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| Thread: Heroes 5 Wish: "Leaders" |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 · «PREV |
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Djive
Honorable
Supreme Hero
Zapper of Toads
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posted January 15, 2004 07:22 PM |
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I don't see any difference in how the leader slot would work as compared to the leader would work.
The Leader as I suggested was part of the stack and had no special gui needed for it. This was for ease of use, and to make the leader and the troops one unit to as a great extent as possible.
If you have this extra slot, and split the army or if you join two armies who have leaders in the special slots, then you face EXACTLY the same problems as if the leader is part of the stack.
You have two stacks each with a leader in the leader slot, you merge stacks but now have one surplus leader which you can't place in the new armies single slot because there's already one. You face the same decision there as for a leader, but have less freedom in how to handle it since you're now limited also by the creature slots you introduced.
You also lose one of the benefits with the Leader, in my system you saw that the stack had a Leader (and how strong the leader was) by looking at the medals showed with the stack. In your system there is no such visual indication, which makes managing your troops much more cumbersome.
There is no Stacking problems with Leaders, unless you design the rules around them for the stacking problems to exist. Limiting recruitment to one Leader per creature type effectively removes all stack handling problems with Leaders.
Another solution which also removes Leader stacking problems is to simple demote the second strongest Leader to a recruit if stack is joined with a stack with a stronger Leader.
I think your suggestion also detracts from the beauty of the idea of having Leaders be of the same race as the creature they command. The way you suggest the feature the Leaders works like a hero in too many respects, and this was not my intention.
I also don't like that players could use low-level Leaders to lead high-level troops, troops which have nothing in common with the own creature type, and troops of hostile alignments.
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"A brilliant light can either illuminate or blind. How will you know which until you open your eyes?"
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gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted January 16, 2004 12:57 PM |
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well, if the stacks are joined, the leaders of both stacks could be preserved. the surplus weaker leader would just have no leadership effect in the joined stack, but would become effective again when the stack is split.
or was there some reason against it?
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Polaris
Promising
Known Hero
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posted January 20, 2004 10:08 PM |
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Quote:
I don't see any difference in how the leader slot would work as compared to the leader would work.
The Leader as I suggested was part of the stack and had no special gui needed for it. This was for ease of use, and to make the leader and the troops one unit to as a great extent as possible.
If you have this extra slot, and split the army or if you join two armies who have leaders in the special slots, then you face EXACTLY the same problems as if the leader is part of the stack.
OK, let me first say that I think your system is well thought out, but it has a few kinks (some are insoluble without an architectural change). Now let me try explaining my system one last time, and *forget everything I said before.* I realize now that my explanations of my modification so far have all been misleading in some way because I was trying to "sell" my system as better rather than more flexible.
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In Heroes games, we have creatures stacks, and you equip different creatures to them (can't think of a better word than equip, but you know what I mean). Moving one creature to another position does not effect the positions of any other creatures, unless you swap them.
Now imagine there are 2 sets of creature stacks, one only has creatures, the other only has leaders. Moving one creature from one creature slot to another does not necessarily move the leaders (but it can, see 2). If leaders do not move along with creature stacks, then they only effect the one creature slot that their leader spot corresponds to. If there are no creatures in that stack, then the leader effects no units.
You now have the overhead of 2 sets of creature stacks. But I think that overhead is worth it for ironing out your kinks. Everything that can be achieved with your system, can now be achieved with my system (if you think about this rather than just replying, you will see that this is true). But my system can also do more. Although if you choose to do more, my system will not be able to precisely mimic your system anymore (this was the cause of previous confusion).
Bells and Whistles
1) If the creature stack that a leader is modifying dies, the leader may die, but there is nothing inherent about the way the system works that forces the leader to die. So it may be decided by the designers from a balance perspective what should happen. This could even be toggleable by the player, but I am generally against that type of thing.
2) When a creature stack is moved, the leader may be linked to the creature stack, but this is not required. The same stacking resolution strategies that have been suggested for your schema could be used in this method, and they would have the same advantages and disadvantages. (this would precisely model your system, but would have my system's UI overhead instead of yours)
3) Viewing the benefits of the leader:
It is very easy to view the precise benefits of the leader seperate from the stack. There is no reason, that you should not also see these benefits or medals on the creature stack. If there are a high amount of medals (if leaders were more like heroes than you have proposed) it would be cumbersome to HAVE to view this on the creature stack, especially if heroes can move to different types of units. This is insoluble with your method.
4) There is nothing preventing you from FORCING all leaders to be of the same type as the creature stack (as in your proposed system). Although if this is done, the leader should be linked with the creature stack as mentioned in 2. However you now have the flexibility of making leaders more like Heroes. Or you can even combine the two types of leaders if you want.
