[Altered Melee] Creep Alliances

[Reznor]

So I was watching a stream of Warcraft 3 and it got me thinking, what if you could ally with certain races of creeps on melee maps? For instance, in the lore Night Elves were allied with all dragon flights except black. What if that were incorporated into the game where if you play as Night Elves on a melee map, all the dragons that would normally be hostile become rescuable units? You wouldn't gain experience from them because you're not killing them, but you do get a free dragon out of it.

• Another thing I noticed is that none of the level 10 dragons really have any spells. I feel like some spells that dragons could incorporate are breath of fire for red dragons, blink for bronze dragons (since they have knowledge and some control over time, this would be them stopping time to travel short distances), and raise dead or summon infernal for black dragons.
• Each race has specific creeps they can ally with. For Night Elves, it would be dragons (except for black and nether dragon flight), Furbolgs, and Wildkins. For the Undead, it would be black dragon flight, pretty much any creep on the Felwood tileset, and any demonic units. For Orcs and Humans, I was thinking that they could buy contracts at mercenary camps. So Humans could ally with bandits and any other Human creeps on the map, and Orcs could buy contracts with Fel Orc or Demonic creeps on Outland maps, and Trolls could be a free alliance on Lordaeron, Northrend, and Ashenvale maps for the Horde.
• So for a certain amount of gold and possibly lumber, half the creeps on the map could become your allies. I feel like the Night Elves and Undead would become very powerful in this regard since the Night Elves have such a strong connection with nature and the Undead have a huge amount of influence in certain parts of the world of Azeroth and beyond.
• Centaur could be a buyable alliance for the Night Elves because they are connected with Cenarius in lore.
• What sort of alliances would Northrend creeps like the Magnataur share? Would they be more closely tied with Cenarius or with the Scourge? Nerubians would possibly be part of the Scourge, or be a buyable contract with either the Night Elves or Humans since in lore the few surviving Nerubians who weren't cursed with undeath directly opposed the Scourge, and this is evident in some of the last Undead missions in the Frozen Throne.
• Another thing that could be added are creep heroes, like hero dragons, hero dark wizards, hero Centaur Khans, etc.

What sort of balancing issues could happen based on this change to melee maps and how would you resolve them? If anybody wants to undertake this project, please link me your work so I can check it out myself, as I'd love to see my idea be made real.

 

[Limitteditemeater]

These ideas could definitely work out well, however, one of the problems is that some maps will be incredibly unbalanced based on what creeps are there, while others are almost always op for one race. Dragons for Night Elves are fine lore wise but gameplay rise it would probably break the balance as the night elves could quickly run and grab a chaos dragon and destroy a red camp with that dragon and possibly some more of the camp that it stole. Also, I doubt Centaur would be liking towards the Night Elves since like Harpys they used to have quite close ties but in present lore most if, not all are savage. To make this a thing you would probably want to design new balanced creeps for this idea or give it a hard requirement to unlock red camp creeps. The idea could definitely work just needs some changes. If it became a thing it could definitely be very interesting and fun to play.

 

[Cespie]

Not a big melee buff, but it sounds like it would work if you are very particular about how you arrange the creeps. In fact, you'd probably have to trigger spawn the creeps to fit the race patterns of the players to avoid having a night elf player surrounded by undead rescuable creep camps fighting an undead player who then rescues all of them with an acolyte and rushes his base.
The concept sounds like a very difficult to balance twist on... well... Mercenary Camps... basically.