Hard to kill heroes

[Reon]

I thought you mentioned they were missions where you have your army fight another army, those types of missions tend not to have detail terrain

 

[Lord Esdin]

No, ours did...also not all missions were melee type missions where you have to destroy the enemies base. Lots of missions had much different objectives and were overall more complex.

 

[Reon]

What do you mean complex?

 

[Lord Esdin]

Like missions with multiple main quests, let me give you an example.

You are given control of a hero and a few units, you need to fight your way to an abandoned base..that's quest 1

Then you have to fix the base up

You have to destroy an enemy structure located to the east before it gets enough mana to cause meteors to strike your base, so you have to do this under 20 min, that's quest 2

Then you have to destroy several structures in a base to the far east..that's quest 3

And you have to do quest 2 and quest 3 while defending your base from enemy attacks.

 

[Reon]

Oh i see. i was thinking you meant the terrain was complex, like importing custom tilesets, adding extra things, etc.

 

[Lord Esdin]

That was done too, dont think that the terrain can be crap just because the mission involves a fight between armies though. No one wants to play rough, unpolished missions, right...at least that was the notion among us back then.

 

[Reon]

if the story is involving and the gameplay is fun i would

 

[Lord Esdin]

The story did not take place on Azeroth, but rather in a completely different world, so if you're into fantasy you would've liked it, however I dont really know whether it would've been particularly popular or not, looking at it from my current perspective

 

[Reon]

??

 

[Lord Esdin]

I just mean that people might not be into that fantasy stuff, especially right now

 

[Reon]

? you mean because of the way things are

 

[Lord Esdin]

Yes the virus and everything

 

[Reon]

I think its just the opposite, I mean people are forced to self isolate, theyre looking for a way to distract themselves
what better solution than to immerse yourself in a fantasy ???

 

[ravellani]

I have read your messages on page 8 and I am working on a project just like Lord Esdin's and the terrianing is driving me crazy. I am working on the heros/abilitys as well with the creation and tweaking. I just understand what your were going through. What happened to the map in the end?

 

[Lord Esdin]

A lot of the stuff was lost I've had most of the stuff saved on my old PC and it broke. Sad thing is even if I could somehow find some of it I doubt it would be compatible with the new patches.

 

[Spear]

@Lord Esdin I can see how terraining and trigger making can be difficult. but unit tweaking?? it doesnt takes a huge amount of effort or time to give a unit an extra 50 or 100 health.

 

[Lord Esdin]

It's not that simple. Let me give you an example of what balancing issues I've actually faced before.

We had several human factions, each one with a particular "speciality". One faction had air superiority, and in our story there was no high level technology, there was also no dwarfs (they just didnt exist in the story) so everything was powered by magic. So we had one human faction with these really strong anti ground airships and needed to balance this, to make it fair to all the other factions. Now let's make this simple, this is how tricky it is to balance things just between 2 teams. Since one side had strong air we gave the other side stronger anti-air units. The side with the heavy airpower had archers as anti air, while we gave a unit called spearmaster to the other that was slightly stronger in terms of both damage and hp. But this wasnt fully effective because if the airships were spammed it would leave the 2nd faction at a major disadvantage, plus the faction with the airships could pull certain harassment strategies that would be unfair. So to counter this we increased the food, gold and lumber cost of the airships, but that was not fully effective either. It took us a long time to figure out that in order to have a more or less stable balance between the 2 sides we had to give the side without the airships a flying anti air unit that could effectively counter any kind of airship attacks and to make this unit relatively ineffective against ground units so that side 1 still had air superiority.

So it's not as simple as just giving a unit an extra 100hp, it's more like you gotta balance one side against the other and do so in a way that still allows a side to keep its special units.

 

[Reon]

this might be a stupid question, but how does one side have air superiority when you said the other side can clearly counter this

 

[Lord Esdin]

Ok team 1 has air superiority in the sense that its airship is superior vs ground units than anything team 2 has that is a flying unit and can attack ground units.

Heres an example.

Imagine you take 4 hydras with corrosive breath (for the sake of this example consider them to have a similar range to all other flying units for this attack) and attack a base with them. Chances are you'll do some major damage, well what happens when you take 5 windriders and attack a base with it? The base wont take nearly as much damage as in scenario 1. This is what I meant by superiority...a unit that beats the other teams units at this particular functions. The balancing is made so this doesnt make the gameplay unfair.

