UREpic Era

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Heindal
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UREpic Era

Post by Heindal »

UREpic Era contains three cyberpunk factions taken from my original campaign epical. All factions are mostly animated and they have portraits.

While the police (government) has strong, but expensive mechanical units, the syndicate uses stealth tactics, drones as well as strong infantry units. Free has the best variety of troops, as well as units with strong unique, but unreliable attacks. As this is my first faction, please help me with balancing and feedback. Thanks.

Please note: even so I've changed the right click abilities to work in multiplayer, they will not work on normal maps. I will upload some maps where they will work. They will consume the attack, maybe later even hitpoints of the caster. Due to balancing they are weaker than in the original version of the game.

The units and units pathes can be found here:

https://units.wesnoth.org/1.14/Epical/en_US/Epical.html
The future belongs to those, who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Developer of: Trapped, Five Fates, Strange Legacy, Epical, UR Epic Era
Dungeonmasters of Wesnoth, Wild Peasants vs Devouring Corpses, Dwarf Dwarfson Dwarvenminer
eurydike
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Joined: March 20th, 2018, 1:43 am

Re: UREpic Era

Post by eurydike »

This seems quite interesting.. I tried playing the 1st scenario of the campaign and it seemed quite interesting too. For multiplayer development it probably does require kind of rethinking about what the game is about, it doesn't seem like this will work very well around capturing villages etc, but rather seems like it should be something else. For an example the airships provide income, so they on some level make villages unnecessary. So from that perspective it probably does require maps that are tailored for this addon. I think the graphics seem quite "hurried", but then doing artwork is extremely timeconsuming and so that's understandable. Overall I like the mood and perhaps there are also things to improve on, but I don't want to be particularly critical. Too bad nobody seems to taken interest in this, seeing that the post was made in June 3rd... So key point. For multiplayer what's the game about? What are the different sides trying to do and what are their goals? Maybe that kind of approach would allow creating some novel system for MP. Another thing I happened to think about is that if you're making custom maps - the police car reminded me of this. It seems to be drawn from a different perspective than units typically. If you're using custom maps then perhaps units could also be generally drawn from a different perspective. If you'd go for perspective that's from the top or zenith, then maybe finding "images" to use as custom terrain would be possible or easier - you know there's the possibility of using pictures as map overlays?
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Heindal
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Re: UREpic Era

Post by Heindal »

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about that faction. I admit that I made these unit pictures in a hurry.
Some of them are indeed a little cheesy.

(The campaign Epical and the units was a christmas surprise for listeners of my radio show UR Epic several years ago and I just had two weeks of spare time to make it)

But I don't think they are too bad, especially as they are animated. Not many factions are animated, or have self-made portraits. Its hard to make everything by yourself: coding, conception, unit descriptions, balancing and artwork. Allrounders are still just average in everything and I don't have the patience for artwork, after all it's something that I made "for free" (pun intended).

I made several balancing changes in these units for multiplayer. Many abilities are right-click special that can be casted like spells and drain energy. But these factions need a helpmenu, which should than be integrated into a multiplayer map. I admid that the ad-air ship is a nice feature. But they are expensive. It takes time until they earn their costs. I already made two maps for multiplayer, but haven't finished them yet.


About the motivation: The Factions are Free, the Syndicate and the World Union (Government).
Let's add the story-line, which might be important to understand the motivation.

Story: The 21st century. A mess! Influenced by conflicts between the rich and the poor, the young and the old, transparency and corruption. A century of great technology achievements as well as scattered dreams such as cold fusion and fracking. In the middle of the 21st century the natural resources were almost exhausted and a global conflict began to arise. Fortunately a group of scientist found a simple solution for all resource based conflicts. The nano technology allow to changed the consistence of existing material changing its properties, in exchange for a massive use of energy. But with the small hope of cold fusion gone, the humans began to develop a risky way to produce enough energy for their procedures. Giant satellites produced the required energy and transferred them via microwave to the earth. 'The New Union' controlled these stations and therefore it controlled the world. But as force tends to corrupt people, it was just a matter of time for an epic conflict to begin.


While the World Union is trying to keep order and the control over the energy production. It sees the other two factions as organizations of terror. So mostly police, military forces and soldiers are part of this faction. So far it's the weakest faction, especially as right-click abilities are not yet integrated for this faction.

Balancing: The machines and tanks need to get a little stronger. I'm thinking about a soldier unit, as well as an anti-protest police unit equipped with a shield and a non-lethal shock device.


Free is the new 'social network' of the future youth, founded by the old-school hackers based on hacker ethics. This hasn't only attracted hackers and coders, but also scientists, journalists, makers and entire companies that support that faction. There motivation is free exchange of knowledge and equal rights for mutants. That is why this faction can recruit mutants, one of the most flexible units, which can ascend to a variety of types.

Balancing: The Free hackers still have a powerful electro attack - that is not intended and needs to be changed. Also the idea of having one 'mutant' unit that evolves into all other types isn't so good. The neostreamer still needs some overwork.


