[Altered Melee] Some race ideas

[Michael Peppers]

Mostly harvesting ideas, just throwing them out there, feedback is appreciated.

Kobolds:

Hall = Mine, the mine is already harvested by itself (+10/15 a pop), either like an Entangled gold mine or without units, but still costing some upkeep (let's keep it fair). No wood costs, pretty hefty gold costs.
The racial hero can spawn gold via aura/debuff (death debuff?)/side effect of a spell. (EDIT: I got it! Turn an enemy at low hp (no heroes ofc) into gold (the item) EDITEDIT: Aura of Greed, grants a Pillage-like passive to nearby units... and something else).
Buildings can be created by any unit (not heroes) with a backpack (a specific one?) but that unit has to carry a pick item that can be bought in the Hall/Mine. (3 free picks at the start for the player)
Houses give more food than normal (15-20) and can be used to train the most basic melee unit only, which is also gonna be available in the standard Barracks and Hall/Mine.
(Maybe) They can buy bundles of wood in the Shop or another building just to cover for neutral heroes/mercenaries/zeppelins/whatever.
They can also build tunnels that connect their buildings.
Oh, when the Mine expires the Hall is gone as well. Sounds fun.

Goblins:

Have basic workers + access to an enhanced wood harvester (the mecha thingy they already got) and an enhanced gold harvester (this thing). As far as units go, there's trikes and guns and all sorts of things around.

Gnolls/Creeps:

A sort of frailer than normal basic melee unit, like a looter, with worker (gold) animations, it can attack and when a certain number of enemies around it die, you get a sack of gold with a part of their... bounty value? (right name for that is...?) that you can bring back to your hall.

A hero that can manipulate/convert/revive creep camps? ("Creeplord"?)

Outlaws:
Some units have Corpse Looting, a skill based on Ghoul's devour thingy that gives some gold when the body's been consumed. (too similar to the Creep looter perhaps?)

Corrupted Trees/Satyrs:

Their counterpart to the tree of life blights the terrain. Right. That's a given. Corrupted Tree structures benefit from blight's regen, have mana, can be placed wherever, but they take (small) constant damage (and mana drain?) when rooted in non-blighted terrain. Workers are more or less like wisps. (maybe using this model or something else)
On wood harvesting I got 3 ideas:
1. Standard wisp harvesting but only for blighted trees
2. A Satyr Pyromancer burns the trees, slightly better income than the usual +10
3. An ancient that saps "essence" (wood) from nearby trees

Alliance Remnants: (or "Human Alliance" or "Lordaeron Alliance" or w/e)

(Probably Tier 2 unit) Dalaran Guard, can switch from normal to magic damage with a skill (autocast?)

Blood Elves: (Can't miss them)

Pretty unoriginal, but... make them train dragonhawks, then you can combine the dragonhawks with either the archers (gotta have 'em) or with a melee unit to get a different flyer depending on your needs/what you have around when you panic.

So... yeah, thoughts?

EDIT: Changed stuff with suggestions and new ideas.

 

[cleavinghammer]

The Hall going down with the mine sounds needlessly frustrating.

Satyr buildings: I dunno about negative HP regeneration, maybe give the buildings mana that goes down if not on blight? Spells could be used to accelerate production or for strong AoE (to counter their limited movement).

 

[Michael Peppers]

The Hall going down is part of what makes it interesting to me: it makes it an all-out race, keeps you moving and producing and you should always have a secondary Hall(Mine) taken. If you lose the Hall you lose, well, your gold income and those building picks. I'm looking at Kobolds as more of a mini-race myself, like: no tiering, less buildings, a couple less units, 1-2 Heroes. If it was a full race I would not use the Hall for tiering up, I guess.

I like the idea of mana and some form of spells on the Corrupted Trees. Now that I think about it having hp loss only when being rooted in non-blighted terrain makes more sense, doesn't it?

 

[noob]

An enhanced gold miner is not very balanced so I am not sure if it is a good idea to have that in the goblin race.

 

[Michael Peppers]

An enhanced gold miner is not very balanced so I am not sure if it is a good idea to have that in the goblin race.

