Heroes and Sea Units

[Kam]

Imagine for a moment that WC3 had sea units originally. How would the vanilla heroes have been balanced to deal with them?

 

[Sintriaxx]

I don't think it would've made too much of a difference on them, personally. Heroes are melee ground units, and I can't see them attacking sea units. Let the seas have their battles, and the land have its own .

 

[Kam]

I don't think it would've made too much of a difference on them, personally. Heroes are melee ground units, and I can't see them attacking sea units. Let the seas have their battles, and the land have its own .

That's one approach but for competitive play they would need to be adjusted to deal with such a significant threat or heroes could be sidestepped entirely. Even when players go heavy air heroes still have a place.

 

[Heinvers]

That's an interesting concept Kam.

Let's just say that instead of those (for e.g. the Naga would have heavy ranged/melee units as the ultimate techtree) heavy/medium /ranged units would replace them and special shields or passive abilities could be researched as an alternative.

Might also be that the game would've turned into a macro-type one like SC2 is, thus heroes would be nothing but dust or obsolete.

The gameplay would be fast-paced with fewer upgrades and slower attack speed/s.
The bounty/a.k.a pillage could be more important than resource gathering.

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Now that's just one concept, there's a whole variety of approaches into this topic.

 

[Shar Dundred]

I don't know if they'd even had to rebalance the heroes since sea units wouldn't be capable of taking out an entire base or disabling it - unless the player builds everything close to the shore or is somehow forced to use sea units.


Still think it's a shame that sea units didn't make it into WarCraft III. AI doesn't like them since Blizzard didn't bother.

 

[Kam]

I understand that development may have been different but I am proposing this as a hypothetical.

Assume you have terrain that allows for bases to be susceptible to sea units via deep water adjacent to mines. There are also many areas of shallow water. Now take the Blademaster. How could he be adjusted to help counter, in some way, a Battleship attacking a base from deep water.

 

[Wietlol]

You can make naval units without changing any of the units on land.

I once made (not finished though) a strategy map where every race had 3 ships (no shit, the models were already in the game)
Ships are built very slow but have a huge amount of health.

They had a transport ship. The transport ship has very low health and cannot attack.
The transport ship was only good to get units past the walls of the enemy (yea I had walls too)
The units can only be dropped in small areas because most of the sea is deep water.

They had a frigate. The frigate is a ship that is specialized at destroying other ships (transport ships and battleships)
If the enemy has no ships, dont create frigates.
The frigate is the basic war ship. All other warships are compared to the frigate.

They had a battleship. The battleships are slow moving, low dps, high ranged units... like catapults.
They deal very much AoE damage but have a very low fire rate.
Because of their range they can destroy buildings that are not too far away from the water.

With those three ships you have pretty much what you want.
You have a reason why to build ships and you have something to fight them off.
The thing is that there is actually only one warship (assuming that people wont use massive armies so a battleship will actually help in naval battles too)
You might want to have another ship that is specialized in destroying other ships but cannot attack air and make the frigate have lower damage for example.
Or a ship that has some builders on board so it can repair ships at sea.
Maybe a demolition ship? (One that explodes to deal damage.)

Just use your imagination

EDIT: Ofcourse this will be going a bit back from the WC3 basics where everything is playing alongside heroes.
This is more of a thing for a bit bigger rts games.

 

[Molaf]

You would have a lot of machines to breath created by the ingeneers, Like gobelin trash or a good gnome one. Harpoons.

As in warcraft 2 you would have submarines ships. As so, one of the first race to pick would have been gobelins and maybe makuras, or the fat seals (I dont remember their name) and of course nagas.

Then if you have to balance some heros... mmmh maybe about items you could buy (allow to walk on water) Tornado of the naga witch would maybe create a whirlpool and attract ships. Maybe heros could even have some kind of personal "jet ski or whatever"
Most of the summonings spells would be amphibians. (summon wolfs would be summon leopard seals by example)

But I think the main balance would be with the races/buildings/units. Not so much about the heros ^^

 

[Himperion]

How would the vanilla heroes have been balanced to deal with them?

Whay not a "Hero load" option for the combat units. When inside the battleship or the destroyer the hero can use his abilities to support his army like on earth.

 

[Kam]

Whay not a "Hero load" option for the combat units. When inside the battleship or the destroyer the hero can use his abilities to support his army like on earth.

I like that but I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement.