Abilities Era
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Ken_Oh
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Abilities Era
This era is pretty much complete, as far as the original intended scope goes. Balancing (hah, probably going to be a joke) and polishing are all there is left. Of course, unit graphics would be nice, but I'm not going to hold out on that one. I just hope people can have fun with this.
The era in a nutshell
The unit attacks and stats are very bland.
-Knights mainly do blade damage, like mountain terrain are mainly weak to pierce damage, except their heavy unit which is resistant to pierce.
-Pirates mainly do pierce damage, like water terrain and are weak against impact damage, except their heavy unit which is resistant to impact.
-Bandits mainly do blunt damage, like forest terrain and are weak to blade damage, except for their heavy unit which is resistant to blade.
Every level 1 unit, except the archers, has a unique weapon special or ability. Every level 2 unit, in addition to the level 1 abilities, has an ability that effects adjacent units in some way.
Known Issues:
If you know a way around these, let me know. Note that moveto events cannot be used for aura effects, since they can be abused by undo (and I don't want to lose undo)
-Some aura abilities, like Entrench and Fog, cannot currently be shown on the attack window. Optimally, there would be an event that triggers right before seeing the attack option window (let's say consider_attack) and consequently another event that triggers when the window disappears (i.e. consider_attack_end). Since we don't have that, we'll just have to remember what the ability does and do our own math. Also, if there was an event like this, then Tactician wouldn't have to be just for units that start near the Tactician unit.
-Dash doesn't work without the unit having skirmisher (I would rather the unit not have skirmisher, but it's not possible). The problem is the attack_end event happens -before- the attack results such as movement reduction and attacks_left reduction occurs. Optimally, attack_end should happen after these, or there needs to be a separate event that happens after everything in an attack.
-Firststrike via Initiative prevents Storm from actually getting an attack in. I'll work on that soon.
-My aura art sucks.
Abilities/Weapon Specials and their effects
Knights
Level 1
Dread: Offensive only, defender only counter-attacks at 50%
Bloodlust: Offensive only, if target is killed unit is allowed another attack
Knockback: Offensive only, moves defending unit back one hex
Storm: Offensive only, each unit in the attack can only make 1 attack
Level 2 - All are leadership/aura effects
Entrench: Adjacent allies granted +20% to all resistances
Frenzy: Adjacent allies get +1 HP for every hit landed, can even exceed max HP
Tactician: Adjacent allies granted a few new attacks, each uses a different damage type
Enrage: Causes adjacent allies to Rage for 2 combat rounds
Pirates
Level 1
Parry: Once this weapon has a successful strike, damage taken is reduced by 25% for the rest of the attack
Ensnare: Offensive only, as soon as one strike hits, every strike after during the attack gets 100% chance-to-hit
Knockout: affected unit cannot move or attack for 1 turn or until hit
Dash: After attack, player gains remaining movement points and can move
Level 2 - All are leadership/aura effects
Initiative: Adjacent allies at start of turn granted Firststrike
Maneuver: Adjacent allies granted 50% minimum CTH
Fog: Adjacent allies granted +20% terrain defense, max of 80%
Blitz: Adjacent allies at start of turn granted skirmisher
Bandits
Level 1
Chaos: Player gains control of unit during the side turn, unit has 1 MP and can attack
Spiked Armor: Defensive only, each attempted melee strike opponent makes causes 2 points damage to the opponent
Loner: When there are no allied units on adjacent tiles, this unit does 50% more damage
Raid: Offensive only, each successful strike with raid takes 2xp from the defender and gives it to the raider.
Level 2 - All are leadership/aura effects
Disengage: Adjacent allies granted escape, the 2nd miss by an attacker causes end of combat
Obscures: Deluminates, but does not effect the unit itself.
Despise: Every adjacent unit, even allied, loses 8HP at the start of this unit's turn
Pillager: Negates village healing or resting healing of adjacent enemies.
The era in a nutshell
The unit attacks and stats are very bland.
-Knights mainly do blade damage, like mountain terrain are mainly weak to pierce damage, except their heavy unit which is resistant to pierce.