It probably depends on its cost (especially upkeep) and availability most of all. I can see it being very bad for balance if you can get it from the start for kind of cheap, but if it's locked until, say, tier 3, it probably doesn't affect the game all that much... but that's just speculation until somebody actually tries

 

[noob]

Stuff in tier 3 change barely anything in duels but in teams it can make really weird results.
Such as frost wyrm spam (with some casters to support of course).
or troll batrider spam with liquid fire.(siege and counters air and absurdly hard to fight back if microed well)

 

[cleavinghammer]

Gold: Maybe a corpse-looting mechanic instead of the enhanced gold mines, where a corpse is consumed to give a random stat increase to the looting unit and/or gold (based on the dead unit's cost). If more gold is needed, the looter can downgrade itself (lowering a random stat) in exchange for gold.

 

[Scias]

The issue I find with creating Bloodelf as a separate race is that some of it's units already exist in the Human race as originally they're merged together.. So do you scrap Humans and replace them with Bloodelves, do you remove Bloodelf units from Human race or do you keep them and try to make a entirely new Bloodelf race not using the original bloodelf unit designs? I think the big issue with the 3rd method would be that the original Bloodelf units are heavily spell-caster oriented which by lore is perfectly suited for their race, the unique and game-making concepts of Spellbreaker, Priests, Dragonhawks might be too much to sacrifice.. And if you leave those units in Human race it's gonna make your new races authenticity suffer.

Dragonhawk archers really does sound unoriginal, and if you're trying to accomplish something that would seem authentic and "blizz-like" I think this would be a step in the wrong direction right away.. Since originally in every race all the units were completely unique and different from each other.. You don't see variations of any existing units - like, there's no variation of knights with a crossbow, no variation of gryphons with a spear etc..

Here's some ideas I had for bloodelf race before:

-Spellcaster as the base unit, I've seen bloodelf archers done a lot and it is not an original idea, not only because it's done a lot but also because it is kind of a simple nightelf reskin. However, no other race has a spellcaster for it's first unit. This also works with the lore since bloodelves are heavily magic oriented. Depending on whether or not you're removing human race, the basic spellcaster could possibly have weak version of heal or slow spell or anything else that the human spell casters have.. Also depending on how the rest of the units of this race would be designed to work together. Creating a custom and original spell is definitely a option too.

-Some ideas to think about is how different races are affected by different times of day such as Nightelves regenerating only at night time, or terrain like blight for Undead.. Bloodelves could have certain effect only at daytime, like mana or health regenration.. Since Bloodelves are heavily caster based and to make something special about them I was playing around with the idea of having their mana have negative regeneration (drained), however they could build some mana-generators which would be cheap buildings and take little space (possibly could even be converted into towers to spare room for other buildings in the selection menu).. Which would provide the units with mana regeneration greater than the drain, so around these generators the casters would be more efficient in combat.

 

[Wrda]

Meh, kobolds don't seem worth of a race, e.g. they don't really have much of anything unique and could have fit in Gnolls/Outlaws/Creeps instead.
You're trying to make a race out of something that really doesn't have much content in it, unless you really thought deeply how many unit types and their characteristics that makes variety and still feels like they all belong to a race.

Oh, when the Mine expires the Hall is gone as well. Sounds fun.

Doesn't sound so fun when a player is going for expansion because his goldmine is runned out of gold see's not only his main building get destroyed (wtf just happened) but also potential enemies ambushing gnoll builders on expansion location (rage quit), and then game over.

 

[stein123]

How about a Tauren Race? or maybe a Gnome race?

 

[Kyrbi0]

what the HECK is this and WHY WASN'T I INVITED

also inb4 master race Jungle Trolls.


//EDIT//
I kinda want to dive more into both of these:

The issue I find with creating Bloodelf as a separate race is that some of it's units already exist in the Human race as originally they're merged together.. So do you scrap Humans and replace them with Bloodelves, do you remove Bloodelf units from Human race or do you keep them and try to make a entirely new Bloodelf race not using the original bloodelf unit designs? I think the big issue with the 3rd method would be that the original Bloodelf units are heavily spell-caster oriented which by lore is perfectly suited for their race, the unique and game-making concepts of Spellbreaker, Priests, Dragonhawks might be too much to sacrifice.. And if you leave those units in Human race it's gonna make your new races authenticity suffer.

Dragonhawk archers really does sound unoriginal, and if you're trying to accomplish something that would seem authentic and "blizz-like" I think this would be a step in the wrong direction right away.. Since originally in every race all the units were completely unique and different from each other.. You don't see variations of any existing units - like, there's no variation of knights with a crossbow, no variation of gryphons with a spear etc..

