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The Northpact is one of the Heaven's Fall races, and a current work in progress. I created the models and assets for it, with the theme in mind of a band of Tuskarr and Northrend snow creatures working together for survival. There's more to it than that in the Heaven's Fall storyline, but that's the general gist of it.
Early Game
Playing the game begins with:
- Frozen Hall
- 5 Frost Spirits
The Frozen Hall trains Frost Spirits, the basic worker unit, and contains the Backpack upgrade like the Warcraft 3 standard melee races.
The Frost Spirit is the main worker unit. It harvests gold and lumber, and can cast Blizzard after the player has a Temple of Frost (Level 2 hall), but the Blizzard is low-damage and costs all the Frost Spirit's mana.
The blizzard also leaves behind a destructible patch of snow, which cannot be directly targeted but can be dissipated by AoE abilities.
The player has 6 immediately available structures:
- Igloo
- Altar of Tundral Brotherhood
- Icecutter's Lodge
- Icy Spire
- Northern Vendors' Shop
- Block of Ice
The Igloo provides 12 food, and has two lanterns that emit an inspiring Lantern Glow, which increases the armor of adjacent units by 2.
I made sure this model has a Light emitter, so you can see the warm glow at night.
The Altar is like any normal Warcraft 3 altar and trains heroes, and revives slain heroes.
Above are shown the four heroes available to the Northpact.
Iceclan Champion
The Iceclan Champion is a strength hero from a hearty blue-skinned Orc clan. He wields two swords, one imbued with flames and the other imbued with frost.
- Leaping Attack - Leaps spinning through the air to a target point, then smashes the ground, causing fire and ice to erupt from the ground.
- Elemental Rage - Surrounds the Iceclan Champion with a ring of frost and flames, providing armor, adding a cold effect to attacks, and causing damage to nearby enemy land units.
- Frost Shield - Creates a destructible ring of ice around a target point.
- Frostfile Bladestorm - Spins around damaging nearby units with the swords of frost and flames.
Tuskarr Chieftain
This is a friendly Tuskarr chieftain skilled in the art of fishing and combat.
- Turtle Patrol - Summons a team of turtle-riding Tuskarr watchmen to defend the Tuskarr Chieftain.
- Spear Toss - Throws spears outward in a ring around the Tuskarr chieftain, damaging and stunning nearby units.
- Fish - Throws a lure into any nearby Shallow Water or Deep Water on the map (must be facing the water) and waits for a few seconds, sometimes catching a fish. When the Tuskarr Chieftain catches a fish, he can choose to sell it for some extra gold for the player, or eat it to restore food or mana. Some fish have other special abilities.
- Elder's Memorial - Summons a large stone Tuskarr head memorial, representing a Tuskarr elder. The memorial empowers nearby units and has a damaging freezing effect around it when summoned.
Legion-Pact Grandmaster
This hero is an elemental of frost and wintery magics, imbued with the power of Northrend.
- Northern Spirits - Summons an untargetable energy spirit that follows a target unit for a certain duration, and heals it if it becomes greatly injured in that time.
- Deep Winter - A channeled snow cloud appears, stopping enemy units within the cloud from using spells and abilities.
- Frostwave - The Grandmaster shoots out waves of damaging frost in a targeted direction, which deal damage to enemy units.
- Icy Vortex - The Grandmaster creates a giant swirling vortex which causes all nearby units to move inwards towards the vortex at a certain rate. Units can be commanded to run out of the vortex to fight against its pulling effect, and enemy units will take damage based on how close they are to the center of the vortex. The closer the enemy is to the vortex, the more damage he will receive.
This hero is a scorpion-riding Blue-skinned Orc ready for battle.
- Burrow - Becomes invisible and travels underground.
- Venomous Sting - Causes the Mountaineer's scorpion mount to attack with its stinger instead of letting the Mountaineer battle with his hammer. This deals poison damage, and poisons enemies, dealing more poison damage over time.
The attack animation depends on whether the Venomous Sting hero ability is active.
- Rocky Trail/Icy Trail - Leaves behind a trail of ice shards that explode on contact with enemies while mounted, or a trail of rocks when burrowed that slows and damages enemies.
- Tunnel - The Mountaineer and his burrowing scorpion mount travel to a target location, and leave behind a Tunnel, which allows allied units to travel between the two locations for a certain duration.