-Pirates mainly do pierce damage, like water terrain and are weak against impact damage, except their heavy unit which is resistant to impact.
-Bandits mainly do blunt damage, like forest terrain and are weak to blade damage, except for their heavy unit which is resistant to blade.
Every level 1 unit, except the archers, has a unique weapon special or ability. Every level 2 unit, in addition to the level 1 abilities, has an ability that effects adjacent units in some way.
Known Issues:
If you know a way around these, let me know. Note that moveto events cannot be used for aura effects, since they can be abused by undo (and I don't want to lose undo)
-Some aura abilities, like Entrench and Fog, cannot currently be shown on the attack window. Optimally, there would be an event that triggers right before seeing the attack option window (let's say consider_attack) and consequently another event that triggers when the window disappears (i.e. consider_attack_end). Since we don't have that, we'll just have to remember what the ability does and do our own math. Also, if there was an event like this, then Tactician wouldn't have to be just for units that start near the Tactician unit.
-Dash doesn't work without the unit having skirmisher (I would rather the unit not have skirmisher, but it's not possible). The problem is the attack_end event happens -before- the attack results such as movement reduction and attacks_left reduction occurs. Optimally, attack_end should happen after these, or there needs to be a separate event that happens after everything in an attack.
-Firststrike via Initiative prevents Storm from actually getting an attack in. I'll work on that soon.
-My aura art sucks.
Abilities/Weapon Specials and their effects
Knights
Level 1
Dread: Offensive only, defender only counter-attacks at 50%
Bloodlust: Offensive only, if target is killed unit is allowed another attack
Knockback: Offensive only, moves defending unit back one hex
Storm: Offensive only, each unit in the attack can only make 1 attack
Level 2 - All are leadership/aura effects
Entrench: Adjacent allies granted +20% to all resistances
Frenzy: Adjacent allies get +1 HP for every hit landed, can even exceed max HP
Tactician: Adjacent allies granted a few new attacks, each uses a different damage type
Enrage: Causes adjacent allies to Rage for 2 combat rounds
Pirates
Level 1
Parry: Once this weapon has a successful strike, damage taken is reduced by 25% for the rest of the attack
Ensnare: Offensive only, as soon as one strike hits, every strike after during the attack gets 100% chance-to-hit
Knockout: affected unit cannot move or attack for 1 turn or until hit
Dash: After attack, player gains remaining movement points and can move
Level 2 - All are leadership/aura effects
Initiative: Adjacent allies at start of turn granted Firststrike
Maneuver: Adjacent allies granted 50% minimum CTH
Fog: Adjacent allies granted +20% terrain defense, max of 80%
Blitz: Adjacent allies at start of turn granted skirmisher
Bandits
Level 1
Chaos: Player gains control of unit during the side turn, unit has 1 MP and can attack
Spiked Armor: Defensive only, each attempted melee strike opponent makes causes 2 points damage to the opponent
Loner: When there are no allied units on adjacent tiles, this unit does 50% more damage
Raid: Offensive only, each successful strike with raid takes 2xp from the defender and gives it to the raider.
Level 2 - All are leadership/aura effects
Disengage: Adjacent allies granted escape, the 2nd miss by an attacker causes end of combat
Obscures: Deluminates, but does not effect the unit itself.
Despise: Every adjacent unit, even allied, loses 8HP at the start of this unit's turn
Pillager: Negates village healing or resting healing of adjacent enemies.
- Attachments
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Abilities Era v0.3.1b.zip- (145.11 KiB) Downloaded 473 times
Last edited by Ken_Oh on May 20th, 2008, 10:37 am, edited 13 times in total.
I would put the abilities on the level 1 units so you can use them right away to test them. Of course, it will be harder to balance if you are concerned about that.
Some abilities I'd like to see:
Deluminate
Kamikaze
Thorns
Retreat
Mind Flay
Bleed
Fear (negative Leadership against the enemy)
I'd definitely try this out if it had some/all of these abilities.
