[Campaign] Elite Soldier's abilities

[ArchDuke]

the terrain is key, right

 

[Lord Aiden]

It's one of the key ingredients, a base can be very well defended, but a very good location can make it even more difficult to attack

 

[ArchDuke]

Did you get the difficulty adjustment list ????

 

[Lord Aiden]

Yea, I was looking through it earlier. Good work

 

[Lord Aiden]

@Rem I see you're online, what are your thoughts on elite units abilities?

 

[Rem]

i have created very few units, i mostly did terrain, 2 units which i remember well that u can call elite were the Cerulescent Guardians
i think they had like 750hp with resistant skin, true sight, and a charm ability which could only be used on air units and consumed no mana

just think of a human grunt, with a few tricks up his sleeve


The other one was called Reyes, i think the unit had 880 hp, it had resistant skin, hardened skin, true sight, healing wave, hex, and could attack both ground and air units with its attack,

it had only 880 hp for a reason; i had to reduce it from 950 because the unit would be too strong

 

[Lord Aiden]

oh I remember playing that map, you're supposed to destroy the water palace on the hill right?
The guardians were a nuisance, basically knights with resistant skin, but the Reyes seemed more like very strong spell casters than elite units, from what I remember although they were hard to take out they didn't really deal heavy damage; they just hexed your forces and healed eachother. . . the healing made it hard to take them out

 

[Rem]

wow u remembered actually they resurrected each other: Siler gave me the suggestion to give them the tauren classification and the ancestral spirit ability; which i did, only renaming it to something like "resurrect," which is why they were so hard to take out, made for some interesting gameplay though: there were 5 of them guarding the palace along with the Blue Witch hero....

 

[Lord Aiden]

Definitely an interesting mission, needed more dialogue though, also I felt like the enemy did not have enough air power; besides that sea dragon and sea serpent (which were relatively weak air units) they didn't have much

 

[Rem]

ye ur right, serpent was only 500hp because it was mainly anti-air
I think the dragon had like 850 hp but it made up for this with a very strong attack

 

[Lord Aiden]

I don't remember the stats but the computer barely trained any, I remember I had to fight like 8 air units the entire mission

 

[Rem]

really? well it wasn't supposed to be much of an air battle anyway. should've worked with the ai editor more

 

[Lord Aiden]

More like u should've messed with the triggers more

like some event happens (for instance some building is attacked), and it triggers the creation of an air unit

 

[Rem]

wish i had thought of that back then

who knows maybe ill work on another map, maybe collaborate with one of you guys this summer

 

[Grey.Knight]

Hey guys since u are talking about elite units, would it be better to give one side all elite units or simply like 2 or 3 of them but really strong ones?

 

[Lord Aiden]

There's my opinion on the subject; I would give elite (stronger) units to the enemy but only make them slightly stronger, like if the soldiers of my side would have 480 hp, I would give their soldiers 600 hp, also I would introduce very few "elite" units that are slight stronger than the player's counterparts, however I would have several really strong elite units protecting the target of the mission, whether its a hero, a building, or a set of things. My suggestion would be to introduce a group of several every strong elite units to the enemy but set a build limit on how many the enemy can make, so there's like 5-8 of these units on the battlefield at any given time, it something is really strong, make sure that it cannot be respawn to be training....

 

[Grey.Knight]

ok got it...

Have a few strong soldiers that can easily eliminate the other sides solder's 1 on 1

and have a few elite units like the knights with plenty of hp, resistant skin, and an ability to damage enemies that are surrounding them

 

[Lord Aiden]

Yes, that's basically it, try modifying fan of knives, or something like chain lightening

 

[Lord Alyx]

Look Unless the map is a final battle (In which case you need the enemy having as much elites, and the strongest elites at his disposal) then you generally need 2 types of elite unites; one type of basic tier 1 elite unit (like a stronger version of the footman; eg. 600hp, critical strike, hardened skin, etc.) and a really strong bodyguard unit that protects the hero, structure, entrance to building, or whatever else is the goal of the mission, (and those need to be really strong, 1200+ hp, resistant skin, hardened skin, spell immunity, charm, various auras, etc.)

 

[Lord Aiden]

To this day I've never really seen a better elite unit than the one Blake used in one of his missions
Basically a skeletal knight:

a 1200+ hp unit that could attack both land and air unit and only had 3 abilities:

1. Resistant Skin
2. Spell Immunity
3. An ability based on command aura that lowered enemy's attack damage by a certain percentage

And that was it, it was the most effective unit besides those super OP 3000hp+ bosses encountered in some wc3 campaigns

 

[Rem]

Yes, Blake created the perfect elite unit, in fact so perfect that 8 of them could destroy an entire army, thankfully they were only used in one mission to protect Arveleus' palace and are never actually used an as attacking force

A concept you guys need to understand is that elite units need to be balanced too, they're not some kind of mighty invincible unit that nothing can touch.

