Storm of the Imperial Sanctum

Storm of the Imperial Sanctum (also known as 'SotIS') is a user made map for the real-time strategy video game, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. It is based on the "Aeon of Strife" map from StarCraft and "Defense of the Ancients" from WarCraft III.
The main objective of the game is to destroy the enemy's main structure, which is the fleet beacon for the Protoss or the Nydus Worm for the Zerg. Each player will choose one unique hero and will use the heroes throughout the entire game. Like in role-playing games, players will level up their heroes and use minerals to buy equipments during the mission. What makes this game unique is that players have the ability to call down mercenary beacons which will summon units to break the scales in battle. Which makes this game have elements of both macro-management and micro-management to the gameplay.
Gameplay
Storm of the Imperial Sanctum pits two teams of players competing against each other: the Protoss Encampment and the Zerg Hivemind. The Protoss Encampment is located in the southwest corner of the map, while the Zerg Hivemind is in the southeast corner of the map. In the beginning of the game, a 90-second countdown will execute for players to prepare themselves for battle. After the countdown reaches to 0, both bases will spawn creep waves that will attack each other. Creep waves do not have any advantages over each other. The main objective is to destroy the primarily enemy structure: the Protoss Encampment forces are to destroy the enemy Nydus Worm, whereas the Zerg Hivermind forces are to destroy the Fleet Beacon.
Each player controls one hero that is chosen during the beginning of the game. Each hero has its own unique ability and statistics. In SotIS, there are about 24 heroes that can be chosen from, and an option to randomize hero picks for additional minerals. Each patch will either contain balance changes and sometimes newer heroes, since the game is still in early development. The game is very dependent on teams, so it is very difficult to win a game when depending on one person on the team. Storm of the Imperial Sanctum allows the game to be up to ten players, with five on each team. The game is well balanced if the teams are even.
The gameplay revolves around strengthening individual heroes; it does not have the elements of a regular melee game of StarCraft II which requires the use of resource management and base building. Micro-management is essential for this game. Teamwork and leadership are the only macro elements applicable. When computer-controlled units are killed, the player will gain minerals and experience points like in role-playing games. Minerals are the player's primary resources which allows their heroes to buy combat items and mercenary beacons to strengthen them. If the players gain enough experience points, they can level up their hero which strengthens the hero's statistics and can give them the ability to learn newer abilities. If the hero levels all the way up to level six, the player can learn ultimate abilities, which is the most powerful ability the hero can use. When the hero learns all of their abilities, they can still strengthen their abilities by learning them again. This is called the "ability level", every time a hero learns an ability level, their abilities will grow more effective and more useful such as gaining more damage, lesser cooldown, and lesser energy requirements. If the player levels out all of their abilities, they can still learn "stat bonuses". These will give the hero extra bonuses to their statistics such as giving them an extra amount of damage, armor, hit points and energy.
Players can also kill allied units when they are below a certain hit point. This is called "denying", when the hero denies a creep, structure or tower, the player can prevent enemies from gaining minerals and experience points. This is useful because if the player's enemy is prevented from gaining minerals and experience points, they can fall behind and the player can easily kill them.
Unlike in other games in the Dota genre, the players can have the ability to use mercenary beacons. This allows the hero to summon units to aid the player in battle, such as medics that can heal the player's hero, players can also buy mercenary beacons that can counter the enemy's armor type, for example: if the enemy's armor type is psionic, the players can buy the beacon which can summon an anti-psionic marine and can easily kill it, or anti-biological marines which can counter biological armored types or the player can also summon anti-armored type marines to counter armored heroes.
Development
The game was made using the StarCraft II Map Editor, which is provided when installing StarCraft II. The game functions through triggers which is constantly processed when loading the game. Once the game is done loading, the triggers will execute during the Map Initialization. Like in DotA, the map is a user made map, which has purely custom made content and made from scratch by one user. Before the release of this game, selected users were able to "beta test" for the map to find glitches and bugs for the map, the beta phase began during the beta phase of StarCraft II and ended during the release of StarCraft II along with the release of the public version of SotIS.
The only way to play this game or download the map was to make a Battle.net account for StarCraft II, log in and click on the Custom Maps section and join a game, with Blizzard's system of Custom Maps, the players can only download it via Battle.net and not as a file, considering that if the users have the file, they can gain access to all the editor utilities and modify the game to make it their own version of the map.
During the beta of SotIS, eckolnovkol created an official forum for beta testers to discuss the map. To date, the website has over 2,000 members. There are sections for bug submissions, development, guides, gameplay mechanics, suggestions and strategies, and all are currently heavily moderated to maintain good quality feedback from devoted players.
Comparing to DotA
This game is roughly similar to the hit game Defense of the Ancients; it has the same gameplay mechanics and concepts, like buying items to enhance player's heroes, creeps spawning periodically in the entire game, and the option to "farm" neutral creeps in the forest. In addition, both games have super creep on each team lurking in the map, such as Roshan from DotA and Aeon from SotIS. If the players kill these elite creatures, the entire team will receive a prize money and will drop an item which contains a special ability that only one player can use; however, there are two effects within the special item dropped by Aeon that the person can choose: the first, allows players to instantly restore 75% of their total health, and the second is, summoning their own "Aeon" on the field that can stun and tank the opposing enemies. In both games, each team has towers that equally have the same statistics so both teams have no advantage over each other. Each teams must destroy every building that leads to the "ancient" or the primary building of each team in order to achieve the goal of the game. There are also differences such as the ability to call down mercenaries, and different items with different abilities. In DotA, if players destroy most of the enemy team's defenses and structures, mega creeps will be spawned. On the other hand in SotIS, it will have the same creeps but there will be an addition elite creep that is stronger than usual creeps, such as the Colossus for the Protoss and the Ultralisk for the Zerg. There is also a new combat system in SotIS which heroes have different armor types like Armored, Psionic, and Biological depending on the hero's character.

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See Also

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