[Strategy / Risk] Strategy based on Kings Bounty / HoMM

[Kroemel]

Way Of The Cookie ( WIP )
A map based around Kings Bounty, which is basically Heroes of Might and Magic but without the Economy.

Short Explanation

You control one Hero which leads an Army. In the World you do only walk around with your Hero and interact with NPCs and maybe ( ? ) other Players. Fights take place on an Battlefield with a Turn Based Grid like System. Fights are what the Map is all about. You have to carefully plan every move of your Army and Hero. Most Fights are going to be clash against two armies while most of the time you fight against a moderate intelligent KI. You try to limit your losses and maximize your rewards. Your goal is it to defeat the Boss of the Map. To archive this you are going to have to level your hero, increase your Army, complete Quests and maybe ( ? ) interact with other players.

Video Showcase

Showcase of the World

Showcase of a Fight

Long Explanation

It would be wise to watch the Videos first : ) Custom User Interface I aim to completely create a custom user interface and only show the parts of wc3 that are beneficial. Currently that is only the Portrait. As without it a Hero does not respond. I plan on using mainly the wc3 battlenet images. My goal is it to create a smooth user experience. Following is the current Image of the World: World Console On the Bottom is the World Console. It shows the Hero and his army. You can manage your Army with a simple Drag and Drop. if you intent to split a Stack into multiple one press the stack with Right Click.​ NPC Interact Screen On the Top Left is a Screen which will open whenever you interact with an friendly PC. You can interact by simple right-clicking the NPC on the World with your Hero. Each NPC will have a different Screen. This one is quite simple, it just sells you some Stacks.​ Dialog A custom made Dialog in the center of the Screen. Here you can input Numbers change Sliders and Press buttons to actually do stuff. A Dialog should be self explanatory and is always context dependent​ Unit Info On the Top Right you currently see a Unit Information Screen, this is very much Work in Progress and currently only shows you the Stats of the last unit you had your mouse over​ Following is the Interface in the Fight: Initiative Bar On the Bottom replacing the World Console will be the Initiative Bar, it just shows the order when a unit can attack. The current Turn has the unit on the most left.​ Action Bar On the Bottom Right is the Action Bar. Here you can order your current unit ( if it is selected and it is your unit ). In the Action Bar are all Actions a unit has, besides simple walk and attack. The first two Actions most units have are Wait and Defend. Every following Button in this case the Summon Skeleton one is a Special Ability the current unit has. There are special Indicator an Action can have: Cooldown, Charges, Disabled.​ Unit Info On the Top Right you currently still see the unit Info, this time it shows more stuff, like the current Values the selected Stack has. Also it shows the Icon of all Buffs.​ Initiative Unlike other turn based Battlefields where every unit acts once in a turn, this one does not have any turns whatsoever. A unit can act based on its initiative stat. The higher the earlier. A Unit might even attack twice in a row if it has more initiative then another. To understand this better we first have to know that the init stats gets calculated into a pause time value. The higher the init stat, the lower this value gets. For example an Init of 0 gives one a pause time value of 100 An init of 5 gives around 70 You can think of the Initiative Bar like a Time Axis. Which gradually increases from 0. First turn will be the unit with init 5 at time 70 At 100 its the first turn of the unit with 0 At 140 the first unit acts again At 200 the slower unit might act again At 210 the fast unit can act At 280 The fast unit can act again... HERE the fast unit acted twice before the slow one Waiting and Stunning Because of this system waiting is pretty straight forward. If you wait, you get placed at half your wait time. So in the Example of above you have to wait 70 / 2 = 35 to actually act. If you have waited before you can not wait again, but if you end your turn after you have waited you ONLY have to wait the other half of your turn until you can act again. This is quite powerfully as you can control when to act twice in a row. At 75 it is your turn with init 5 and you wait ( that means you get placed at 70/2 wait time again ) At 100 its the first turn of the unit with 0 At 115 You can continue your turn. At 140 You may act again At 200 the slower unit looks sad that he watched you act twice Stunning is a mechanic where normally you would loose your whole turn, but i decided that stunning will simply just push you in the initiative bar a bit back. With this case Stunning a slow unit is not so punished and you can decide how "much" you want to stun a unit. If you like theese Walls of Text i could write more : P

Feedback

I have many open questions about the direction of my map. For example I don't know how and what would be best for a PvP or if should focus solo on a campaign ? This type of gameplay is usually tied with lots of invested time, so having to wait for your opponent, welp sucks ? What if they just decide to leave or drop out after a good amount of time ? Also is this Rogue-like ? I do want to have randomly generated enemies / encounters. So each time you play the map is different. I developed the map in reforged and i have no idea if the attached map works without the reforged graphics. Any Feedback would be appreciated. And if you want to help me more check out Rogue-like Kings Bounty / HoMM

 

[Kino]

That is a very nice custom UI

 

[A]mun]

I'm playing Homm 2+3 atm, so this just hits the spot .

