Heroes - what to do with them?!

[azaremoth]

The next things I have planned for the Cursed are hero units - I have concepts and finished models for one cursed and one imperial hero.



Imperial Sarge:
- tank, medium range, medium damage
- jumpjets
- changeable weapon: dual chain gun and dual plasma guns

Cursed Shade:
- medium hp, very strong melee attack
- can cloak
- can create decoy units

What is missing is a good concept for the integration into the gameplay. Obligatory is a leveling system to unlock abilities/weapons/better stats/... imho.

What do you think - how should the units be integrated into the gameplay?

The "easiest" way: in addition to your starting units you get a hero unit that can be rebuild with a special buiding (stats are saved). Heros are supporting your other units and become deadly strong throughout the game. I think it was done similarly in WC3.

[smoth]

What are you looking for as far as leveling and abilities..? I may be writing something like that in the near future(AKA YEARS FROM NOW LOL)

[knorke]

nice models, very retro with the cig.
imo the trick with hero units in RTS is to find a good mix of making the hero have hundreds of spells and making it "just like a normal unit but stronger."
Warcraft 3 heros are quite complex (different kinds, many levels etc) but I think that would not fit The Cursed. Maybe more like Tanya from Red Alert or the heros in C&C Generals (USA Commando Burton, GLA Sniper, China Black Lotus Hacker, google for details)

random ideas that work for both heros:
-put sattle charges on buildings or set them on fire (like c&c)
-climb over cliffs
-can swim
-support aura that makes near units fire faster/fight stronger or heals them
-can use force field/magic to become invulnerable for a short time. (maybe becomes immobile when doing that)
-is build via some mechanic that allows him to be deployed anywhere on the map (drop pod, teleport, digging out of ground,...)
-can see cloak/burrowed enemies
-immobilize enemy vehicles/big units by destroying wheels/legs
-teleport units to his location
-shockwave thing that destroys enemy around him (like in 2D shooters where you have bombs that clear the screen from enemies)

[azaremoth]

Maybe more like Tanya from Red Alert or the heros in C&C Generals

What are you looking for as far as leveling and abilities..? I may be writing something like that in the near future(AKA YEARS FROM NOW LOL)

I think I'll start with linear leveling. Something like: Heroes gets XP (gained by himself and by allied units within a certain range around the hero) => hero auto-morphs into next level hero (with better stats and other abilities). When the hero dieds you'll have to rebuild it (the gained level will not be lost but the costs increase with every level).

I am glad to hear that you are planning to work "on that field".

random ideas that work for both heros:
-put sattle charges on buildings or set them on fire (like c&c)
-climb over cliffs
-can swim
-support aura that makes near units fire faster/fight stronger or heals them
-can use force field/magic to become invulnerable for a short time. (maybe becomes immobile when doing that)
-is build via some mechanic that allows him to be deployed anywhere on the map (drop pod, teleport, digging out of ground,...)
-can see cloak/burrowed enemies
-immobilize enemy vehicles/big units by destroying wheels/legs
-teleport units to his location
-shockwave thing that destroys enemy around him (like in 2D shooters where you have bombs that clear the screen from enemies)

Wow - that is an excellent list of ideas - thank you! Most of them are also easily applicable (with the current set of Lua used in the cursed).

[KaiserJ]

i am also working in that field (levels, items) on a project; that is to say i'm designing things and a brave coder plans to implement them

as with smoths' work, yours will likely be picked over and analysed as well, should you come up with something good (and frankly i'm convinced you will because everything else in cursed is money)

just to add a few to knorkes ideas which are all cool;

