Infection race

[PajdomanMokri]

If you've seen my previous threads, you know I get ideas for unique races, but can never think of a way to bring it to life in Warcraft. I decided to make an infection race that would rely purely on infecting enemies, with little or no units.
Upgrades would be like evolution tree, where the player would select bacteria, parasite, etc.
The goal is to have a disease spreading, and depending on upgrades, it could do one of the following:
-DoTs to kill the infected
-Turn enemies into zombies (or some mutated unit, belonging to neutral hostile)
-Take control of the enemies (like some hive mind parasite)
-your suggestions?

The enemies should kill off their infected units from the start and contain the infection, so the infection player doesn't spiral out of control.
The player would be defeated when there are no infected units left on the map.

The goal is to have players constantly looking if their units are sick and not allow the disease to spread.
The race should be weak and almost irrelevant during early game, so it seems like no threat, mid game, when it spreads a bit, should become nuisance, dealing minor damage, but enough to reduce hp regen of units, but still seem like minor threat. Then, after some bigger upgrades are made, if enough units are infected, it should be very hard to impossible to deal with (like most diseases in movies of that type, if you've ever seen one).
Long story short, the infection player should be no threat in the early stages, but should be able to spiral out of control very quickly, if not contained.

Imagine, you are playing the game and see your unit has debuff and you are not aware what it does, but you decide to ignore it because it does nothing. Afterwards, you see that units are regenerating slower and start to be worried, but are unsure what is happening. And in the late game, 70% of your units die and start rising from the dead, spreading the infection even further, until you are overwhelmed and finally lose.
But if you know what you're doing, then you instantly kill of any infected units you have, reducing your armies to half of their size, but you remain with no infected units and, if you survive until late game, you see your enemies struggling with the infection, while you are healthy.

This is the hardest one for me, because I need to think of:
1. ways to spread the infection (researches and upgrades)
2. how the player should play (not just waiting for the disease to spread and doing nothing)
3. evolution tree (not sure how would I even make something like this)

So, if anything comes to mind, please share it with me. I would be thankful.

 

[cleavinghammer]

* Spreading contamination:
** Contact (getting too close to an infected unit)
** Food (cast on a food building, every newly trained unit has a chance to have the disease until all infected buildings are destroyed)
** Air (creates a slow-moving controllable ethereal cloud of disease that infects units inside it).
** Spores: a dead infected unit releases uncontrollable ethereal clouds that wander around at random, infecting units they run into.

* Upgrades: Damage done to target, casting time, mana cost, spawns (clouds etc.) per corpse...
* Research: Type of target allowed (ground/air, living/undead, mechanical, hero, ethereal...),

As for what the player does, you should make him neutral so infected units aren't automatically attacked. The player is only made hostile when he completes an important upgrade (during the final phase). In the meantime, he could go around killing creeps to gain corpses and gold to fuel his research.

 

[pick-a-chew]

Seems like a fun idea. How do you plan for it to be played? Like you have two people playing against each other, and another player playing this race? How would it be balanced, since the infector will likely establish a foothold in one player's army (allowing all other players to grow/expand without being hindered). At the moment i sort of imagine a map like Booty Bay where you infect the enemy (who has some sort of advantage) and you help your ally out by crippling them with your disease, though i imagine if done by AI it would be boring.

The way your infection would start is to have your disease be asymptomatic (i.e. it doesn't cause any negative effect, the infected units are merely carriers). Then you can use your "evolution tree" to choose traits that aid spread (such as by making it food, water or airborne, spreadable by contact), and traits that cause adverse effects but also cause it to become noticeable, such as decreased regeneration, slowed, reduced damage, higher upkeep, sleeps at night, whatever.

The player would play by actively choosing upgrades and evolutions. You could bring infected critters under the player's control so that the critters can be used to spread the disease to player bases or neutral camps.

Essentially your race idea, in essence, is an extreme elaboration of the naga siren spell "Parasite", in that with a high amount of triggering it will become very customizable to be spreadable/spawn units/deal damage or whatever.

 

[PajdomanMokri]

Seems like a fun idea. How do you plan for it to be played?

It would be like normal melee map, except with a lot unique races, not just build, train, upgrade, attack.

How would it be balanced, since the infector will likely establish a foothold in one player's army (allowing all other players to grow/expand without being hindered).

That would be highly ineffective, since the survival relies only on one player's skill. If the infected player is skilled, he will kill off all infected units and it's game over. But if you infect all, chances that somebody will mess up will increase.

Essentially your race idea, in essence, is an extreme elaboration of the naga siren spell "Parasite"

Actually, I planned to trigger all of it, because I don't want parasites to be dispelled. Then the player is too weak, since I plan to make exorcist race, that would dispel everything. And it wouldn't be fair.

 

[PajdomanMokri]

Any other ideas? I still don't know how could I make good evolution tree selection...

 

[pick-a-chew]

Well the evolution tree would contain traits of a limited number of categories, e.g. Transmission (spread) & pathogenicity (effects). You can break the latter down into subcategories like disease (damaging), behaviour-changing (zombies/mind control) and symbiotic (enhancing).

Really your tree will have two or three distinct branches. If you look at any IRL infection, the life cycle has clear stages: infection, followed by reproduction of the bug inside the host (which causes disease), and then transmission to complete the life cycle.

Infection is hard to play around with. You could make it so your disease infects workers or ground units or animals or heroes of creeps or critters easily.

The other two I've discussed already.

 

[cleavinghammer]

Instead of making the infection dispellable, give it a chance of resisting dispel (as one of the skills).

So for skills, you'd have increased damage done to infected unit, reduced time needed for full infection, more types of targets allowed, amounts spawned, resistance to dispelling, reduced manacost...

Some infection ideas:
Rabid: If the infection is left untreated, the unit becomes Neutral Hostile and attacks nearby units, spreading the infection to the units it attacks.
Immune to Pain: The unit only takes half damage from all attacks, but deals damage to itself every time it attacks.
Sleep Sickness: Unit randomly has Sleep cast on it.
Fungus Colony: Unit (randomly and on death) explodes in cloud of spores, infesting nearby units.
Sensory Shutdown: Unit's sight, range and accuracy are sharply reduced.

Some beneficial ideas:
Mycelium: When holding still and injured, infected unit gains greatly increased HP regeneration but moves very slowly (the speed debuff is removed a few seconds after fully healing).
Spores: Infected unit gains the ability to emit spores for various effects (sleep, paralysis, blindness etc.).
Infect Tree: Unit infects a tree. Until destroyed, the tree is an infection zone that spreads the disease to units around it (and other trees, increasing the area).