Logistics is nice. With endurance and some levels and few items B'Shan can clear sky drake nodes.
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Heroes and abilities
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(March 16th, 2018, 19:59)Littlenog Wrote: Is there a way to remove the -1 to Hit for long range? This would be nice in general for 'long range' bonus (applying also to normal units) : in my opinion, long range should act as its name implies, enjoying long range attacks like magic attack equivalents.
After some more brainstorming on possible new item powers :
Chaos, ??? name At end of turn, for each (melee?) attack on the hero, there is a 15% chance to heal 1 hp. Kinda like regeneration except random, doesn't revive at end of turn, and feeds on high attack strength which suits Chaos well. We could even merge it into Flaming as you generally want them together anyway - doing so would allow having two new item powers instead of only one. While random, the high number of rolls should in theory make it reliable enough to keep the hero alive unless the incoming damage per turn significantly exceeds the healing capacity. Would somewhat solve Chaos's problem of not being able to heal heroes, and although the ability to stack it with other healing sources when playing Life worries me, it's still much less of a problem than abilities that grant defense. Chaos ??? name Each combat turn there is an X% chance the hero becomes unable to take normal damage until end of turn. Sadly, unreliable so I probably wouldn't want to craft items with it, unless X is very high (like 60%+), but equipping randomly found ones would still be great. Unfortunately hard to implement, especially showing when the effect is active. Death - Sadistic Whenever a combat spell targets an enemy unit, heal 1 for each 8 cost of that spell. Kinda like having life drain spells except, this would trigger on any spell being cast by anyone, not just the hero itself. Basically, you could use any curse, direct damage, or instant kill spell to heal your heroes in combat. Would also work very well on heroes owned by Chaos wizards. Not AI friendly unfortunately and might be a bit of an overkill - with this, Death heroes might be better at healing themselves than even Life. So probably not a good idea. 
Given that heroes already have way too much survivability I don't think the healing ideas are good - imagine Torin with 40+ attack with the chaos heal ability (even at 15% that's healing 6+ per round). With 25+ armor, that effectively means invincibility.
Similarly, the death one would allow wave of despair to heal all your heroes for 8 HP per round, and each of your caster heroes can trigger it with their own spells - you could be healing 30+ HP per round. Even if you limit it to single target spells, that could still be 6+ healing per hero per wizard/caster per round. That's simply far too much healing. But the numbers couldn't be any lower or it won't help early game. The random invincibility isn't too bad, but I don't think you can go higher than 30 or maybe 40%. I'd rather have healing powers that affect chaos units (requiring chaos channels on the hero) or death units (requiring blood lust) which at least forces some fairly heavy drawbacks on the hero - but they wouldn't be useable without those spells, making the powers too niche. So, they'd have to also cast those spells on the hero, but those spells are normally permanent, so you'd need to make them somehow come off - but then what if you actually cast the spells on them? I don't really think you can afford to add any extra survivability to heroes.
May 11th, 2018, 08:12
(This post was last modified: May 11th, 2018, 08:32 by teelaurila.)
How about regeneration-like coming back from the dead, rather than more "can't hurt me"?
Death - Revenant Should the hero carrying the item die, and its allies manage to win the combat, the dark powers infused will raise the hero as undead. (perhaps with "animated" as from animate dead - and an undead hero can keep coming back as long as you keep winning the combat) Same rules as regeneration on irrecoverable damage. Chaos - Soul Inferno Should the hero carrying the item die, and its allies manage to win the combat, pure magical power is radiated into the hero, raising the hero as a chaos creature as if chaos channels had been cast on the hero. If the hero cannot gain another chaos channels ability, the power is released and the hero killed in an explosion as if fire storm was cast on the square. (If you want to make this random, could be either raise with a new chaos channel power if possible, or die in a ball of fire) Both of these are largely useless for the AI but very useful for the player. But heroes and items tend to be like that.
Speaking of heroes and abilities, could item hot-switching by teleporting be limited or even removed somehow? It is rather ridiculous how a single set of winning gear can go to one hero after another within a single turn.
Ideal might be that you can teleport an item to a hero that has an empty slot, but you cannot take an item from a hero by teleport (thereby no switching except if in same square). Probably impossible to implement, though? Cost of the teleport is likely the easiest parameter?
I believe the ability to move items is essential for them to be playable. You can't expect the player to always return their heroes to the capital when a new item is found. Limiting it to once per turn might make better sense but I have no way to do that. I could raise the cost but it has to be something affordable even for the early game, which is why it still costs 20. I think this was requested before but there is no good solution to the problem - however keep in mind the item can't be at two placed during enemy turns. So if the enemy catches your hero that doesn't have the items in a battle, however small battle it is, the hero likely dies. So it's not that trivial to use multiple heroes with one set of items, I tried and ended up losing one of the two heroes quite quickly.
The undead "regeneration" is bad. Undead can't heal and can't gain experience so it's the last thing you want to see on a hero. Especially on one that has 1 hit point remaining since it just came back to life (and if it restored health to max like regeneration then it'd have no drawback at all besides not gaining exp which would be far too powerful for high level heroes) The chaos is slightly better but you often want to put Chaos Channels on your heroes when playing chaos, and then it would prevent the item from working. Also you can have at most one chaos channel effect on a unit under normal rules and even if the item tries to break the rule, you can only have the breath one on a hero with no thrown, breath or ranged attack, and the flight one on a hero that doesn't fly. Either way if we wanted more Regeneration effects, the correct action would be to add that ability to more predefined items, not a new ability that does the same. As we specifically reduced that in the past, I don't think this is the case.
May 13th, 2018, 07:28
(This post was last modified: May 13th, 2018, 08:05 by teelaurila.)
Regenerating health in combat is a big deal in making a hero invincible, and if we don't want that but we want chaos/death heroes to be survivable, then coming back from hero sniping seems to be the only way.
But perhaps it's more about spells than item powers - items tend to be almost all found (at least in my use) so it doesn't go with your books. |