- a teleport spell that allows you to move your hero to an advantageous position near an allied unit every few minutes (for larger maps or huge battles to possible offset a relatively slow movement speed)
- "summoning" abilities to build a costless tower or mobile unit on a countdown near the hero
- temporary barricades (i.e. anivia from LoL)
- capture (brainwash? sapping a tower? it's been in a lot of RTS games, i enjoyed using spies in C&C generals to steal labs and plants)

something of note... in my very very early wip game plan (action RPG) abilities will all be from picked-up items, allowing players to customize and combine different abilities on their load-out to make the most out of their characters' strengths or the NPC enemies weaknesses... you could just have a shared set of abilities for cursed and let the players pick a new one or an upgrade every few minutes... would certainly open the idea of heroes up strategically, and as long as you can avoid noob traps, sharing abilities for heroes across the two armies should make balancing comparatively easy and let players pick abilities that apply to the map (nobody would pick the swimming guy on DsD etc)

[smoth]

I think I'll start with linear leveling. Something like: Heroes gets XP (gained by himself and by allied units within a certain range around the hero) => hero auto-morphs into next level hero (with better stats and other abilities). When the hero dieds you'll have to rebuild it (the gained level will not be lost but the costs increase with every level).

I have on my harddrive/smoth.net a copy of my halloween project, it does the following:

you gain xp..

every so much xp counts as a level

when you die, you lose xp..

only to a certain level though, like say you are level 6, you die, you lose xp, you can keep losing xp until you reach level 2 at which point you are capped and will not drop further. Terribly untested and what not.

[zwzsg]

I'd like direct controllable heroes, viewed from above, move with keyboard, aim with with mouse. Like I did for KP, except KP settings isn't as well suited for heroes as The Cursed.

[azaremoth]

I have on my harddrive/smoth.net a copy of my halloween project, it does the following:

you gain xp..

every so much xp counts as a level

when you die, you lose xp..

only to a certain level though, like say you are level 6, you die, you lose xp, you can keep losing xp until you reach level 2 at which point you are capped and will not drop further. Terribly untested and what not.

Hi Smoth,

I couldn't find a hint to your halloween project on smoth.net. Also the forum is only displayed in a tiny frame on the center of the webpage. It is hard to read the forums that way. Where can I find the experience lua stuff?

Thx,
aZaremoth

[smoth]

that sounds odd, can you take me a screenshot of the forum as it displays for you?

The halloween project is not public due to mainly the code being a trainwreck of hack coding back when I was getting more aquainted with lua.

I need to redo the experience code before I share it that and add skills to the damn thing.



is where I was at. Still need to add the skills display etc. Research menu code has been a great help in figuring this part out.

[azaremoth]

something of note... in my very very early wip game plan (action RPG) abilities will all be from picked-up items, allowing players to customize and combine different abilities on their load-out to make the most out of their characters' strengths or the NPC enemies weaknesses... you could just have a shared set of abilities for cursed and let the players pick a new one or an upgrade every few minutes... would certainly open the idea of heroes up strategically, and as long as you can avoid noob traps, sharing abilities for heroes across the two armies should make balancing comparatively easy and let players pick abilities that apply to the map (nobody would pick the swimming guy on DsD etc)

That sounds very interesting (and hard to realise in Spring) - I am looking forward to see where you are going with that idea. A more complex hero system would be step two for me right now. I'll reach for the low hanging fruits in the first step.

Hi Smoth,

I couldn't find a hint to your halloween project on smoth.net. Also the forum is only displayed in a tiny frame on the center of the webpage. It is hard to read the forums that way. Where can I find the experience lua stuff?

Thx,
aZaremoth

That should actually be a pm. Anyway - the issue is solved: I had an old link.

[zwzsg]

Here is a tiny mutator showing how I'd like heroes to be like:
CursedHeroes_1.16.sd7

Instruction:
- Get cursed_116.sdz
- Get CursedHeroes_1.16.sd7
- Play Cursed Heroes 1.16h (against hard zombie AI for exemple)
- /cheat
- /give tc_sarge
- /luarules hero
- You now control a single unit with buffed hp.
- Move with arrows or wasd, aim with mouse, fire primary with LMB and secondary with RMB
- Press CTRL D to suicide
- You can also exit hero mode by typing again /luarules hero
- Other cool units to try: tc_belial, tc_mancubus, euf_tank, tc_bonebeast, ...


