[Campaign] Tales of Silventria Mechanics Thread

[Blake8]

Ye, we kind of overdid it on that one...

 

[Lord Aiden]

Most of the intersting discussions occur in chat nowadays. that was just Siler trying to make himself look like a boss in ability making

 

[Blake8]

I just wanted to make Rasler as balanced as possible, in order to make the battles against him not too easy but not too difficult, also the difficulty will determine what items he is to have, for instance on hard I'll give him some item that will enhance his hp regeneration

 

[Lord Aiden]

Might wanna give him hardened skin + an akhn on hard

 

[Blake8]

Maybe, hey I had this idea, why dont we have another mission where basically you have 2 units having to fight their way through the map, this time Rasler and the hero, then a few missions later you find out Rasler is a backstabber, what do you think about the idea ?

 

[Lord Aiden]

Spoiler

I really like your idea Blake. Instead of making it just a chapter in which you and rasler fight through the map, make it so that you have to reach a base somewhere, take over that base than actually defeat some rebels in the process, that way the player will get a feeling that Rasler is loyal, then in a few missions have him attack your encampment with a bunch of rebels at his side.

Look at it this way=> Make a map where you start at one edge and have to fight your way to a base somewhere in the middle, then you take it over and have to destroy several rebel encampments, after which you win the chapter, maybe have Rasler around for the next couple of missions either as a playable or unplayable hero, then have him side with the rebels

 

[Lord Siler]

@Lord Aiden Very good idea, we already have some terrained maps that could be used for such a mission if they are slightly modified. I think we need to make it like this: First in an interlude you hear about Rasler, then several missions later you are send to the region to fight alongside him, then all the events unfold, but I think we made a little too much out of all of this, it started off as a joke but not we actually made a balanced hero for him, as well as developed a storyline and other elements. Kinda weird considering I thought all this would simply be a joke, I never thought we'd make any of this happen to any extent considering it was based on someone developing a campaign which he never planned to launch.

 

[Lord Aiden]

Well I think it became something awesome

we were having fun making his character, story, everything else. And those times in chat were golden, I hardly laughed so hard in my entire life and it was all over this Rasler and his fake rpg or whatever he wanted to design it to be

good times man

 

[Lord Siler]

Glad to hear that, but what happened to all those other things we were supposed to come up with and develop, this thing just took over the project, and another thing: we have like a half developed map from Apostle with most of the triggers missing and half the terrain not being there, I really wanna finish that before anything else, and hopefully I'll have enough free time maybe this weekend...I'll try to work on it, although im not nearly as good as Apostle but I'll definitely put the effort into it

 

[Lord Aiden]

Blake mentioned that this isn't a big priorty atm, we have other stuff that needs to get done, and its still nowhere near completion

 

[Lord Siler]

I agree but it would be a shame to just let such beautifully designed maps go to waste. its like leaving the most pristine art in the basement while a gallery displays mediocre works

 

[Lord Aiden]

I agree with your reasoning, we'll see whats gonna happen

 

[Lord Siler]

It's kinda weird but I've been opening some of the maps and I find that either Blake, Aster, or someone else has developed all these Murloc unit, and other race units but they were not integrated into any map, the only thing which appears in other maps is a "Murloc Alchemist" unit which gives an enormous bounty (1,000+) if defeated. Why not integrate all this stuff into other maps? Maybe have murlocs fight you or be your allies?

Also let's talk about that expedition like map we had ideas about some time ago, I would love to create something like that, but you guys gotta help me out cause I cant really do this alone

 

[Lord Siler]

I was testing the new Rasler right now, and ironically he was too op, I had to increase mana costs for certain abilities as well as reduce his mana...

 

[Lord Aiden]

I think he was meant to be a little OP at level 10 because that's when you would be facing him as an adversary...

 

[Lord Siler]

Guess so, so we'll this is by difficulity level:

On easy all he has in his inventory is an orb of +5 damage

On Normal he has an item that gives him +2 bonus armor and + 7 damage, and an orb of +5 damage

On Hard he has an item that gives him +3 armor and reduces magic damage, a sobe mask, an item that gives him +2 bonus armor and +7 damage, and an orb of +5 damage.

 

[Lord Aiden]

Might wanna give him an item with the hardened skin (reduces attacks by 5 or so) ability on hard, but then again you gave him plenty of armor upgrades which reduce damage but only fractionally rather than in the absolute sense.