Some abilities I'd like to see:
Deluminate
Kamikaze
Thorns
Retreat
Mind Flay
Bleed
Fear (negative Leadership against the enemy)
I'd definitely try this out if it had some/all of these abilities.
I don't think balancing is really an issue for this kind of era. Anyway, probably nobody is going to have all these abilities in the same era and balancing with only one or two is completely different from balancing with all. So, I would go for "do not balance, do not play, only for test purposes"...
I second JW on putting abilities on level 1 units. If this era is here for tests purposes, then you want to be able to launch a hotseat game, recruit a few units and try the new abilities. Of course, these level 1 units would be unbalanced, but for test purposes, we don't care.
Concerning already existing abilities, it might be good to include them anyway. Indeed, some of the proposed new abilities work in similar or oposite way than existing one (and the second case is often a reason of rejection...) So, having them both is better for test purposes... Typically, if a "darkens" ability is added, then it would be nice to see how it interact with illuminates...
On this point, the easier is maybe to include all the mainline units and faction in the era... which would have the added benefits of allowing to see how the new abilities are powerful wheninteracting with mainline units... ll the better for testing.
Of course, if you add mainline factions, you'll probably want to have them at "age of champions" (or whatever the name is) so that even the high level units can be recruited (because some abilities such as illuminate or leadership only exist at higher levels).
By the way, thanks for the work, I had proposed a similar "WICOT era" recently but did not have time to code it...
I second JW on putting abilities on level 1 units. If this era is here for tests purposes, then you want to be able to launch a hotseat game, recruit a few units and try the new abilities. Of course, these level 1 units would be unbalanced, but for test purposes, we don't care.
Concerning already existing abilities, it might be good to include them anyway. Indeed, some of the proposed new abilities work in similar or oposite way than existing one (and the second case is often a reason of rejection...) So, having them both is better for test purposes... Typically, if a "darkens" ability is added, then it would be nice to see how it interact with illuminates...
On this point, the easier is maybe to include all the mainline units and faction in the era... which would have the added benefits of allowing to see how the new abilities are powerful wheninteracting with mainline units... ll the better for testing.
Of course, if you add mainline factions, you'll probably want to have them at "age of champions" (or whatever the name is) so that even the high level units can be recruited (because some abilities such as illuminate or leadership only exist at higher levels).
By the way, thanks for the work, I had proposed a similar "WICOT era" recently but did not have time to code it...
Hypocoristiquement,
Jym.
Jym.
And concerning the abilities I would like to see:
_ More on the aura stuff, including of course darkens or fear but I guess auras can modify almost anything such as defense, resistances, ... that would lead to:
_ entranchers : increase def of allies.
_ tactician : decrease def. of ennemies.
_ aura of pain : aka "anti-heal".
_ racial leadership (greater bonus but only for some allies).
_ Stuff changing the terrain type when the attack miss (may be automatic or not). Typically, fireball melting ice and snow or even burning forest and villages, waves of cold (DA) freezing water or creating snow, "entangle-like" raising forest
_ the abilities on the Wiki WML_Abilities page (knockback, charm and bloodlust). These three should not need much work if the WML there is uptodate...
_ I like the "curse" (mix between poison and plague: 'tag' the unit as cursed, no immediate effect, can be healed as poison, when the unit die, turn it into WC).
_ plunder (when hit/miss (in village ?), steal gold from opponent).
I don't know if it's possible, but I would really like to see some kind of "triggered ability", that is an ability that a unit can use once per turn, or once every odd turn, ..., maybe instead of attacking, and allow to do something. I'm afraid WInCOT, but...
(typically, something, like, say, "chi healing", one every other turn the unit may concentrate on its inner self and, instead of attacking, gain 20HP).
Again, thanks for the work...
_ More on the aura stuff, including of course darkens or fear but I guess auras can modify almost anything such as defense, resistances, ... that would lead to:
_ entranchers : increase def of allies.
_ tactician : decrease def. of ennemies.
_ aura of pain : aka "anti-heal".
_ racial leadership (greater bonus but only for some allies).
