I play a good amount of starcraft 2 and there's a really popular custom map called "phantom mode". If you've spent any amount of time in sc2 arcade, you're probably familiar with this.
It's an 8 player map, open-diplomacy, everyone starts out allied with each other. 2 players are randomly chosen to be phantoms, and the other 6 are slayers (normal players). No one knows anyone else's role. Phantoms are alerted who the other phantom is at around 15 minutes in. Players' roles are revealed once they are eliminated. The whole map is revealed to everyone at the beginning, and then alternates day and night every 5ish minutes (night being fog of war, day being completely revealed).
The goal of the slayers are to eliminate the phantoms. The phantoms try to eliminate everyone else. It's basically a 2v6 in favor of the "good" team.
However, phantoms receive extra free resources, which increase as the game progresses. They also have a higher max supply, which increases as well. So at 5 minutes, phantoms might be receiving 3 of each resource per second, and have a 210 supply cap. At 30 minutes, 10 extra resources per second, 300 supply cap, etc. So there's a timer of sorts for the "good" team, since phantoms get increasingly powerful.
As part of the "good" team, you want to be looking out for players who are building up too quickly, have too many production buildings for their supposed income, over 200/200 supply, or are being overly-aggressive. As a phantom, you want to remain innocuous and hopefully encourage slayers to fight each other, until you have a chance to explode onto the map, ideally at night-time when you can cause the most confusion.
There are a few other details and extra quirks that I won't get into, but that's the gist of it.
Anyway, I want to recreate this in Aoe2 because it's hella fun, and the aoe2 community is very open to weird and wonky custom maps. However, after fiddling around in the editor for 45 minutes, I'm realizing that I know jack shit about map creation. The map editor is WAY more intuitive and easy to use than the sc2 counterpart, but I'm worried it may lack the complexity needed to pull off a map like this. There are certain problems I'm foreseeing that I haven't even begun to tackle.
For instance, the score. Is it possible to hide it, or set the scores to the maximum values? The scores would reflect the extra resources that phantoms receive, and would be a dead giveaway.
Randomly assigning roles. Is there a random function built into the editor? If the phantoms were always P2 and P5, players would catch on pretty quick. That brings up additional issues for triggers. If I wanted to do something like "If timer=10:00, phantom receives 10 wood food gold stone per second", how would I assign that trigger to a player if I don't know which player will be the phantom?
So my question is, should I spend a lot of time attempting to create this, or are there certain hurdles that just won't be possible in the map editor? Are there any resources (youtube videos/series, tutorials, etc) that will be helpful for me? If you have any experience with map creation, how did you get started? Was there a corner of the internet that was particularly helpful for you? Point me in the right direction.
Any advice is much appreciated, thanks in advance :)
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