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| Thread: Unit Upgrades |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 04:59 PM |
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Of course there is a reason NOT to upgrade Succubi: it might be better to build something different.
The same thing is true the other way round: of course there is a reason NOT to build a new creature dwelling: it might be better to build an upgrade of an existing one.
The general unit XP is there: primary hero stats - it's what a Hero is all about.
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xerox
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 05:48 PM |
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Edited by xerox at 17:53, 08 Jan 2013.
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Sure, you have choice if you want to go for Lilims or let's say Breeders first. But in the end, you're still going to have both of them. Consider the possibility that there are three ways for the Lilim to upgrade. All are adept at handling different situations or just play differently. That would make upgrades be more than just "Should I get upgrade X or creature Y first? I'll get both of them in the end anyway".
I didn't envision creature XP as havning much to do with Hero development. Say I'm Haven and I use Sentinels. Now when I use Sentinels efficiently, with any Hero on my side, they gain XP. There could be different kinds of experience. For instance, using the Sentinel in an offensive manner would give it XP that would lead to an offense-oriented upgrade. That way you could easily merge it with a Blood/Tears type of system.
____________
Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 06:25 PM |
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Quote:
Consider the possibility that there are three ways for the Lilim to upgrade. All are adept at handling different situations or just play differently.
That may sound tempting for some, but it's a chimera. Let's start with the Succubi. Upgrade A) Lilim with Enthrall; Upgrade B): no Enthrall, but 30% more shooting damage. Upgrade C): Succubi lose their ranged attack, but gain +2 speed and +50% HPs. Great.
However - what about the other Inferno units?
If every unit has 3 possible upgrades there are 3*3*3*3*3*3*3 = 2187 possible armies - and all muust be balanced. Which is silly.
The only reasonable way to go is individual building trees for all towns with a mix of options. There may be units with no upgrade, units with more than one upgrade, with alternative upgrade or simply alternative units, as long as it fits and makes sense.
{quote]I didn't envision creature XP as havning much to do with Hero development. Say I'm Haven and I use Sentinels. Now when I use Sentinels efficiently, with any Hero on my side, they gain XP. There could be different kinds of experience. For instance, using the Sentinel in an offensive manner would give it XP that would lead to an offense-oriented upgrade. That way you could easily merge it with a Blood/Tears type of system.
*Sigh* That makes sense only with CONSTANT unit numbers within a stack. What you describe is basically disciples, although it doesn't matter what you do with the Sentinels, because we cannot expect the game to make a difference in experience whether you kill a unit attacking at your own baseline, attacking at the enemy baseline, retaliating at your own baseline or retaliating at the enemy baseline.
If you want a more generic way to "upgrade" units - that is, to "earn" them abilities that depend on what role you intend to use them in - you have to refine the hero ability system and do it via HERO development.
And if you just take a moment and contemplate on it, you'll find that this is simple and reasonable for game with growing unit stacks.
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xerox
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 06:39 PM |
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I'm sorry. I changed my mind mid-way. Two upgrades - using a Blood/Tear-system - seems a lot better and more reasonable. Like you said, every single creature wouldn't need an upgrade either. Just look at Crossbowmen. You can't really do a lot with a creature like that, especially not with a Blood/Tear-upgrade system. It's hard to imagine a Tears Crossbowman.
I don't really understand what you mean that a creature experience Blood/Tear upgrade system needs constant unit numbers. Sure, you would need to have a system where the amount of experience gained is proportional to the number of creatures. Otherwise you would just be able to have 7 stacks of Sentinels, spam the Defense button, and they would be Praetorians in a week.
I imagine offensive actions such as waiting, attacking and retaliating asswell as using certain abilities would give Blood XP and defensive actions such as soaking up damage and using certain abilities would give Tears XP. Of course this would require those abilities to actually exist with the base creatures.