 

[Lord Aiden]

Rem. I don't know if you noticed, but those units, "Spectral Knights" were the name were literally the last line of defense for Arveleus' Palace, that's mainly the reason they were so OP, all the other elite units like Alphas, Milreavers, Black Vipers, Grey Guards, and all the other things I can't remember were much less OP and not nearly invincible or anything of the sorts.

Everything else was more or less balanced, these weren't for the above mentioned reason.

 

[Rem]

Sorry, you were right

 

[Lord Alyx]

@Lord Aiden

I couldn't not find the map I kept telling you about, but I can provide a very in depth description of it since that it seems would be the next best thing, you want this?

 

[Lord Aiden]

guess that will have to do ...

 

[Lordlycan]

Elite units are elite's because they can control the tide and speed of a battle. History has tons of great examples. (polish hussar/Phalanx/Companion cavalry/Hun archehorsemen/English Hunchback longbowman)

Focus them on a aspect.

Flee:
#1 Making them highly durable with long disables but also granting dmg immunity to ENEMY units. Is an interesting take for an Elite unit that allows you to disengage from an unfavorable battles.

#2. Removing collision sizes of all adjacent units (easy way to do it is granting al units invisibility but drop a temp truesight on the area as well.)

Scouting:
#3 Very high movement speed units, with truesight and a large amount of vision.

Durability:
#4 Extreme healing as long as there's a stalemate on the terrain of the current battle.
#4.5 Goblin Engineering crew deployment start automatically repairing buildings and machines.

Siege:
#5. Long range with high damage to buildings.

#6. Durable Short range Trojan horse type of unit removing collision issues. And allowing you to drop tons of units in enemy bases (like goblin zeppelins)

Discord:
#7. Usng a skillset to sow discord and chaos amongst enemy ranks. Transmute/Charm and resetting Mercenary cooldowns

Temp Reinforcements:
#8. 1 Man Army. A single unit with so many summons that only last a very short window of time.

 

[Lord Alyx]

@Lord Aiden

Ok before you can understand the battle you must understand the history of the land,

Very briefly the contient is divided into 5 regions of influence, each one controlled by a prince.

Prince Azurian controls the north-east territory, a very ore rich and somewhat economically developed part of the country, his intention is to dominate the rest of the regions and create a kingdom under his rule alone, obviously you don't want that to happen, but the Prince has already incited a civil war. Your goal in this mission is to invade his domain and destroy the royal castle; a symbol of his power as well as the location of his current whereabouts.


This is a rectangular map; the width is much smaller than the length. You start at the bottom while the royal castle is directly across from you on the top of the map, the map is an uphill struggle, and the castle's primary defenses are 1) Flame towers; these shoot at and burn both ground and air targets, 2) Blue dragons, 1000hp dragons that are extremely effective against any air units, but are also pretty good against ground threats as well, 3) units known as marksman; basically a very effective archer with a really good range, 4) Azurian Guard; a 1350 giant human unit that has resistant skin and an ability that reduces damage from magic 5) Astral keeper; a void walker like being that is ethereal the entire time but can do huge amount of magic damage to both land and air units, can also cast hex and soul burn.

The castle has inner and outter "zones," the defenses I've described are basically what's guarding the castlem in other words the inner zone, the outter zone has all kinds of human units present, these are less powerful but more numerous, you have to go off against 2 major bases while are extensive in order to make it to the castle, and you can't just take your air units and fly over there cause of the dragons which will destroy any air unit that come within 1500 range of the castle.


You have a 250 food limit in this mission. Mission starts, you have 9 minutes to destroy a small mining outpost, take their gold mine and establish a base, (you have to do this before dawn) then you have to fight off various forces and make your way through the defenses (think of it as twilight of the gods, only you're playing as green, and you don't have archimonde but 3 powerful heroes instead. Once you get past the middle of the map, the Prince gets scared, he begins building this magic devise that basically creates a black hole at a particular location; and therefore destroys a quite a large are. It's survivable but its easier to just go and destroy him before the weapon is fully charged. Depending on difficulty you have anywhere betweeen 45 and 15 minutes before the thing is fully charged, at that point you gotta destroy all the defenses and breach his inner zone. You will get some reinforcements once you reach certain points, finally when you are within a good range of his castle the prince will start going crazy, he will use mass teleport like spells to gate in tons of loyalists, attempt to bribe you, have his harvesters attack your forces, even have his workers convert to heavily armed militia to fight you, at that point you gotta do everything and anything to destroy the castle.