Note: The gadget used in this mutator is actually mod-agnostic.

[azaremoth]

Hehe - that is fun. You should try the euf_destroyer for some starship rumble. It should be included as a game-mode imho: hero survival with some randomly dropped med-kits and a leveling system (as soon as I get some time to write it).

Some notes:
- the hero unit is shooting all the time (no matter if I press any mouse key or not)
- it would be cool to be able to use the jumping ability of the sarge (by pressing the bound key for example)

Anyway - great work!

[zwzsg]

- the hero unit is shooting all the time (no matter if I press any mouse key or not)

That one was hard to debug, but I found out the issue: It happens when you lag and there is less unsynced frames than synced frames.

Other times it fires while it shouldn't:
- When you leave the unit, it starts attacking whatever spot you were looking at. But a true hero never surrender, dying on the spot is the only honorable way out.
- If you click-spam, then the reloadtime is skipped. But let's pretend it's not a bug but a feature aiming at increasing weapon power without touching the weapon def.

It should be included as a game-mode imho

Sure. Building a whole game mode out of this would be great. It's actually my final goal. But then I got the idea to use your Cursed models for it in 2009, yet haven't done anything since.

[azaremoth]

I am currently reworking/optimizing the heroes. The most important changes are:

- level cap increased to 10 (was 5). However, the actual impact of fully leveled heroes is not twice as strong

- leveling will happen more often with less increase in power

- rebuilding heroes will cost time but not resources anymore

- both heroes do have very powerful point and click weapons ("ulti") now beginning with level 6. The Sarge has a BFG ("Brute Force Gun") and the Shade has a D-Gun like weapon

- for the Sarge the different weapons will be indicated by the visuals. You may recognize that I was making the weapons look doomesque (no copy&paste, but close enough) plasma-gun (Doom 1/2) and BFG (doom movie). Also - the minigun is now should mounted...

- the cursed Shade does not change weapons throughout levels. However, the increased in power is indicated by different visuals for weapons (two-handed sword -> double scythes -> double katana) and additional gimmicks (mask, hat, ...)

[raaar]

Energy blades would make more sense in these contexts where melee attacks are used against armored targets like tanks and such. Ingame the shade's swords have a glowy effect on them, that helps, but could be more intense when attacking.

Asian conical hat is weird.

The melee attack animations are also weird, they feel wrong. Shade spins too much, in my opinion it'd look better if it cycled between a few different forward swings instead.

[azaremoth]

If you take a close look, all blades do have a glowing plasma edge. At least for the swords I did also keep the distortion effect that was there before.

As far as the animation is concerned - the circle attack is a feature of the unit. Thus the animation should fit. I did clean some stuff in the script though. The Shade will now circle faster and without being interrupted - it is actually a nice blade dance

I totally love the hat. Would would you suggest as helmet?

[raaar]

something that would fit a sith lord!

I'd change the armor also.

[azaremoth]

Sith Lord? I actually had a undead ninja from hell (think of Scorpion) in mind, when creating this unit. Thus the Asian hat fits quite well.

[PicassoCT]

Heroes, there abilitys create what they are used for.
You are entering DOTA country there.

There are buffs for close-combat units or ranged-units, which specify the location the hero will be.

The same goes for weapons.

The most interesting combos are heroes which have orthogonal abilitys.
Like a sniper, who can heal himself by devouring fresh corpses.
Or a melee-buffer, who needs to recharge while not under attack.
Some abilitys can be game deciding so need to be selected carefully. Lets assume a hero can drag a enemy towards him- or blow a formation up, by shoving everyone away.
There is lots of things, but what did you imagine for them.
How much budget for micro did you allocate for this hero.
For the value of invested micro-time, must be worth the sacrifices of not invested in macro time.