____________
Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 08:14 PM |
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I'm sorry, but I must be misunderstand something, because what you suggest would man that you would have to keep track of blood/tear XP gained for every SINGLE creature separately, adding the blood/tear bar we currently have for the main hero for every single creature - how is that supposed to work?
I don't like to repeat myself, but in HoMM the units are boosted by THE HERO. You may of course have even more than one hero bossting an army, but boosting the units make no sense. You can always try WoG and see that it doesn't work.
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xerox
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 08:20 PM |
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Edited by xerox at 20:20, 08 Jan 2013.
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Each of the say seven creatures in the Haven faction has an experience bar. Whenever a Sentinel attacks or defends, all player-owned Sentinels in the game gain either Blood or Tear experience. Whenever a Sister attacks or defends, all Sisters gain either Blood or Tear experience.
The hero has nothing to do with it.
____________
Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 08:48 PM |
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What happens, if you reinforce a stack - you have a weekly production, after all.
What happens if you merge a stack with a blood ability with a stack with a tear ability?
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xerox
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 08:55 PM |
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Edited by xerox at 20:57, 08 Jan 2013.
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Larger stacks gain more experience.
Every single player-owned stack of Sentinels share the same experience bar. So if your hero has a stack of Sentinels and they gain enough Blood experience, all Sentinels on the maps will be able to upgrade into Legionaires.
____________
Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 09:39 PM |
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Where's the difference to simply decide what alternative upgrade to build? I mean, a hero may have a certain flexibility in deciding about whether to fire off damage spells or defense spells, but a shooter will shoot, and a fast flyer will fly to attack, while a slow grunt will play bodyguard.
Makes no sense.
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xerox
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 09:49 PM |
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Edited by xerox at 21:51, 08 Jan 2013.
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The slow grunt's Blood upgrade could be a fast grunt?=P
That being said it's harder to come up with say Tears upgrades for shooters. But not impossible. The Crossbowman Tear upgrade could be one that reduces the Might defense on struck enemies, allowing your other creatures to deal more damage against that particular enemy.
Of course it can't get to the point where it feels like a COMPLETLY different unit.
____________
Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 08, 2013 10:21 PM |
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I repeat where is the difference between simply decising between an alternative upgrade?
Where alternative upgrades make sense, that is.
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MattII
Legendary Hero
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posted January 09, 2013 01:49 AM |
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Edited by MattII at 02:08, 09 Jan 2013.
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JJ would you please shut up about unit XP not making sense, WoG for H3 did it perfectly well. And so what if you might want to keep stacks small due to experience, you can just pass the new guys off to a second hero, or introduce just enough troops not to drop the stack down a level, and hand off the rest. It is BTW called Heroes, not Hero, despite the fact that many games end up having a single hero per side except for town defence. IMO what has always sucked about the game was that heroes were almost entirely passive, which is where H4 went right, for once heroes could travel around without having to drag anything else along.
Really, if you don't like something just say "I don't like it", dont go around saying "it's crap" because there are people out there who are going to argue, and then you end up, as you have here, with more post arguing over a particular (sometimes not very relevant aspect) aspect than over the rest of the topic.
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 09, 2013 08:34 AM |
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No, I will not shut up, because unit XP in HoMM - the way the game has been - is crap. Whether you like it in WoG or not (oh, the novelty), I couldn't care less, because it turns the game upside down. It's doubling XP (Heroes profit, creatures profit), it devaluates creature production, it devaluates HEROES, it makes the game even more cluttered than HoMM 6, since you have to keep track of unit XP (to refrain from reinforcing-to-weaken, and it shifts the focus from Heroes to creatures.
What may happen in such a game is, that a medium hero with a small but highly experienced army is blasting away the unexperienced creature production of many weeks led by a good second, that is - your creature production is worth crap.
And while in the last two games efforts were made to hand players the opportunity to have more than one experienced hero (avoiding that exact situation that your home garrison is worthless), it would be even more nonsensical to allow this with creatures.
