[Altered Melee] Additional autocast stage which only targets Heroes (Would love feedback)

[MapNoob]

I've been working on an extended autocast system which introduces another stage after the normal autocast where this new added stage only targets heroes.

The idea is that is that it could hopefully help reduce mental load of managing casters by giving another tool in the toolbox. If you only have a few casters, having to prioritize important targets like heroes could maybe be useful, by ensuring your Hero is always buffed/healed while your enemy's Hero is always debuffed.

I've been going through many different approaches and I thought I was done implementing this week until I realized my approach with having different abilities representing different stages resulted in the icon disappearing from the command card when multiple units with different stages of the autocast were selected at the same time. But @Duckfarter came to the rescue with the info that levels of abilities can decide allowed targets, and selecting multiple units with different levels of an ability still displays the ability in the command card.

So this is what this implementation is built around, which was fairly straight forward for single units.
However group orders made it significantly more complicated as I wanted similar behavior as for normal autocast toggling, where if some units in a group have autocast toggled on and some do not, a right click only toggles the ability on for those who do not already have it on.

In this implementation this means that if a unit in a group has the Hero only autocast toggled on and some do not, right clicking the ability will result in the other units incrementing their stage of the autocast until all have the Hero only autocast toggled on, at which point the next right click will turn it off for all the units in the group.

This is just a map with a bunch units and casters and the script controlling the autocast.

How the implementation works is described in the script if you are interested.

I would love some feedback.

 

[A]mun]

First i salute you for your effort of bringing more quality of life to this old game.

Now,
i'm too much of a LUA noob to really comprehend this, but strictly from a gameplay perspective:
Wouldn't it be more intuitive to make a system that forces casters to prioritize heroes first - toggleable perhaps?

Then again, i see the use of dedicated support units.
Realistically, players will keep these in the same unitgroup (strg+1) as their hero(es) (like pros do anyway).
Which, when hero exclusive mode is active, would make them stand around and do nothing.

 

[MapNoob]

First i salute you for your effort of bringing more quality of life to this old game.

Thank you! It's kind of a study for myself, as to how to make RTS games more accessible to a wider audience. It feels like the genre has kind of stagnated the last decade or two and I suspect them being so mentally demanding is part of the explanation.

Wouldn't it be more intuitive to make a system that forces casters to prioritize heroes first - toggleable perhaps?

Do you mean an autocast mode that could still target other units beyond Heroes, but would strictly prioritize Heroes first? Because this system only allow Hero targets when toggled on but all targets obviously when standard native autocast is toggled on.