 

[Blake8]

You could also give him an item that increases health regeneration, or an akhn on hard, but I think your choices are good, one last thing, if you really want to make him hard to destroy on hard enhance his armor to like 16, combined with magical resistance this should definitely do the trick

 

[Lord Siler]

I think additional health regeneration as well as magical resistance should do the trick here, too much armor doesn't do much, after you hit like 12 armor each additional point increase armor by like 2% or so, but do whatever you feel like

 

[Lord Aiden]

Not a bad idea, so I take it on hard we need to give him items that : enhance his hp regeneration, his mana regeneration, give +5 additional armor and final magical resistance

 

[Lord Siler]

Yes that would do

 

[Lord Aiden]

I really like it how we decided to add items to units to augment the difficulty, also giving him a huge attack bonus on hard wouldnt hurt

 

[Lord Siler]

Hey. hey. we're not trying to implement Kasrkin mode here

 

[Blake8]

You said it!

 

[Lord Aiden]

lol

 

[Blake8]

Look there's easy then normal then hard

We use normal as the reference.

In normal mode the enemies hero's got decent items,

In easy we take some of those items away

In hard we give them some more items

Normal should always be used as a reference


Other things are for example the player gets some reinforcements on normal
on easy he should get more reinforcements, on hard he should get less or none

Another thing: I've had some chats with this with other campaign creators and they agreed, let's say there's an item that the hero needs to get for story reasons or something similar on a map, this item pretty much needs to be acquired, but the item also gives the player a very good ability that essentially augments how the gameplay will flow

Well on easy and on normal the item should be given to the hero at the start of the mission, while on hard the item needs to be given towards the end, this is an unorthodox way to control difficulty

 

[Lord Aiden]

How do we plan the fight against him to pan out?

 

[Blake8]

ok this is likely a major spoiler

Spoiler

At first you meet him and you have to escort him to a base in the woods, you have to defend this base from rebels as well as destroy all the rebel outposts in the area (probably around 5), you get to control Rasler and your normal hero for this mission, Rasler will start out around level 5 and will be able to level up a little, I'm not sure about the next few missions, but then you get a mission where your goal is to defend a particular base im the high mountains against rebel attacks, and then soon enough Rasler and his forces attack your base, at this point your objective will change from just defending the base to eliminating the traitor...it should also be noted that Rasler will have some other heroes at his side

 

[Lord Aiden]

other hero = Haldan ?

 

[Blake8]

Possibly, but I just meant to say that to emphasize that he wont be alone

 

[Lord Aiden]

What about the whole rune artifact backstory?

 

[Rem]

I think we should focus on the story first, then focus on all the other details,

you guys need to write more lore, Blake you promised me....

 

[ArchDuke]

I think we should focus on the story first, then focus on all the other details,

you guys need to write more lore, Blake you promised me....

You know I cant argue with Rem, in-fact i believe her to be 100% right, you guys are trying to make all the peripheral details first before making the story.

Now think about it, the story is what gives life and meaning to everything else, without the story Rasler, Haldan or whateverelse the traitor is means nothing,'

You need to write a strong story emphasizing both the sequence of events as well as the relations between characters at every given time, then it can make meaning out of this whole campaign youre creating...

Story has a greater importance than any character or action within it merely because its the glue which ties all characters, actions, events, and thoughts together in a coherent sense

 

[Colonel Aster]

Spoiler

Ok I was in chat with Blake and Aiden earlier, and looks like this Halden story may go somewhere, now Rasler is in charge of retrieving and extracting the mana and magic from ancient artifacts. while doing this he found a crystal quarry which was below one of his excavation sites, and he put Haldan in charge of it, now some times goes by and he looses contact with Haldan...seems something strange happened at this crystal quarry...

 

[Blake8]

We'll write stories, but we also have to make sure that the things we mention in them are compatible with the editor, otherwise we wont be able to recreate the events within it or will simply look like fools when doing so, but ye I understand your statements about the story, well focus on it more now

 

[Colonel Aster]

Need to wanna emphasize something, a while ago me and Blake were creating the palace map, for this particular map we had decided that everything should be very similar for all difficulties for the enemy, so here's how we manipulated the difficulty:

The player would start off with 2/1/0 level of upgrades depending on whether he's playing on easy/normal/hard

The player will get frequent/less frequent/no reinforcement depending on whether he's playing on easy/normal/hard

First attacks on the player will start after 5/3/1 minute(s) depending on whether he's playing on easy/normal/hard

Special forces will attack the players after a long duration/around 5-6 minutes/after a very short duration (like 2 or so minutes) depending on whether the difficulty is easy/normal/hard