In closing, I will say that I originally came up with this system for the sole purpose of eliminating the oddity of the leader actually being part of the creature stack (this to me is a major problem because creature stacks are founded on the idea that everything within them is identical except the top creature which has "carryover" HP) while maintaining functionality. Originally it was intended as a complementary system to yours, but then I saw how much more flexible it was and how you could do so much more with it. You are not pigeonholed into doing things the way they were originally suggested when this topic was first conceived. You could make leaders more like heroes (why should leaders be so different from heroes whenever they have such a similar purpose? we already have a system for making heroes stronger, why not extend it to leaders?). While you may have had an original intent when you came up with the idea of leaders, surely you can see that there is room for the idea to grow and evolve. There is, in my opinion, a greater elegance in carrying over the same system for hero growth over to the leader growth.
But alas, as I mentioned in my first post in this topic, I don't think the whole idea of leaders are self balanced. Whether it be creature EXP, or creature upgrades, there should be a per creature cost to make individual units stronger.
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Djive
Honorable
Supreme Hero
Zapper of Toads
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posted February 28, 2004 01:20 AM |
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True, you can by doubling the number of stacks from say 7 to 14 get more flexibility with Leaders.
But in some cases that flexibility can be damaging to the game, and game balance. One of the specific qualities I had for Leaders was that they HAD to lead their own stack. And if you want to stick with that restriction then the additional slots in the GUI seems a bit superfluous to me.
This restriction explained many things in my system. It explained why promotions were fixed and not variable and selected, it explained why the benefits of Hero and Leader would stack (because the Leader had RACE specific knowledge about his own race and their way of fighting, whereas the Hero had general knowledge applicable to most races), and finally a fixed promotions for Medals gives a decent chance of playtesting how Leaders will affect stacks.
I grant you that yes, you get alot more flexibility with your system but you also go against the principle of giving the Leaders a role which is significantly different than the Heroes. In your system, Leaders get free promotions, can lead any stack, can give bonuses to any stack, is not really part of the stack. In other words they are very, very much like heroes. Which was something I wanted to avoid.
"3) Viewing the benefits of the leader:"
I don't think it's cumbersome to view this on the creature. At least not if you use a GUI for creatures similar to the H4 ones. There's plenty of space to add more information about the benefits of the Leader of the stack on that screen. Space which is more or less not used for anything useful in Heroes 4.
What I'm mainly concerned about is how you want it to look at the combat screen. You can't really have a Leader standing beside each stack there (since I think this will garble up the combat field with creatures which can't be directly attacked but appear there anyway.) Therefore I think having the information on the stack is to prefer, at least in combat. And if you have to do this for combat then why not also in the army review screen?
On 4. As I mentioned above. My intent was to make Leaders and Heroes dissimilar as otherwise, there's really no point in introducing them.
The Leader did not have any special stats, and so was identical to the other creatures in the stack. If you want to get away from this oddity, it would be simpler to just count the Leader as "0" creatures instead of "1".
If you make Leaders like Heroes, then the game is very likely to be unbalanced. I agree with this, since the flexibility to add nearly any ability to any creature would be a very daunting task to play test. That's one of the reasons I put restrictions on Leaders, and worked to make them dissimilar from Heroes.
I don't believe in giving them a level-up system either. Again it's too flexible and will be very difficult to balance.
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"A brilliant light can either illuminate or blind. How will you know which until you open your eyes?"
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B0rsuk
Promising
Famous Hero
DooM prophet
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posted February 28, 2004 11:09 AM |
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Edited By: B0rsuk on 28 Feb 2004
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I don't like it too much.
1) It disencourages splitting armies even further. Therefore it disencourages tactics and strategy.
What I would like to see instead is ability to split stacks during battle, including "trampling" rule to prevent spamming all hexes with 1 imp . Stat increasing artifacts should be toned down, and there should be more "once per hero" upgrade sites instead of chests, defense gems... to encourage multiple armies.
That would enhance gameplay.
2a) It would promote save/load abuse even further. If you lose your army, your hero can perhaps flee (not always). What about leaders ? Losing your so-beloved leaders to strong AI opponent would pretty much force you to load game.
2b) Multiplayer games would see LESS comebacks, because winning a big battle would mean MUCH more that at the moment.
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There are currently too many benefits for winning a battle. "lost a battle, but not a war" rule doesn't apply for homm too much. Winner gets experience, possibly artifacts, and keeps his army. Retreating hero learns nothing. May even not survive.
Heroes is already too much about "have single army and NEVER, EVER lose it".
Oh, and by the way: I would always split my army to fill every slot possible, so I can have spare leaders when needed. Remember leaders gain experience for survived battles, no need to engage.
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Tell me, what exactly leaders add to gameplay ?