The Icecutter's Lodge is the basic troop production building for the Northpact. It trains the following units:
The Icecutter's Lodge contains the Dragon Taming upgrade, which allows Iceclan Grunts to mount on Ice Dragons to become Dragon Riders.
The Frostwolf is an agile alternative basic fighting unit, which can be upgraded with Windspeed, which provides temporary invisibility, and Scent Tracking which allows the Frostwolf to detect invisible and burrowed units.
The Icy Spire serves as a lumber dropoff point for Frost Spirits, and provides upgrades to the Northpact units to increase the damage and armor of both ranged and melee units.
This welcoming shop offers various items to Heroes and units with Backpack for purchase. The current items list is shown below.
- Scroll of Regeneration
- Mana Stone
- Lesser Clarity Potion
- Healing Potion
- Mana Potion
- Scroll of Town Portal
- Orb of the North - Provides a percent change to knock back enemies on attack, pushing them backwards and dealing bonus damage.
- Staff of the Legion-Pact - Allows heroes to cast Blizzard, and create a pile of snow similar to the Frost Spirits, but anywhere in battle.
- Tiny Aura Obelisk - Constructs an Aura Obelisk at a target location -- see "Block of Ice" structure for details on Aura Obelisk.
The Freezing Legion have no towers. Instead, they can build a Block of Ice which upgrades into various other structures.
Spider Shrine
This building spawns tiny spiderlings every few seconds, but they have a leash range and a short duration. When killed, a small team of spiderlings pops out of the Spider Shrine, ready to protect the player's town.
Aura Obelisk
This building contains four aura abilities, each of which requires a Research that is performed by itself or another Aura Obelisk to unlock the aura.
Wall Corner
This building, which looks like a small pointed icy rock, is a corner of a wall. Building two of them within a short distance of each other allows the player to instantly summon a connecting wall of small 2x2 pathing structures.
Late Game
When the player upgrades to Temple of Frost, the second level town center, the following new structures become available:
- Hunters' Rest
- Crystalline Cavern
- Blizzard (Creates a pile of snow)
The Hunters' Rest is a tier 2 unit production building.
It produces the following units:
- Ridgeback Rider
- Polar Bear & cubs
- Catapult
- Tuskarr Sorcerer
Ridgeback Rider
The Ridgeback Rider is a Tuskarr warrior mounted on a powerful Mammoth.
It's abilities are not yet set in stone; feel free to contribute Ridgeback Rider abilities if you read this far.
Polar Bear & cubs
The Polar Bear is a basic combat unit, which can be upgraded with Leap.
Leap allows the Polar Bear to leap through the air into battle. In addition, it also benefits the Frostwolf from the Icecutters' Lodge, which also learns the ability to Leap.
The Polar Bear's Leap is better, however, because it also contains a stunning effect when landing added to its basic leaping attack AoE damage.
The Polar Bear also can produce Polar Bear Cubs, which are released instantly from the Polar Bear at a cost of gold and lumber, but once released incur a delay before another can be released.
Catapult
The Catapult is a handy siege artillery unit. It can be upgraded with Sub-Zero, an ability which makes it steaming with its coldness, and causes units near to the Catapult to be slowed. It also can add a freezing AoE effect to the Catapult's attacks -- but I didn't code that yet.
Tuskarr Sorcerer
This sorcerer is a caster, who can initially cast Cleanse, which abolishes negative magical effects from allied units. He can be upgraded to learn Frozen Spears, which allows him to add a cold effect to his thrown spears at the cost of mana with each attack. In addition, he can be further upgraded to learn Hearthyworthy Haunch, which summons a mighty haunch of leg meat that heals units near to the meat.
This cavern is a unit production building home to the mystical creatures of the deep.
The cavern can produce the following units:
Freezing Revenant
The Freezing Revenant is a small, light unit with one special power. It's attack cooldown time is enormously slow, about 4-6 seconds, but each attack temporarily freezes enemy units and locks down all of their movement and abilities. It is almost like a free stun, with every attack, due to its chilling power. However, this is its own skill in combat and it is otherwise a small, light, and ineffective unit.
Spider Mystic
The Spider Mystic is a caster unit that can initially cast Parasite, which infects enemy units with a parasitic damaging effect that later causes them to spawn spiderlings if they die while infected.
It can be upgraded to learn Regenerative Essence, a healing AoE ability, and then further upgraded to learn Mass Web, which causes all enemy units in a target area to be bound to the ground so that they cannot move. Any air units affected by the web are pulled to the ground.