The Syndicate is a criminal organization that even controls entire governments and mega-corps. While they act in the shadows using high-tech stealth technology, their goals are not quite clear. Their mysterious leader is ruling them mercilessly and seems to be aware of any actions inside his entire organization. This mastermind has a plan and only he knows about it. One member of his inner circle is 'Wargirl', his top assassin.

Balancing: So far I feel that Free and Syndicate are even. The syndicate still needs some special abilities such as satellite strikes.
The future belongs to those, who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Developer of: Trapped, Five Fates, Strange Legacy, Epical, UR Epic Era
Dungeonmasters of Wesnoth, Wild Peasants vs Devouring Corpses, Dwarf Dwarfson Dwarvenminer
eurydike
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Re: UREpic Era

Post by eurydike »

Considering the flavour of the story I find this era considerably interesting. Also got a bit enthusiastic thinking about the possibilities of defining a game for multiplayer. So here are some possibilities to consider:

-------- 3 player game - "mainframe & hacker":

Goal of FR33 in this scenario is to find and hack a mainframe
Goal of Syndicate in this scenario is to eliminate the leader of the FR33 faction
Goal of Police in this scenario is to find and protect the mainframe, capture syndicate boss and safeguard the hacker.


The mainframe: An interactable structure placed somewhere in the map, inside some building.
The FR33 faction must find a way for some of their hackers to get to the mainframe and interact with it. If they're succesful, the game is won. Notably the hacker does not need to be the leader of the FR33 faction, but instead, any recruited hacker unit will do.

This results to the idea that Police both wants to protect the FR33 leader and prevent it from reaching the mainframe, as well as prevent the other hacker units from reaching the mainframe. Only one side can win, syndicate wants to find the FR33 leader before the police, so they have less resistance in reaching their goal. The police also wants to find the mainframe before the FR33 so they can prevent the hackers from reaching it. And the FR33 leader obviously wants to avoid being defeated and they want to find the mainframe.

Interactable elements inside the map. There could be elements in the map that the players' units can interact with, such as secure electronic doors, that can be hacked. Powercenters that can be destroyed to disable electric doors. For an example the hackers might want to find a way to infiltrate a building that contains the mainframe. The police would want to make sure the electric door powercenters are not broken, to make it more difficult to reach the mainframe.

--------

So this would be one type of game that could be defined for multiplayer. Other possibilities include random goals for the sides, so there could different victory conditions that are unknown to the other players. One other possibility would come with this additional faction:

Werewolves - They could be a faction that tries to imposter as members of the other factions, but they also have the capability to transform into the werewolf form. Some sort of transformation theme seems to be already going on in this game? This would particularly useful in the random goal version of the game as then players wouldn't actually know which side the werewolf faction was, without actually detecting the units changing to werewolf shape. Some goal could for some faction could then be to expose the werewolf.

Other types of games could be for 2 players, an escort mission, where the player has to reach some position in the map, and another player has to prevent them from reaching it.

Another variant of this escort mission could be such that a player has to find some mass storage device, and transport it to a certain location. This could be for an example a 3 player game where each side can take the device, and then they have to retrieve to some headquarter location. Then if one side captures the device, other sides could still try to take it back and transport it to their HQ.

----------

So basically I got this two venues in mind which would allow defining a new MP game for the cyberpunk faction: Thinking about ways to interact with the map and environment, and defining goals for different sides which make up the game logic.

What do you think about this?

(These are images for the following comment underneath)
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detective.png
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Last edited by eurydike on October 5th, 2018, 6:56 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Heindal
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Re: UREpic Era

Post by Heindal »

These ideas sound awesome. Unfortunately they aren't so easy to realize. I've never seen or played a multiplayer add-on with such options in Battle for Wesnoth. I'm quite sure I could pull this off, if I invest some time. But unfortunately for now I don't have the time (and the focus) to do that.
The future belongs to those, who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Developer of: Trapped, Five Fates, Strange Legacy, Epical, UR Epic Era
Dungeonmasters of Wesnoth, Wild Peasants vs Devouring Corpses, Dwarf Dwarfson Dwarvenminer
eurydike
Posts: 44
Joined: March 20th, 2018, 1:43 am

Re: UREpic Era

Post by eurydike »

I tried working on some of the images today morning and decided to try and do a new version of the cruiser images. Feel free to use them in your era & campaign if you think they're good enough to replace their predecessor images. I think I'll try and do some new images for the other units, possibly. I'm trying to learn more about drawing so it's good practice.. What do you think? :D (there's a limit of 5 images per comment, so I'm adding the other files to the previous comment to avoid making a new comment just for that) Also did a version of "police" and "police captain" and "detective". But they also got some thematic differences like the color of the uniform is more saturated and deeper blue, so maybe you don't like the changes. But have a look and if you'd like to include them, then great. :)
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Heindal
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Re: UREpic Era

Post by Heindal »

Nice redraw. I will see if I can embed them into the faction. Considering the quest ideas inside of multiplayer - its quite possible to make escort missions and so on. I did this in World of Wesnoth a while ago.
The future belongs to those, who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Developer of: Trapped, Five Fates, Strange Legacy, Epical, UR Epic Era
Dungeonmasters of Wesnoth, Wild Peasants vs Devouring Corpses, Dwarf Dwarfson Dwarvenminer
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