_ Stuff changing the terrain type when the attack miss (may be automatic or not). Typically, fireball melting ice and snow or even burning forest and villages, waves of cold (DA) freezing water or creating snow, "entangle-like" raising forest
_ the abilities on the Wiki WML_Abilities page (knockback, charm and bloodlust). These three should not need much work if the WML there is uptodate...
_ I like the "curse" (mix between poison and plague: 'tag' the unit as cursed, no immediate effect, can be healed as poison, when the unit die, turn it into WC).
_ plunder (when hit/miss (in village ?), steal gold from opponent).
I don't know if it's possible, but I would really like to see some kind of "triggered ability", that is an ability that a unit can use once per turn, or once every odd turn, ..., maybe instead of attacking, and allow to do something. I'm afraid WInCOT, but...
(typically, something, like, say, "chi healing", one every other turn the unit may concentrate on its inner self and, instead of attacking, gain 20HP).
Again, thanks for the work...
Hypocoristiquement,
Jym.
Jym.
JW wrote:I would put the abilities on the level 1 units so you can use them right away to test them. Of course, it will be harder to balance if you are concerned about that.
Some abilities I'd like to see:
Deluminate
Kamikaze
Thorns
Retreat
Mind Flay
Bleed
Fear (negative Leadership against the enemy)
I'd definitely try this out if it had some/all of these abilities.
I would like to see Overwhelm as well.
Why did the fish laugh? Because the sea weed.
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Ken_Oh
- Moderator Emeritus
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- Joined: February 6th, 2006, 4:03 am
- Location: Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Hey, guys.
If you look in the WML Workshop thread, you'll see that a lot of those abilities you're listing are planned (mind flay, thorns, charm, lullaby, etc.) but I gave them different names because of the specific unit (for example. I was going to use the Evlish Shaman sprite for Bandits and give it Charm, but decided to go with tougher looking sprites and call it Chaos).
About giving the level 1 the abilities, you guys are right. I was thinking that it would be best to at least have a sterile environment to start with, for balance sake, but I should take my own advice and just screw worrying about balance.
See, I was going to make L1 just non-ability and L2 with regular abilities (simple combat ones) and have L3 use all aura/leadership, but it'll probably be even more fun just to start the units out with abilities. That'll mean we can even put the leadership/aura effects on L2 units (especially Deluminate).
Last note, while ideas are great, they're also relatively cheap. Code the ability, head over to the WML Workshop thread and post it and I can almost guarrantee it'll go in quick.
EDIT: OK, I gave all the L1 units the L2 names and put the 2 abilities we have working into the L1 units (although Charm/Chaos ability is making it crash for me). Also, I made sure I included the era.cfg file this time.......
If you look in the WML Workshop thread, you'll see that a lot of those abilities you're listing are planned (mind flay, thorns, charm, lullaby, etc.) but I gave them different names because of the specific unit (for example. I was going to use the Evlish Shaman sprite for Bandits and give it Charm, but decided to go with tougher looking sprites and call it Chaos).
About giving the level 1 the abilities, you guys are right. I was thinking that it would be best to at least have a sterile environment to start with, for balance sake, but I should take my own advice and just screw worrying about balance.
See, I was going to make L1 just non-ability and L2 with regular abilities (simple combat ones) and have L3 use all aura/leadership, but it'll probably be even more fun just to start the units out with abilities. That'll mean we can even put the leadership/aura effects on L2 units (especially Deluminate).
Last note, while ideas are great, they're also relatively cheap. Code the ability, head over to the WML Workshop thread and post it and I can almost guarrantee it'll go in quick.
EDIT: OK, I gave all the L1 units the L2 names and put the 2 abilities we have working into the L1 units (although Charm/Chaos ability is making it crash for me). Also, I made sure I included the era.cfg file this time.......
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Dragon Master
- Posts: 1012
- Joined: February 11th, 2006, 1:04 am
- Location: Somewhere
I'm so glad someone likes my ability.appleide wrote:JW wrote:I would put the abilities on the level 1 units so you can use them right away to test them. Of course, it will be harder to balance if you are concerned about that.
