Customizability of generic units? [Discussion / Suggestions]

General feedback and discussion of the game.

Moderator: Forum Moderators

Post Reply
shevegen
Posts: 497
Joined: June 3rd, 2004, 4:35 pm

Customizability of generic units? [Discussion / Suggestions]

Post by shevegen »

This topic is about making generic units more "customized".

With that I mean something like ... take a sword fighter. They may use generic swords, say they have
one attack at power 4. Next there is some tile on the game map, or perhaps a city, with the option
to upgrade that sword, to lead from power 4 to power 5. Like a smithy, with a grumpy and greedy
dwarf! Anything like that... or a stable for horses and what not.

This upgrade may take one turn or so of inactivity. Like, a small improvement; perhaps also cost a
bit of gold, and limit the upgrades possible, to avoid mega-upgrades stacking on top of one another.

I think I also suggested some other customizability in the past, such as getting an owl scout to a unit
or so, and overlaying the picture of an owl onto the unit type to insinuate that this unit has an owl
scout now. Mechanics-wise, this could be to expand the vision by +1. Such ideas, like, slight
improvements only.

Anyway. The above is not so important to focus on whether these mechanics make sense or are
too weak or too strong.

My more general question is whether people think this could be interesting? Of course it would
require some design and thinking up front, to avoid illogical situations (I always hated in warcraft
3 how a single rod of necromancy, used onto a dead sheep, can lead to two skeleton human
warriors fully equipped appearing from that dead sheep corpse, so such nonsense should not
be possible), but slight upgrades might make the game interesting. I am thinking here of keeping
it deliberately quite weak, so to not get into the problem of overpowered changes. Several
campaigns suffer from lack of balance. And perhaps the above should be restricted to
hero-type units, which would make it less powerful automatically. But these are mostly
secondary thoughts; the more interesting part, to me, is whether people may think that
such customization could be interesting even for mainline inclusion, in the long run. Of course
the mainline has other goals, in particular getting newcomers on board, so you don't want
to confuse them with game mechanics that add more and more detail. But for older players,
this may provide a slight adjustment factor that could be interesting. Personally I definitely
belong more to the audience of those people who are interested in campaigns that bring
in new and innovative ideas; it's not trivial to reconcile orthogonal design goals. But a
discussion could always be had. So here is an attempt to try at one. :)
User avatar
patience_reloaded
Posts: 62
Joined: August 15th, 2019, 2:38 pm
Location: UTC+1

Re: Customizability of generic units? [Discussion / Suggestions]

Post by patience_reloaded »

Did you ever hear of the "Armory Mod" add-on? It allows units to drop their weapon, pick up weapons lying on the ground, and salvage the weapons of killed foes. If they are used to using a weapon of the same type as the one picked up, they will get a big benefit, but if a unit picks up a weapon that they are not used to using, the effects are decreased. For example if a spearman picks up the pike of a lv2 spearman, he will get a stronger attack, but if he picks up a sling of a lv2 footpad, the attack he gets will be very weak, much weaker than it was on the original unit.

I know it's not exactly what you suggested, but it could be worth a try if you don't know it already.
There might be more, similar add-ons. I guess that there are add-ons that give units more interesting bonuses when they level up after max level.

If you want to use equipment wildly, you could try the infamous "Legends of the Invincibles".

I personally don't encourage to include such mechanics into mainline wesnoth, however I like that they are available in add-ons.
Post Reply