Scaling Enemy Waves

[ravellani]

I am making a hero siege map and at this point I am designing the enemy waves. This topic has caused some problems for me planing wise. So I have some questions:

1. How much stronger should each wave be in terms of health and damage? I dont know how to balanced the difficulty with a consistent increment.
   
2. What is the best way to put a difficulty in effect? With a trigger or an aura or some other way?
3. I am using all the creeps in the game for enemy so should I just leave them the way they are health and damage wise?

I just need some options and possible a tutorial. I know the same balancing does not work for all the custom games out there.

 

[Macadamia]

I am no expert in balancing so I will pass on the first question.

2) The easiest way is to use an upgrade that you can scale to your needs, with a large possible choice of effects (damage increase, defense increase, hp increase, the list goes on forever).
Make sure all the creeps you choose to use for your waves use the upgrade in the Techtree- Upgrades used field of the object editor.
Once done, all you have to do is increase the upgrade level before starting every new wave...
3) Maybe select your creeps by type (flying, range, melee, casters, etc..) and standardize their stats in order to control these with the upgrades mentioned for point 2), and then, depending on the diversity you want for your waves, chose a mix of different types of creeps or on the contrary, only creeps of the same type.

Hope this will help a little !

 

[ravellani]

Thank you for clearing up number 2 and your idea on number 3

 

[Macadamia]

Always happy to help

 

[DoomBlade]

The first question is a tricky one in so many aspects. It all really depends on the Hero and item scaling in the map. If you design the waves first, then you can make the Heroes and items scale accordingly to the difficulty of the waves.

Remember to have scaling damage on skills of the Heroes. Test your map a lot, it really helps and gives an idea on how to fix balance issues.

Also need to count how much gold or any resource the creeps that you kill give. And then you need to balance the items based on how much gold you gain in the map.
Usually you see item scaling normal items/magical items/rare items/epic items, etc.

Oh and if you want to make more like a custom scaling system, you can change stat gains in gameplay constants.
The biggest issue I have seen in the past or made myself is that with the normal armor damage reduction multiplier unit's become too hard to kill. You can lower this from gameplay constants though.
So I would personally try to make a custom damage system using a DDS.
Damage Engine 5.5.0.0

And for the waves, I like to have Boss waves and waves that contain Champion/Lord/Epic/Unique units, with personalized abilities: Higher damage, Aura, High health, etc.

Then for some ability balancing. Area of effect spells that deal damage, should always deal less damage than single target spells. It's a good ground rule, you don't want to have useless Heroes in your map.

If you want to make passive abilities that proc when the Hero "takes damage" the percentage should be set so super low. Otherwise the passive will proc all the time with only 3-4 creeps hitting the Hero.

Making passive stun abilities (i.e bash) should also be made with super low percentage and probably should think if it should be able to proc on Bosses.

You could also design the Hero-types on your map: "Fighter, Tank, Off-Tank, Healer, Support, Mage" Based on the designs then make some basic stat lines and "set of skills".
For example: "Mages are great at dealing damage, but die easily".

Anyways I personally think Hero Siege/Hero defense maps are pretty hard to balance. Hope this helps and gives you some ideas. Good luck on your map making process!

 

[ravellani]

Thank you Doom Blade, that was some great insight. I will try my best to follow your guild lines.