Some abilities I'd like to see:
Deluminate
Kamikaze
Thorns
Retreat
Mind Flay
Bleed
Fear (negative Leadership against the enemy)
I'd definitely try this out if it had some/all of these abilities.
I would like to see Overwhelm as well.
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Ken_Oh
- Moderator Emeritus
- Posts: 2178
- Joined: February 6th, 2006, 4:03 am
- Location: Baltimore, Maryland, USA
OK, with every L1 unit having an ability or weapon special, I'd like to make the corresponding L2 keep that special and also give them some leadership/aura effect. I've pretty much got all the brainstorming I need at the moment for L1 abilities, so those leadership/aura effects are what I'd like help with (other than WML help).
We have:
Leadership
Illuminate
Delluminate
Heals (+4 and +8)
Fear-opposite values of Leadership on enemy units
Entrencher-increase def of allies.
Tactician-decrease def. of ennemies.
Aura of pain-anti-heal
Give adjacent allies skimisher ability
Give adjacent allies different attack types
We have:
Leadership
Illuminate
Delluminate
Heals (+4 and +8)
Fear-opposite values of Leadership on enemy units
Entrencher-increase def of allies.
Tactician-decrease def. of ennemies.
Aura of pain-anti-heal
Give adjacent allies skimisher ability
Give adjacent allies different attack types
All surrounding allies gain:Ken Oh wrote:OK, with every L1 unit having an ability or weapon special, I'd like to make the corresponding L2 keep that special and also give them some leadership/aura effect. I've pretty much got all the brainstorming I need at the moment for L1 abilities, so those leadership/aura effects are what I'd like help with (other than WML help).
We have:
Leadership
Illuminate
Delluminate
Heals (+4 and +8)
Fear-opposite values of Leadership on enemy units
Entrencher-increase def of allies.
Tactician-decrease def. of ennemies.
Aura of pain-anti-heal
Give adjacent allies skimisher ability
Give adjacent allies different attack types
+1 attack,
Marksman,
Lawful alignment,
+10% resistancies,
Steadfast,
Firststrike,
etc...
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Ken_Oh
- Moderator Emeritus
- Posts: 2178
- Joined: February 6th, 2006, 4:03 am
- Location: Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Bump to say this era is comming along nicely. If you want to try it, the new version is above, but please only try it if you've got Wesnoth 1.1.8 or higher, because there will be major problems if you don't.
Only things in the era now that don't work correctly are Spiked Armor (still need to filter out the range) and Raid. Raid works well but if the raiding unit or the victim die during the attack, it'll crash the game. It's been fixed in SVN though.
As always, if you want to help with any code, please come here: http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 605#166605
Only things in the era now that don't work correctly are Spiked Armor (still need to filter out the range) and Raid. Raid works well but if the raiding unit or the victim die during the attack, it'll crash the game. It's been fixed in SVN though.
As always, if you want to help with any code, please come here: http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 605#166605
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Ken_Oh
- Moderator Emeritus
- Posts: 2178
- Joined: February 6th, 2006, 4:03 am
- Location: Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Yeah, you might be right about putting it on the server. About a week ago it seemed like I only had one ability working and now I've got about half of the level 1 ones done. I'm planning all leadership/aura effects for level 2 units, but it would be perfectly reasonable to put this on the server as soon as I get a few more abilities done.
You can open any unit with an ability and see a macro included and then look in the Utils folder for the abilities (which are basically just macros). Is there any other parts you want explained? I was definitely going to make some post (or maybe wiki page) on all of the lesson I've learned when this is all done.
You can open any unit with an ability and see a macro included and then look in the Utils folder for the abilities (which are basically just macros). Is there any other parts you want explained? I was definitely going to make some post (or maybe wiki page) on all of the lesson I've learned when this is all done.
I think it might be good to move the mentioned level 1s to level 0 to let you test balance if you want and give you quicker access to the abilities at levels 1 and 2.Ken Oh wrote:About giving the level 1 the abilities, you guys are right. I was thinking that it would be best to at least have a sterile environment to start with, for balance sake, but I should take my own advice and just screw worrying about balance.
Just my 2 cents.
Corwin