 

[Reon]

now I see why you were mentioning all the things with the airship: you guys had a real hard time balancing something similar.

 

[Lord Esdin]

Ye. Dont get more wrong making campaigns is fun, but it can be tedious and difficult as well.

 

[Reon]

Did you ever create AI? I noticed that some campaigns have a really good ai that keeps the battle interesting, also what would you say is the most difficult task in making a campaign?

 

[Lord Esdin]

No - I never worked on AI, but just so you know it's not always brilliant AI that keeps the battle interesting, it's also some very well engineered triggers that respond to the players actions as well. The most difficult part is putting it all together and making sure it runs smoothly without any bugs or errors.

 

[Reon]

what exactly do you mean with triggers?

 

[Lord Esdin]

Let me give you an example from a map I worked on.

You started at the south and your job was to destroy a base in the north that was well protected. You had access to air units. There were several triggers that were activated when you built an air fleet an/or entered a region with a flying unit. For instance if you created at least 3 airships the trigger would activate causing the enemy in the north to upgrade all the scout towers to guard towers. This is just one example, there were also triggers that were set to activate if the player would enter a certain region with flying units and would do all sorts of things to make air harassment difficult.

 

[Lord Esdin]

You know this reminds me of a campaign map which was in it's very early stages of development. We put an enemy stronghold on a huge hill in the center which was essentially invincible. In order to make it fall the player had to take his hero, a geomancer (archmage) and take him to 5 total circles of power. When he would enter each he would began casting earthquake on the fortress, and once he did it within all the circles the fortress would fall. Wonder how this .mission would've turned out of it was fully playable.

 

[Reon]

that a unique mission, similar to (at least in my mind) to the undead finale of tft, is that where you got the inspiration to do it?

 

[Lord Esdin]

Actually no, one of my friends had an idea that we place a stronghold on a hill. To the left and right of this hill were other bases, and the players needed to destroy these and put his hero in both of the circles of power to let him cast earthquake on the stronghold in order to destroy it. So the player had to destroy all the enemies on the left path and bring his hero into the circle and then all the destroy all the enemies on the right path and put his hero in the other circle.

It was a very interesting concept. The stronghold was magically shielded and could not be harmed by regular attacks, but a strong earthquake could damage the ground/foundation beneath it such that the building would fall.

 

[Reon]

@Lord Esdin if u dont mind me asking: w/o the use of triggers. or with MINIMAL use of triggers what are some ways u can prevent a player from winning a story mission by use of air units alone if lets says the goal is to eliminate a a building or several buildings

 

[Lord Esdin]

If you dont wanna use trigger make the enemy's anti air units more effective, here are some ideas,

First off you can create your own armor by converting "normal" armor into it and make it take 0 damage from piercing attacks and spells which are the 2 most common attack types of flying units

You can give your units and building spell immunity which will protect them from at least some flying units

You can modify elunes grace so that spells and magic attacks do less damage to units that have this modified ability

You can give special "critical strike" abilities to your archers or other anti air units that do double or even triple damage to air units

You can make special towers that attack only air units, you can also give these towers the barrage ability which let's them attack more than 1 target simultaneously

*If the theme of your map allows it you can give the enemy lots of siege engines with the barrage upgrade enabled

Create a special "slow" ability that only targets air units and give it to your spell casters

You can probably make a special aura out of unholy aura that drains the hp of enemy air units

Create a bunch of anti air flying units

Create an infinite star fall (starfall that doesnt end, duration =0) that only targets air units and covers a large area

You can make an air unit that is like a giant floating airship that only targets other air units and just floats over an area, I've done this once and its very effective if you do it right.

I can come up with more, not sure how practical they will be though

 

[Reon]

You can make an air unit that is like a giant floating airship that only targets other air units and just floats over an area, I've done this once and its very effective if you do it right.

wow u actually made something like this. this looks like an awesome idea

 

[Lord Esdin]

I didnt make the particular unit, one of my friends did, I cant even find the model we used. But all it really was is an airship with 3000hp, very slow movement and a quick attack rate. The trick is to make it have a strong piercing attack with a range of like 1000 and a low (~0.9) cooldown that only targets air units. It basically asserts air superiority over a given area.