As it is, the game is called HEROES of M&M, NOT creatures of M&M, because the general idea of the game is that you can freely stack units of the same type and influence them by way of their commanding hero. You might say, that this idea is what made the game so great in the first place, because it simplifies things, while still allowing a process of experience-based increase of fighting strength. That's why the relative worth of creatures is to depend on the heroes, not on the creatures themselves. Which means, that you have to let the HEROES get the abilities that are to influence the creature STACKS.
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Avirosb
Promising
Legendary Hero
No longer on vacation
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posted January 09, 2013 08:43 AM |
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I must say I agree with JJ here.
Allowing creatures to receive XP devalues the purpose of heroes,
both thematically and from a gameplay perspective.
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artu
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted January 09, 2013 08:46 AM |
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Quote:
What may happen in such a game is, that a medium hero with a small but highly experienced army is blasting away the inexperienced creature production of many weeks led by a good second, that is - your creature production is worth crap.
Yes, that happens in Wog if creature expi is on. Another problem is you can no longer predict how strong a rival is before they attack you. Somebody with 60 Gremlins come by your castle and you don't buy defenses because the gold should be spent elsewhere but than they turn out to be ace expi level and take out the castle. I still turn creature expi on when playing random maps though. Despite all the cons, the new abilities gained by the creatures are so cool.
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Salamandre
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
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posted January 09, 2013 08:56 AM |
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Quote:
Allowing creatures to receive XP devalues the purpose of heroes,
Heroes are walking sprites created to bring creatures from point a to point b. With a very few exceptions (for H2/H3 from what I know) they are all same, you play either with a might or a magic one. While creatures experience can give more subtle tactics than just powering same hero again and again.
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MattII
Legendary Hero
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posted January 09, 2013 09:02 AM |
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Edited by MattII at 09:33, 09 Jan 2013.
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@ JollyJoker:
Ah, right, so an infantry unit with 10 years of experience suddenly becomes a bunch of incompetents when placed under a novice commander? No thanks. By your reasoning the whole thing should have ended up as a sort of King's Bounty clones, but it hasn't, so deal with it.
BTW what you suggested in your first post, about heroes getting abilities specifically related to single creatures, that is the epitome of weighing down a game with way too much complexity.
The fact is, despite the name, the game has never been as exclusively about the heroes as you think it should have been. Heroes have, bar one game, always required creatures, and bar that same game have never acted on the battlefield as a unit.
Oh, and as for dropping experience levels, most heroes are likely to have either Logisitcs, Pathfinding, or both, which is going to make delivering units to them actually quite difficult.
Also, unless a player is really good, has just the right enemies, and is fighting might-only armies, he's going to take losses, so he'll need extra troops eventually regardless.
Quote:
Yes, that happens in Wog if creature expi is on. Another problem is you can no longer predict how strong a rival is before they attack you.
But you don't anyway, at least until H6, you couldn't tell what spells they had, and thus how capable they were of hurting your creatures.
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Avirosb
Promising
Legendary Hero
No longer on vacation
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posted January 09, 2013 09:10 AM |
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Quote:
Heroes are walking sprites created to bring creatures from point a to point b.
They are also gatherers of information and resources, they make creatures stronger and some cast spells 
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Salamandre
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
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posted January 09, 2013 09:17 AM |
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They are dependent on creatures and creatures are dependent on heroes. I see no reason why a Heroes game will be screwed if both are allowed to gain experience. Assuming there is some well thought balance about the process.
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Era II mods and utilities
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Avirosb
Promising
Legendary Hero
No longer on vacation
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posted January 09, 2013 09:36 AM |
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GRIFFINS are trying to learn BATTLE DIVE, but the unit can't learn more than 4 moves.
Delete and older move to make room for BATTLE DIVE?
1, 2 and... Poof!
GRIFFINS forgot the move FLY.
GRIFFINS learned BATTLE DIVE.
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