Caster of Magic - new hero abilities

[Seravy]

I believe there are not enough "mage type" random hero abilities in the game. In fact, Sage, Prayermaster and Arcane Power are the only three while there are 7 fighter abilities.

I don't know if I'll be able to add more or not (icons would be especially problematic) and I definitely won't start this in the near future, but as a long term plan, I'm considering the addition of some or all of these :

Capacity - Unit has +1 Ammo per 2 experience levels.
Battlemage - Unit gains +1 MP per experience level when using a melee attack
AEther Mastery - Unit produces +4 SP to the owner's Skill pool per experience level.
Guiding Beacon - All units stacked with this unit gain +1 ranged attack per 3 levels of experience (including missile and magic ranged)
Ritual Mastery - Unit produces +10 Power per turn.
Monster Trainer - All fantastic units stacked with this unit gain +1 melee, ranged and defense per 3 levels of experience.
All of these would have the usual +50% bonus for super level.

Battlemage could instead be a preset ability in Power Drain's slot which is unused.

[Tiltowait]

How about one that does the 'fortress defense lightning bolt' every round, at a reduced power scaling with level.

[Seravy]

How about one that does the 'fortress defense lightning bolt' every round, at a reduced power scaling with level.

Too overpowered, and giving the hero the Call Lightning spell is almost the same (minus level scaling). Don't think I can code it either.

[kjara]

One minor thought is that ather master, mana focusing and sage are almost interchangeable (provided you haven't 0'ed out power in the respective category) as all effectively give power and makes sage probably the worst of the three (since there are so many other sources of +research). The same isn't exactly true for the three non-combat physical abilities (noble, fame, trainer). I could see having + power and + research abilities as with buildings (likely with research scaling slightly faster or being available on lower level heroes), but the third seems somewhat redundant.

I agree that a third non-combat skill would be interesting though. Would a scaling healing ability be interesting (aka heals 20 + 5% per 2 levels extra)?

If battlemage is in the random mage pool its going to suck to roll it with most of the standard mages. As fixed mod to the couple of hybrids it would be potentially interesting.

Assume guiding beacon like leadership would only be for non-fantastics? Might consider making it 50% efficient for non-magical ranged attacks (like leadership).

Is it possible to code a leadership type ability but only for fantastics (unclear what stats to boost, since attack is slightly less useful for fantastics due to higher base/lower figure counts, either attack at a higher rate or a more defensive spread might be interesting)?

[Seravy]

One minor thought is that ather master, mana focusing and sage are almost interchangeable (provided you haven't 0'ed out power in the respective category) as all effectively give power and makes sage probably the worst of the three (since there are so many other sources of +research). The same isn't exactly true for the three non-combat physical abilities (noble, fame, trainer). I could see having + power and + research abilities as with buildings (likely with research scaling slightly faster or being available on lower level heroes), but the third seems somewhat redundant.

I agree that a third non-combat skill would be interesting though. Would a scaling healing ability be interesting (aka heals 20 + 5% per 2 levels extra)?

If battlemage is in the random mage pool its going to suck to roll it with most of the standard mages. As fixed mod to the couple of hybrids it would be potentially interesting.

Assume guiding beacon like leadership would only be for non-fantastics? Might consider making it 50% efficient for non-magical ranged attacks (like leadership).

Is it possible to code a leadership type ability but only for fantastics (unclear what stats to boost, since attack is slightly less useful for fantastics due to higher base/lower figure counts, either attack at a higher rate or a more defensive spread might be interesting)?

Like "Monster Trainer", all fantastic creatures gain +1 attack and defense per 3 hero levels? Sounds good.
Indeed, battlemage wouldn't be very good I think I should drop that idea, it's probably hard to code anyway.

[Seravy]

I started implementing the subsystems that allow easy addition of new abilities.

In order for this to work, four things are needed :

The first, the display module is already done. Now any new ability only requires adding a new entry to a table instead of hardcoding filling all variables for the ability (icon, help, text address, etc). This also makes it easy to change the amount of bonus provided by existing ability, like Agility to 2/3 defense per level or anything like that (I have no immediate plans for such though), considering it took at least 4 hours just to make Prayermaster display correctly in the previous system, this is a huge improvement. It also generated some free space in the display procedure which might be very useful in the future.

The second, the hero generation in magic.exe, that one is coming up next. I'm considering to split the two ability types into three : Mage, Fighter, and Leader with some abilities belonging to two or more of these. This would also make it possible to define Battlemage as Mage+Fighter, so it would only apply on heroes that are both type.

The third, space to store the new ability flags. There are 6 unused bits, so up to 6 abilities can be added easily (super versions counts as another ability so that's 3 abilities actually). While this doesn't seem to be enough, plenty of data is stored as words when they are actually bytes, so up to 5*8=40 bits are easily available (though I would need to edit code to use those data fields as bytes for this to be safe)

The last, the actual effect of the new abilities, this entire depends on the ability itself but I think most of what we listed is possible to do, some might be hard, though. There seem to be unused icons in the LBX, so adding icons should not be too difficult either, and some can even reuse existing ones (Ritual Master could use Caster's icon for example). Not sure about help entries, but in worst case I can put all the descriptions into one entry titled "new abilities" and make all new abilities link to there.

Any further ideas for new abilities are welcome (including fighter and leader types as well as mage)

Edit : Created to new random ability generator procedure, it works. Added all planned new abilities to it. It also uses a table so adding more will be easy if needed. Also added them to the display table so they now show up with icon, name, numbers, everything that's needed.
All that's left is coding the effect of the new abilities, and revising existing heroes where needed (for example beastmaster should definitely have the ability that buffs fantastic units by default), and finding space in the help file for help texts.

[Seravy]

New hero ability coding is completed, everything was possible to implement.
I'll post a proper list of the new abilities and other hero changes when it's ready for release.
There are 9 new abilities, out of which, 6 has a super version.

[FrancoK]

I believe there are not enough "mage type" random hero abilities in the game. In fact, Sage, Prayermaster and Arcane Power are the only three while there are 7 fighter abilities.

Mage type with ranged attack are very powerful, however if they are effectively used by AI could be a balanced add on.

Capacity - Unit has +1 Ammo per 2 experience levels.

Very nice, but only for physical ranged attack. I'll make +1 Ammo for 1 XP level.

AEther Mastery - Unit produces +4 SP to the owner's Skill pool per experience level.

There are so few Skill enhancement it is most welcome!

Guiding Beacon - All units stacked with this unit gain +1 ranged attack per 3 levels of experience (including missile and magic ranged)

I like it, It could be overpowerful, however.

Ritual Mastery - Unit produces +10 Power per turn.

Meh.

Monster Trainer - All fantastic units stacked with this unit gain +1 melee, ranged and defense per 3 levels of experience.

Very nice. How does it work for stacked heroes all with MT? The best will add bonuses and the other noting or all bonuses are going to be added?

New hero ability coding is completed, everything was possible to implement.
I'll post a proper list of the new abilities and other hero changes when it's ready for release.
There are 9 new abilities, out of which, 6 has a super version.

Which abilities are without the super version?

[vicwaberub]

The Golden One with noble would be more immersive or does he have?

[Seravy]

The Golden One with noble would be more immersive or does he have?

Added it a few days ago. Change not yet in 1.35.