would generally make a hero less optimal.
With this in mind, my original post about focusing on hotseat content or multiplayer online games becomes quite vital, since the AI is absolutely terrible when it comes to developing strong heroes. So if this map is played in multiplayer online/hotseat it will make it a LOT more interesting and replayable.
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Centurion
Hired Hero
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posted December 29, 2021 11:24 PM |
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gnollking said:
I have done nothing with the heroes that is not possible without the default map editor. I will only change the portraits, descriptions and starting skills of various heroes and will provide a .pdf file to explain the origins of all the heroes when the big map is released. The major thing I want to accomplish with this map is to have every single starting hero to be viable, each with a custom backstory and options to develop throughout the map, with no "bad" starting skills that would generally make a hero less optimal.
With this in mind, my original post about focusing on hotseat content or multiplayer online games becomes quite vital, since the AI is absolutely terrible when it comes to developing strong heroes. So if this map is played in multiplayer online/hotseat it will make it a LOT more interesting and replayable.
This sounds epic man! You must be a writer in addition to being a mapmaker lol
Hey I played some more Doomsday and Rising Waters, really kept enjoying them! Played them mostly online multi in the Hota lobby and everyone seemed to like playing. I found matches as fast for "Epic Custom Map" as title as I do for Duel matches)
Let me know if you want anyone to playtest your XL map
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gnollking
Supreme Hero
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posted December 31, 2021 02:07 PM |
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Centurion said:
Hey I played some more Doomsday and Rising Waters, really kept enjoying them! Played them mostly online multi in the Hota lobby and everyone seemed to like playing. I found matches as fast for "Epic Custom Map" as title as I do for Duel matches)
Let me know if you want anyone to playtest your XL map
That's very nice to hear! I'll most likely just share the map here once it's ready for testing. Balancing the map will take quite some time, but I'm not gonna micromanage it too much. Some starting areas can be a bit better than others, but as long as it's not too much to overcome by the other colors it's fine.
A big part of the map will be doing optional quests for seer's huts, so the AI colors will be quite heavily boosted. The victory condition is not to eliminate other players, so it's been fun to develop all the areas in the map so far.
Between the custom heroes, timed events, dozens of seer's huts, map events, some fights and other pickups, there's a crapton of writing still left to do . Pretty much all of the map is now decorated and finished, just a lot of writing left (for the most part).
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bluebird
Tavern Dweller
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posted January 10, 2022 07:34 PM |
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Edited by bluebird at 19:35, 10 Jan 2022.
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Played through Doomsday yesterday, superb map. I think it would be a good map to include with Hota as it demonstrates the combination artifacts really well. One thing I liked about it is that it allows really high powered heroes to develop in an organic feeling way in a smaller map, which is rare.
It says in the description that the "AI is boosted", how did you do this? I had a quick peek in the Hota map editor and didn't see anything.
ps. looking forward to the release of the XL map and I have watched on github so I will hopefully get a notification.
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Mortarial
Hired Hero
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posted January 10, 2022 07:49 PM |
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bluebird said:
It says in the description that the "AI is boosted", how did you do this? I had a quick peek in the Hota map editor and didn't see anything.
Did you check starting towns? There is an AI boosting event in each of them.
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