So yea that's basically it.

 

[Lord Aiden]

Interesting mission, long time to complete?

 

[Lord Alyx]

You mean to beat the chapter or to create it?

 

[Lord Aiden]

I meant to beat it, but I'm curious about both now

 

[Lord Alyx]

Well there was 3 people working on it, I think it took about 8 days to make, but only because it really had to be fine tuned, otherwise the map would've been done in like 3-5 days, (special units had to be created and adjusted just for this map, the testing that took place, terrain had to made in a certain way, etc.)

As far as beating it I would say around 2 hours

 

[Lord Alyx]

I got some weeks or so of free time, so here's what I learned from elite and abilities

First of all there are those units that are just like the regular unit except like 20-25% stronger, or do more damage

several examples of this

we have the footman 420 hp
then we have the "raider" 550 hp does a bit more damage, also has an ability that reduces damage from piercing and spells.

Not really an elite unit, but definitely a step up from the footsman


we have the archer. it has like 365 hp

then we have the sharpshooter (from Rem's map) : 700 hp bigger damage, range is like 700, plus she has resistant skin and true sight

definitely a step up from an archer

then there goes the knight 975hp when animal war training is research

then we have the Azure rider 1050hp resistant skin, critical strike

definitely a better knight, if it could use ensnare or attack flying unit it would definitely be an elite unit

Those "Gray Guards" which had 650hp and could attack both land and air units definitely complicated things up for the opposite side they're basically the combination of a footman, and a sharpshooter and is pretty tough on top of that

 

[Lord Alyx]

The map Colonel send me had these units called

"Milreavers"

1175hp units with a strong attack
resistant skin
ensnare

and 2 critical strike abilities

20% chance to do 2x the damage

and 5% chance to do 20x the damage but only to non-hero units or units without resistant skin

now that's a powerhouse unit

 

[Lord Aiden]

You're taking this out of context, in one of the many missions Colonel Aster was making for Blake you had to go up against a rouge general, well more of a rouge field marshal, so this guy being a field marshal had Milrein's (his nation's) elite force the "milreavers" at his disposal, so you had to go up against them.

It would've been an excellent chapter if it was ever completed.

 

[Lord Aiden]

Also regarding elite units, rem was making mountain trail map, it had only one real elite unit: the sharpshooter

a 700hp archer with a chaos attack, good damage, resistant skin, true sight, envenomed weapons, and a attack range of like 700 or 750, this unit could wreck real havoc

 

[Lord Alyx]

I didn't know the sharpshooter had envenomed weapons, that makes it a true elite unit

 

[Lord Aiden]

Yes, but from what I can recall they have a food cost of 4, cost lots of gold and lumber to train, plus have a minimum range which makes them suck in melee combat, they're only good against units or structures from far away, the range (700 I believe) is good but its outranged by any siege units as well as towers so its not a super-unit overall

 

[Lord Alyx]

I don't know about super-unit, but its definitely a very good elite unit by my standards, although its less effective against air units because it has a chaos attack it makes up for this in its ability to damage ground units, plus its exceptional range

 

[Lord Aiden]

I completely agree with your logic, all I was trying to point out was the unit wasn't flawless or balanced all round

 

[Lord Alyx]

Balancing itself is a very difficult task, and even after hours of doing it a unit may have flaws,

I mean look at it this way, you have 420 hp footman, in my campaign due to balancing issues the footman had to either have a stronger attack or more hp, first I strengthed their attack but this cause more problems than it should have, so instead I increased their hp to 480, which wasn't perfect, but which was clearly the better choice

all Im saying is balancing is well, not the easiest thing to accomplish, be happy when it at least seems balanced enough not to cause significant problems

 

[Rem]

 

[Lord Aiden]

yep, Rem you should be happy, your creations are pretty awesome

 

[Rem]

I devised other things as well

 

[Lord Aiden]

I know I've played your maps, have something to say about elite units?

 

[Lord Aiden]

.?

8562558

 

[Rem]

well let me think a minute, you wanna understand how I thought of certain units

 

[Lord Aiden]

you wanna just go into chat?

 

[Rem]

hold on Im trying to think how I came up with certain things

 

[Lord Aiden]

tell me in chat

 

[Rem]

chat? isn't that what this thread is for ?