 

[Reon]

Ok. so it cant target any land unit. How effective was this in your map, and what air units were you attempting to counter.

 

[Lord Esdin]

Ours didnt target ground units. It countered airship, slow but heavy air units, also some units like gargoyles I think. It was pretty damn effective, just make sure it self heals and that it doesnt stray from the base where you station it at(you might have to use some triggers here). I dont it would do too well if it gets swarmed by many air units, but again it was mainly a deterant against slow but heavy airships.

Also we had a different idea, an airship that would cast ensare or web on all air targets and bring them to the ground for ground units to attack, but we never actually developed the concept.

 

[Reon]

i meant to ask: lets say as an example u attack the base with 3 airships each having around 1500 health. how effective is this unit at bringing them down? how long does it take?

 

[Lord Esdin]

I think it did like 60 damage or so, overall it would take less than a minute to get rid of all three as long as they're in range of the airship.

 

[Reon]

i was going thru this in my head, and its a lot of work to import and create this unit instead of just giving a tower a huge range, attack and hp, why did you guys go this route? for the novelty ? or is there some kind of hidden advantage im not aware of here

 

[Lord Esdin]

The unit was already imported and created long before so it didnt take a great amount of effort to tweak it.

As far as the advantages go the main one is mobility, it can also regenerate hp but so can a tower.

Story wise you can have it as a quest to shoot the thing down. I dont recall what else was planned or implemented for it, it was a unique concept, that's why I mentioned it and remember it so well.

 

[Lord Esdin]

now I see why you were mentioning all the things with the airship: you guys had a real hard time balancing something similar.

The real reason is it's the first example that came to mind. We were making a mission that was critical story wise and the the goal of this particular mission was to destroy an enemy HQ, one important structure. Once we began to playtest the mission we discovered that the player can do this with relative ease by turtling, spamming airships and just sending half a dozen of them to destroy this target, this was made possible by a food cap of 200, which was actually essential for a battle of this magnitude. So we began to think of ways to counter t this, it ended up with us giving the building special armor. But overall balancing is very important, otherwise the gameplay is one sided, and you gotta test the game you're making a great deal to see where these flaws actually are.

 

[Spear]

Interesting stuff, so what was the theme of your campaign

 

[Lord Esdin]

there was a lot of things in it, no overarching theme except that even the most powerful tyrants can fall...

 

[Spear]

what's the story then?

 

[Lord Esdin]

Basically you are a knight who completed his traning (the 1st mission is basically your test) after that you are going to war against a group of very powerful rogue mages, along the way you have to fight a civil war, beat a woman who acquired tremendous power as a result of taking the energy of an artifact, and finally your last enemy is basically a forgotten goddess. It wouldve been way over the 18 missions we originally predicted it to be. If you played wanderers of sorceria you know how it has 6 books, well we did not want to split the thing up, so in length it wouldve been like 2 or maybe 2 and a little of the third book combined in one campaign.

 

[Spear]

Wow, that long, dont you think people were gonna get bored and just play something else?

 

[Lord Esdin]

First off this length was what my buddies wanted, I didn't really get a choice, and second I think we have had so many custom abilities and characters that I doubt the player would get bored...but now I guess we'll never know

 

[Spear]

Your campaign sounds promising, you ever consider finishing it?

 

[Lord Esdin]

I don't really keep in touch with the people who I was working with, and lots of the campaign maps, etc. have been lost, so probably not

 

[Spear]

On the title of the thread, I once played a campaign i cant remember which one and the last boss, this general or commander or whatever he was so super hard to kill,. I checked this out in the editor and he had 4 attacks: flare strike - a modified acid bomb, (some ability I cant recall) - reduces the hp and armor of the nearby enemy units. His third was a modified pulverize ability and the final was reincarnation, also he had a command aura...just thought I mention that since that's what the thread was all about

 

[Lord Esdin]

Good suggestions, however you can't give every hero pulverize, the hero needs a special animation for it to look right. The animation has to be him slamming the ground (like what taurens do) or him swirling around, or something else. Without the animation it wont look realistic

 

[Reon]

@Lord Esdin

Generally speaking in the missions you helped create did you give the player a base when the game started or did you just provide him with worker units to build his own.