Heroes of the enemy get aura items that are weak/normal/strong depending on whether the difficulty is easy/normal/hard <-- we may remove this

Enemy is able to use rain of chaos on your base every 18/12/5 minutes depending on whether the difficulty is easy/normal/hard <--needs modification for balance purposes

The bridge on the easier path through the enemy bases is destroyed, thus making you take the much longer path on hard

Certain neutral units that give off a high bounty are replaced with stronger units that give little bounty on hard mode

The player starts off with a large/normal/small amount of gold and wood depending on whether the difficulty is easy/normal/hard

*The player is supposed to get a food cap that is 120/100/80 depending on whether he's playing on easy/normal/hard <--this never got implemented, because food was going to be increased

*enemy was supposed to turn on a anti-magic field after a certain time depending on difficulty <--idea was scrapped because of balance issues

There were other things also i might have forgotten, and other things that we had not implemented but thought about

The ideas was to make sure the player gets to experience everything on all difficulties, I mean some campaigns have it so that you only see the enemy have certain heroes or units only on a greater difficulty, this is extremely easy to implement but the player playing the game on an easier difficulty will never get to experience fighting the hero or the unit and we didn't like this

 

[ArchDuke]

got a few suggestions for you:

if you dont wanna change anything about the enemy you could differentiate the access the player has to resources at the start, this will allow players on easy and medium to build some investment heavy units while generally disallowing them to do it on hard

>Create a second gold mine that player has immediate access to, but vary the amount of gold in it depending on the difficulty

>On easy this gold mine could last a long time, on medium it could last 10+ minutes, while on hard it could be running low when the game begins

A different strategy would be to control how much a particular unit costs on each difficulty, it has to do with creating 3 identical units and varying how much they cost

 

[Colonel Aster]

Players on easy/normal would get access to all kinds of cost expensive units via reinforcement so it makes the 2nd goldmine kind of useless

 

[Blake8]

Azarus, we've had a very similar system set up to lengthen/shorten resurrection time for enemy heroes depending on the difficulty, this actually worked rather well

 

[Lord Aiden]

HEre is something ive thought of for you guys:

Remember @Blake mentioned how although the forces of the enemy don't change the frequency of appearance of each type may, so on hard you could have the enemy produce more heavier units and less lighter ones, while the tendency is the opposite on easy

Also regarding the Lore we're gonna be focuing on that shortly, but its hard to know what we can make and what we cannot due to the various glitches introduces by the new patch, because everything worked fine in 1.26 and 1.27

 

[Blake8]

@Lord Aiden in order to do that you need to know how to use the ai editor rather well, which I'm not very versed with

 

[ArchDuke]

Well. Ive tried to help you guys, good luck with your project!

 

[Lord Siler]

Thanks mate, any other suggestions would also be very welcome, if you're still willing to throw some out there

 

[ArchDuke]

Well let's say you have two integers x and y, and x>y

You could give a hero a powerful item that has x charges on normal, x+y charges on easy and x-y charges on hard

also you could give an identical item on each difficulty but the cooldown would change depending on the difficulty

lastly you could have an ability whose damage output is modified depending on the difficulty, like it could do 375 damage on easy, 300 on normal, and 225 on hard

 

[Lord Aiden]

nice ideas

 

[ArchDuke]

Thanks!

Here come some more since you guys appreaciate them so much and thanks for the rep

give the hero x charges of a tiny tower item, x+y if easy, and x-y if hard

on easy make certain units drops books of knowledge allowing your hero to level up quickly

limit how much experience your hero gets on each level, for instance 50% on easy, 35% on normal, and something like 15-20% on hard
this will be very effective

raise the cost of healing item on hard mode, or even disable these items

 

[Colonel Aster]

Interesting, we could implement the item idea...short cooldown on easy, normal cooldown on normal, and long cooldown on hard

 

[Lord Aiden]

seems like a good idea

 

[ArchDuke]

I will try coming up with some more concepts for you guys, just plz give me some credit one you finish the campaign

 

[ArchDuke]

Ok here are some ideas:
on normal and easy you could purchase akhns of reincarnation, but on normal they take at least 40 seconds more to restock
Normal and easy you could buy potions that restore 500 hp and mp for like 80 gold
On hard these potions are unavaiable so you have to stick with basic potions that only restore 250hp

Oh normal and easy you could buy goblin mines, but they're disabled on hard

Maybe use rem in this mission, you know for difficulty augmentation

also you could have some sort of goblin airships that you could buy but there's a limit of 7/5/3 depending on the difficulty