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Djive
Honorable
Supreme Hero
Zapper of Toads
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posted February 29, 2004 11:18 PM |
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Quote:
I don't like it too much.
1) It disencourages splitting armies even further.
Splitting up your stacks in evenly divided troops is never going to be a viable strategy unless you put a max limit on stack size, or do some really huge changes in how stacks work in the game.
Leaders doesn't make splitting stacks a not viable strategy, the stack concept in itself does that.
The only time players may use several stacks of equal power is if they outpower the enemy many times over, and then the combat is fairly uninteresting to begin with.
The ability to split stacks during combat, I don't want to see at all. It just encourages "sacrifice" stacks of a single creature which already give unwanted results. Trampling rule will probably be very ineffective. The imps will spread out real quick and go out of the area of effect. The best fix for not allowing "sacrifice" stacks to go rampant is to not allow them.
For this I could very well consider that the game forces an even distribution of creatures, in a combat set-up phase. All player decides is how many stacks of each creature to have, and then you get the same amount in each stack.
If you do the system like this, it would work very well to let the Leader affect all stacks of the correct creature type. The player would very likely not want to split the stack anyway, because player is risking the stack which contains the Leader to be wiped out.
Not promoting splitting stacks of the same creature doesn't necessarily reduce strategy much. The strategy of selecting 7 creatures stacks from all the creature types you have recruited is a very similar choice.
"2a) It would promote save/load abuse even further. If you lose your army, your hero can perhaps flee (not always). What about leaders ? Losing your so-beloved leaders to strong AI opponent would pretty much force you to load game."
This is an issue for another topic! It's entirely up to the players conscience when and why they Load games, and in multiplayer you won't get to Load at all.
Currently, Heroes 4 does give players a hefty negative score by resetting some parameters so they reflect scores from the latest Load instead of score from the start of the game. Besides, if player loses his entire army of Orcs by fleeing, then what use is the Orc leader to the player? Very little in the normal case, I'd say.
"2b) Multiplayer games would see LESS comebacks, because winning a big battle would mean MUCH more that at the moment."
No, I disagree. Leaders affects creature stats much less than a Hero or a good Hero artifact would.
"There are currently too many benefits for winning a battle. "lost a battle, but not a war" rule doesn't apply for homm too much. Winner gets experience, possibly artifacts, and keeps his army. Retreating hero learns nothing. May even not survive."
Sure, but the game must also end at some point. The expereince gained should be based on actually killed enemy creatures, but this is easy to change should the designers want to do that.
When it comes to Leaders, they are only of use if you have a lot of creatures of the relevant type. Keeping the Leader is therefore often not a big issue since if you flee you lose the entire stack of creatures which it could affect. (And you would often not be able to recruit a significant amount of new creatures of this type in a game.)
"Oh, and by the way: I would always split my army to fill every slot possible, so I can have spare leaders when needed. Remember leaders gain experience for survived battles, no need to engage."
There was several proposals on how to stop this behaviour. One was to limit recruitment of Leaders. Basically, you wouldn't be able to buy all Leaders you wanted. Besides, you want Leaders of different creature TYPES, and not many of the SAME creature type.
"Tell me, what exactly leaders add to gameplay ?"
It can add several things.
One thing it could add is add more variety to neutral stacks by giving them a good Leader.
Leaders is also a way to make creatures a lot more flexibile in waht they can do, and this increases replay value of the game.
Leaders can also be used for achivving to different effects:
- Creature upgrades (Though this could still exist side-by-side with Leaders)
- Creature Experience.
Both giving creatures upgrades and expereince gives the player a feeling of advancement and continaully improving the army. This is one of the things every game must do to have a long term appeal.
Not every wish has to be for a particular type of game play. The concept of Leaders is not primarily aimed at game play, but at creature flexibilty, and improved re-playability.
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"A brilliant light can either illuminate or blind. How will you know which until you open your eyes?"
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eisenor
Tavern Dweller
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posted March 01, 2004 04:09 PM |
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At first glance I think the idea of leaders is a good one. There are some very interesting things that could be done with them. The question is: Is it worth the effort to add them when heroes can do most anything that a leader could do...and heroes can do it for the entire army...not just one stack.
I wouldn't be opposed to "Leaders". I just don't know how much I would use them.
On the other hand, "Leaders" are a FANTASTIC idea for neutral stacks.
Moderator's note:This topic has been closed, as it refers to an older version of the game. To discuss Heroes 3, please go to [url=http://heroescommunity.com/forumdisplay.php3?FID=6]Library Of Enlightenment[/url], to discuss Heroes 4, please go to [url=http://heroescommunity.com/forumdisplay.php3?FID=17]War Room Of Axeoth[/url], to discuss Heroes 5, go to [url=http://heroescommunity.com/forumdisplay.php3?FID=1]Temple Of Ashan[/url].
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