 

[cleavinghammer]

Kobold/Gnoll/Bandit idea: Mercenaries.

When trained, they appear at the center of the map and become rescuable by any player, who then loses gold equivalent to their cost which is given to the training player. If the training player claims them, they lose the cost of the training.
Alternately, the unit gives money when trained, but is immediately transferred to another player/goes to the center of the map and becomes rescuable (the rescuing player loses gold, but it doesn't go to the training player).
Alternately still, an AoE spell turns owned units into mercenaries, making them rescuable and moving them to the center of the map, either refunding immediately or upon rescuing.

 

[MogulKahn]

So, are you working on something, or you are just throwing some random "cool" ideas for others to use in their map if they need an inspiration?

 

[Kyrbi0]

 

[Michael Peppers]

All these replies, woot!
(Sorry, computer broke again)
(Sorrysorry, not quoting)

Corpse looting? Neat, that could be replacing that Creep looter idea.

About the possible lack of Kobold units, there's a couple of good unit models around (like the Ratorg Rider), but yeah, if we're shooting for a full-fledged race I agree, they'd need to be merged with other creeps. About the mine thing... we'll see how experimenting with that goes when/if I get around to it.

Doing mercenaries like that sounds a bit overcomplicated, maybe we could make mercenaries as a group of units that can be bought by some neutral buildings for some races. Going further in this direction, if there ends up to be a creep race, we could create a way to increase/revive creep spawns and use them for... dunno.

Tauren or Gnome or both are possible, we'll see

The ideas are all here for the taking if anybody's interested but I won't lie, I *may* be reviving my good ol' project if my pc stopped dying.

Kyrbi, you weren't invited because you'd eventually show up yourself (lol)

EDIT: Trolls, huh... as always, no plan for 'em but if you got any spare ones...

Ok, about the elves...

While I agree that reusing the same concepts for different races doesn't look very Blizzard-like, they had to cover for at most 4 races. If you start including campaign races (like Naga and Draenei) and mercenary camps in the mix you'll notice there's actually a lot of overlap with unit types and skills used. In the end, there's only so much you can do to differentiate a race from another while retaining balance. That becomes especially hard when it comes to air units, where I feel most usable ideas were already taken by Blizzard and reused a few times (Frost Wyrm/Chimera/Gryphon/Wyvern are basically the same unit imo, NE and UD anti-air are very similar etc.), my current anti-air unit works kind of like a Gargoyle and I'm not sure I like it, but most of all not using Dragonhawks at all in a Blood Elf race (my current situation) just sounds... wrong, and there's only 4 usable models around iirc. (riderless dragonhawk, RoC High Elf dragonhawk rider, Blood Elf dragonhawk rider, dragonhawk archer)

At the moment the plan is to make the races coexist, tho I'm pretty sure I started all of this with the idea of replacing them.

While I'd be very interested in seeing an all-spellcaster take on BElves and I think that basic unit idea is pretty dope...(minor) can you really justify having non-magic damage on a spellcaster? Or magic damage on such a basic unit? Also, your basic unit being a support unit is a cool concept, but balancing it with current melee sounds tough.(not that I won't be using the idea somewhere xD)

I went with archers. Why? Can you really leave them out when the whole race has been known for them for so long? While Blood Elves are accustomed to having magic in their body there's always been non-spellcaster Elves around doing grunt work (Alleria in Wc2 is the BOMB) and those should be represented if you're doing the whole race. (If we're talking about sub-factions it's okay I suppose)

For me it all comes down to: original ideas? Yes, they're cool and should be done, but cohesion and "fitting" the lore and the world are more important. That's why looking at TFT's Human campaign is the first step if you're gonna go Blood Elves. To me well done custom TFT-era elves would be a race that could entirely replace that take on Blood Elves and still belong. Does that put creative restraints on the whole thing? Yes, absolutely yes (creating a Spellbreaker alternative is impossible), but we're talking about representing Wc3 elves. If it comes down to any Blood Elf concept, even a full-on spellcaster, mana-crazed fel elves thing is totally doable (and your mana idea would totally fit), but those are not my Blood Elves. (shame on Blizzard for ruining Kael'Thas xD)

About the mana thing, I have something similar as a Farm upgrade.