Gute Arbeit soweit, mal sehen was Euch noch so einfällt.

 

[SpiritTauren]

Awesome <3

 

[biridius]

If each player only has one hero with no castles, and if you can implement more than one fight at a time, you could make the global map real-time.

For simplicity's sake, I'd cut the Attack/Defence stats and make any buffs/debuffs for them just give a % increase/decrease in damage. May be add icons to the stack information bar to make it easier to quickly navigate which stat is which. Leadership and level should probably be separated from the main stat block, or not be shown in combat at all.
May be add a color highlight for hexes within shooting range.
The way waiting time depends on initiative seems unclear. Is it not reversely proportional to initiative?

How do you plan to implement larger creatures? 2 horizontal hexes like in h3, may be 3 hexes in a triangle? Or just the same size as others?

 

[Kroemel]

Thanks for the kind words all : )

If each player only has one hero with no castles, and if you can implement more than one fight at a time, you could make the global map real-time.

This is currently the case and will also be the plan for the future. You can freely move around with your hero until you get attacked or attack yourself, then your hero + the opponent in the real time world freezes and you start the turn based fight. I will try to be clearer when presenting such a thing.

For simplicity's sake, I'd cut the Attack/Defence stats and make any buffs/debuffs for them just give a % increase/decrease in damage. May be add icons to the stack information bar to make it easier to quickly navigate which stat is which. Leadership and level should probably be separated from the main stat block, or not be shown in combat at all.

The Stat Window on the right is only a preview, I just wanted something fast that players can actually see the numbers of the units. This is not the final product.
Attack and Defense on the otherhand is already implemented like you would know in HoMM. I think it is pretty important to keep, because once I implement a hero. he will have attack and defense as well. Which will boost those values for all his troops. So for example a Gnoll with 10 Attack will get a boost of 5 from the Hero. Resulting in him being and feeling much better than the same unit on the enemy side.
I could do Attack and Defense with +-% Damage as it is practically the same, but why change now as it already works ? Hmm I'll think about it more.
I like to make everything clear with tooltips and so forth. But i also want to make it easy for me to create new Units.

Like for example here: If I want to change the Buff Effect of Warcy to do something completely different, i only have to change the Buff himself. All the Tooltips will get Updated accordingly.

May be add a color highlight for hexes within shooting range.

I had this at the beginning. But decided to scrap it. I did not like how the overlapping highlighting looks, there was just too much color.
Also it would be confusing with the other system:

In this Example my necromancer currently has the turn but he has only a range of 4. He can not reach the enemy Gnoll Warden as this one is 5 fields away. But he could if he is just move one field closer.
My calculations actually catches this, so the Gnoll Warden still gets highlighted Red and if you mouse over him you'll see the Attack Tooltip as well as a green path next to the necormancer where the computer would force the necromancer to walk to.
As you may see my calculations sees a way in which case you currently can attack the Gnoll if you use your movement.
So if I would introduce Attack Range as indicator. This Gnoll would not be in range.
Well I could show the range of all possible fields if one considers walking.
But I think either solution will be confusing.
Also the calcualtion of Pathing, shoot range, possible Attack and even possible counter attacks already cost much performance ( it kinda lags a bit if you move your mouse over the fields )

The way waiting time depends on initiative seems unclear. Is it not reversely proportional to initiative?

I think it is. Well see for yourself the current calc from init to time waiting is : (100 / ((initivative / 10.0) + 1.0))

How do you plan to implement larger creatures? 2 horizontal hexes like in h3, may be 3 hexes in a triangle? Or just the same size as others?

Yes I thought about it a lot. In the past I already did such a map on a rectangle battlefield, just like your ToMM ( which btw is pretty awesome ). On this there where units with different sizes like 1x2 or 2x2 or even 3x3.
But holy molly did that cost me time to implement, so much actually that i lost interest in progressing the map.
I currently just plan on making every wc3 unit scale down.
So much that the big units in comparison still look powerful.

So, no I do not plan this right now.
I might come back to it once I want to make Boss fights. These I could see occupying more than one field.
But since those bosses are always controlled by the KI, I don't have to bother about the Visual feedback as much.