Caveling
This small caster unit can initially cast Strength of the Pact, and can learn War Cry and Giant's Strength. All of these abilities specialize in empowering the Caveling and its allies.
Strength of the Pact imbues a targeted allied unit with bonus armor. War Cry imbues all nearby allies with increased damage, armor, healing, and mana regeneration. Giant's Strength makes the Caveling grow notably larger, and provides it with bonus hit points and damage.
Tier 3
At this stage, we unlock the might of the true unknown. The 3rd tier of units available to the Northpact is still in development, and varies between maps where I have been developing them. This is an open area for discussion in this thread: What should the tier 3 building in the Northpact be?
Below are some ideas:
At the heart of the old Freezing Legion techtree that inspired the Northpact, there was a Blue Moon obelisk structure which allowed the Freezing Legion to summon the mighty Blue Moon using a special ritual. This system could be adapted and added to the Northpact as well.
As it was in the Freezing Legion, the Blue Moon Obelisk could train 2 units: the Iceclan Warlord and the Disciple of the Moon.
Iceclan Warlord
In Heaven's Fall, the Iceclan Warlord required the Blue Moon to have risen on the map.
Note: In the earlier Freezing Legion race that inspired this concept, ALL players could train the Iceclan Warlord unit once the first player had completed the Blue Moon ritual.
Disciple of the Moon
This unit excelled at its special purpose: the ritual it could perform on the Blue Moon Obelisk.
Any Disciple of the Moon could use the Blue Moon Ritual ability on the Blue Moon Obelisk, which would notify all players that the ritual had begun and stop the Disciple from acting or casting any other abilities. While the ritual was active, enemy players were granted vision of the Blue Moon Obelisk. It took 8 minutes to complete, but the time was halved for every Disciple of the Moon who joined the summoning.
There was a limit of 3 Disciples allowed to join the summoning, so the minimum time to complete the ritual was 2 minutes for a very careful player.
Once the ritual was completed, it could not be undone. Regardless of the map, the world environment became a slightly bluish-green for the remainder of the melee match, and the player who summoned the Moon received a special Blue Moon unit which hovered above the obelisk. Even when the Blue Moon Obelisk was destroyed, this Blue Moon unit remained as an untargetable entity on the map, hovering about the old obelisk's location.
It would periodically heal allied units, even when they were in combat, providing a decided combat advantage to a player who could pull off the ritual. However, because of "Blue Moon"-only techtree, it also benefited other Northpact/Freezing Legion players on the map -- even enemies.
The existence of the Blue Moon on the map enabled access to the Iceclan Warlord, a powerful melee fighter. It also allowed the player do research Bloodlust, which gave the Disciple of the Moon one useful spell after the moon ritual was completed.
The Blue Moon Obelisk, and having the Blue Moon risen on the map, also allowed players to research Cub Leap, an upgrade which gave Polar Bear Cubs access to their parents' Leap ability, and Blue Moon's Grace, a research which made various Northpact units more powerful but required the Blue Moon to be present on the map.
For anyone who has played the Eve of Salvation mod that I released a while ago, despite its being a hastily created buggy sort of thing, it had a different ending to the Northpact techtree. In that version, the Northpact could train a Leviathan Hatchery, which looked like the picture above.
Its purpose was to train Mo'aki Leviathans, which were giant turtles, to keep with the Tuskarr feel.
These turtles didn't have any custom model and could be upgraded with Big Splash, which was a watery version of War Stomp or something like that.
Overall, the Leviathan Hatchery model shown above is almost identical to Heaven's Fall's own Turtle Hatchery model, except that it was retextured to have snow on it instead of Naga-style architecture. I wouldn't want to put it into the Heaven's Fall warcraft mod without upgrading it to make it cooler.
All in all, those were the two Tier 3 concept ideas I had previously implemented for this race, but I leave the thread open for more suggestions with these.
Other Racial Aspects
All buildings are constructed with a cool birth animation that I created, which looks kind of like the Orcs but has Tuskarr furs on it and such.
For other ideas and inspiration, here is a copy of scrapped concept art models for other heroes for this race:
I will probably include a test map on here later, but at the moment the unit data is implemented in too many different maps in a disorganized fashion that I need to clean up. Hence, the inspiration to use this thread to design one perfect version of the Northpact.
If this annoys you and you want to try playing the Northpact, download the Eve of Salvation game mod for Warcraft 1.27. It contains a copy of this race, with the above mentioned Leviathan Hatchery as the Tier 3 building.
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