Local unit upgrades

[Death Adder]

I've got buildings that spawn units and the players can buy upgrades for the units, but only the units from that building get upgraded. (Basically using bonusmod and adding abilities by triggers.)

Thing is you can't tell an upgraded unit from a normal one (or another upgraded unit that has another upgrade) without clicking on it, and that's just the stats, so if they have any more special abilities beyond +hp/mp/dmg/armor then you won't really know it.

So what are the ways to give this information to the players? Ideally you wouldn't even have to click the unit and still get an idea of what upgrades it has using something like attachments, but I'm not too optimistic about this.

 

[IcemanBo]

Is it in option to visualisize the unit for indicating upgrade progess?
Increasing size, step by step, or changing slowtly the vertex color to red.

 

[teozamait]

Attachments would work nicely, since most Item-based abilities do allow for attachments to be used.

 

[Death Adder]

Is it in option to visualisize the unit for indicating upgrade progess?
Increasing size, step by step, or changing slowtly the vertex color to red.

It could work kinda, but I'd need a lot of different things.

Since there isn't just one direction of progress. How would you tell the difference between two units of same unit type but with different levels of bonus health, armor, damage, spell resistance, attack speed, etc?

Attachments would work nicely, since most Item-based abilities do allow for attachments to be used.

Yes, I also think that attachments could work well, but I'd probably need models specifically tailored for this purpose then.

And while it probably wouldn't be difficult to show what different types of upgrades, how would you tell what level of the upgrades?

Then you also have to keep in mind that any of these attachment models couldn't be shared with any aura or buff used in the game, or it could confuse players.

So that's why I said that I'm not that optimistic about it, or maybe I'd have to compliment the attachments with buff tooltips. Or have you thought of something else?

 

[IcemanBo]

Providing such detailed information and in variations seems not so straight forward that can be dealt with simple indicatiors. :/

What about selecting a unit and type "-getinfo" or something? - to display the upgrade information for it's type.