...well, that was long.

 

[cleavinghammer]

Magic damage could be an on/off thing, such as a swordsman who can cover his blade with arcane energy for Magic damage, and turn it off for Normal damage. Lorewise, something like a guard assigned to keeping the Dalaran monster experiments locked up, and so has to deal with corporeal and ethereal enemies.

Caster with Normal could be something like a Blood Mage model who throws arcane spheres with Magic, and telekinetically throwing rocks instead.

 

[noob]

Flaming arrows/sword.
Those deals extra damage of the same kind as the base damage even through it is magical.

 

[Michael Peppers]

Magic damage could be an on/off thing, such as a swordsman who can cover his blade with arcane energy for Magic damage, and turn it off for Normal damage. Lorewise, something like a guard assigned to keeping the Dalaran monster experiments locked up, and so has to deal with corporeal and ethereal enemies.

Nice. Stealing the idea for a Dalaran Guard unit.

Flaming arrows/sword.
Those deals extra damage of the same kind as the base damage even through it is magical.

Flaming Arrows is a no-no since PotM is a thing, Flaming sword could be useful for a basic melee fel/elemental unit.

Clever girl

 

[Sxar]

Some ideas for kobolds: hero (Kobol's King) begins with a passive ability "Naturalizer". Everytime a unit dies near him the naturalizer increase the gold amount of the gold mines under your control. Each gold mine under kobol's control add 20 population and increase +5 for each mine upgrade or tunels. They won't need houses (they live in the mine) however they still being "weak" and cheap. They only can upgrade the gold mine for the cost of the buildings you want. To increase unit production you will need tunels (tunel add +5 to pop and cost more lumber than gold like most of all the upgrades of the mine). The tunels can only be built near the gold mine under your control and can train any kind of kobold that the upgraded gold mine can train too. The kobolds can return wood to a tunel or a gold mine.

edit: the tunels can be built in any place of the map, however the kobold worker will go away of it if it's destroyed or timed out the next function: 2(distance beetween the mine and the tunel/speed of the worker).
The tunels can also move kobolds unit groups between points like zerg tunels do but using the function of above.

 

[Michael Peppers]

The tunnel idea is pretty neat (and I'm gonna use it probably) but the others are so different from mine I'd have to choose between yours and mine and, to be honest, I like mine more.

 

[Sxar]

The tunnel idea is pretty neat (and I'm gonna use it probably) but the others are so different from mine I'd have to choose between yours and mine and, to be honest, I like mine more.

no problem, that's the idea of the brainstormxD

 

[BrazilEmperor]

why you not mix Kobolds with Gnolls,Ogres,Razormanes,etc to be a full race?

 

[Michael Peppers]

why you not mix Kobolds with Gnolls,Ogres,Razormanes,etc to be a full race?

This is just an idea thread, out of all that is here nothing is getting worked on atm.

 

[Banelingline]

So, I ran into some trigger design that might prove useful for subrace mechanics. The result of the setup I went with, which involves just one Event and one Condition (Unit - Generic Unit Event - A unit finishes training a unit for the event, Unit - Type Comparison - Trained Unit Equal to {unit} for the condition), but the test setup I went with involves five actions. For each of the two versions. Namely, Player - Set Max Research Level for Black Gunpowder and Studded Leather Armor to 2 for when you train a Footman, as well as Player - Set Research Level to 1 for Iron Forged Swords and Iron Plating. Then Player - Set Training/Construction Availability of Unit for Rifleman to Unavailable. Also Trigger - Turn Off - This Trigger, for the obvious reason of letting you research later levels without it being undone when you train another of the unit.

The thought of this version of the setup is to have it so that you can essentially choose a unit type to have elites of at the start of the game, then disable the elites of the other categories and automatically shift the available upgrades, essentially specializing your force with your first trained unit. Could be overlapping training access, so you have the elite version instead of the standard version. An important note is that you can make custom upgrades, use alternate Actions and go about options in a very different way, including making that first trained unit actually be an elite by altering its statline, as I did for the Rifleman in the test map attached. Using four extra actions in the process, one to change name (yes, you can do that!), one to give an extra 115 health, one to make it so they actually spawn with that extra max health (the fact they don't by default can be useful) and one to give it 10 extra attack damage. Not going to list each of those triggers like I did for the first paragraph...