Techtree Contest #20 - Air Elementals (Custom Mini-Faction)

[Kyrbi0]

=Reserved=

Mods, if you could please add "Contest Entries" to the tags

 

[stein123]

A Kyrbi0 map?? in this economy?

 

[IronBladeClan]

I appreciate that you made this in 1.26 (which is great for preservation) despite some people continuing to claim that nobody makes maps in pre-Reforged anymore whenever someone like me asks for tools/systems to be made compatible with older patches (or at least for older versions of said tools/systems, that used to be compatible, to be left/re-made available)

Pre-Reforged development is forward-thinking development!

 

[Kyrbi0]

I appreciate that you made this in 1.26 (which is great for preservation) despite some people continuing to claim that nobody makes maps in pre-Reforged anymore whenever someone like me asks for tools/systems to be made compatible with older patches (or at least for older versions of said tools/systems, that used to be compatible, to be left/re-made available)

Pre-Reforged development is forward-thinking development!

To be fair, we are a dying breed. Someday I may finally make the move (though maybe not all the way up to Reforged/latest).

But I've been using v1.26 since it came out & I see very few reasons to jump ship just yet.

 

[Footman16]

To be fair, we are a dying breed. Someday I may finally make the move (though maybe not all the way up to Reforged/latest).

But I've been using v1.26 since it came out & I see very few reasons to jump ship just yet.

I know we had this discussion before on the discord but I really don't understand what you're afraid of from moving, it's the exact same WE except with more features lol. It would be no different to when you updated the WE from v1.01 onwards to eventually reaching v1.26.

Either way, glad to see you join a contest and make a tech tree. I know you put a lot of thought into the blizzardness of techtrees and integration so it'll be cool to see all that theory crafting in practice

 

[Kyrbi0]

I know we had this discussion before on the discord but I really don't understand what you're afraid of from moving, it's the exact same WE except with more features lol. It would be no different to when you updated the WE from v1.01 onwards to eventually reaching v1.26.

We have! But for the public, in a nutshell:

• it's different. better in many ways, but different. I have to learn some new ways of doing things
• every version has weird quirks & even bugs, but the stuff that v1.26 has going on are a decade+ understood. The various Reforged patches brought about "new" and "exciting" bugs that, in some cases, still aren't worked out. I don't want to deal with all that, until I have to.
• I've kinda built up a lot of 'cruft' around my copy of v1.26; like, the folder has sorta become my main 'modding' folder, with all my maps & assets & saves & backup MPQs & alternate MPQs & mods & such... I wouldn't know where to begin, extricating it all, and am kinda scared to. Tons of stuff may not even work on the latest versions & would have to be left behind.
• correct me if I'm wrong, but the newest version requires Reforged (& the billions of GB-choking new assets that entails), and can't just be run 'natively' off a flash drive. Literally to complete this Contest I needed to be able to copy-paste my entire Wc3 directory onto an 8gb flash drive so I could actually work on my entry after my computer died... which would've been basically impossible if I was stuck on Reforged.
• a matter of principle. I dislike what Reforged did to one of my favorite games & to the modding community therefrom. I really dislike the new assets & how they divided the artistic community. By keeping my primary modding ventures back where they've always been, I do my own little meaningless 'protest' against what Reforged has done.

Either way, glad to see you join a contest and make a tech tree. I know you put a lot of thought into the blizzardness of techtrees and integration so it'll be cool to see all that theory crafting in practice

Absolutely! I am too.

Yes I care a lot about that kind of stuff, but who knows if I can actually 'walk the walk'. I doubt it's as good as I'd like (gotta spend a looooot longer on something like this to fulfill that promise), but I hope it's enjoyable.

 

[The Nightmare Book]

Sadly, I didn't see Al'Akir as a hero for Air Elementals, but their Storm Elemental... ROCKS!
Although you state this race as "mini-race", @Kyrbi0, I can say that it's already in a perfect playable state in terms of gameplay flow: tier two costs are combining both tier 2 and tier 3, am I right?
But I feel that grunt-type unit - revenant - is quite good for his active ability: he sacrifices barely any HP and gains a pretty solid bonus, which is noticeable when you have plenty of those revenants in your army.
Flying healer is nice. Sadly, not all of our army can fly, meaning that as AIR ELEMENTAL, I still need to buy ZEPPELINS if I want to drop onto islands for building a base. Odd.

Like this race!
Any chance for the Ethereal race from WoW TBC (and K'aersh patch for WoW TWW)?

 

[Kyrbi0]

//EDIT// Apparently the Hive now automatically combines multiple posts from the same user into one megapost?? I can see how that is useful but in this case (trying to separate 3 different sets of feedback) it's a bit annoying here. I'll try to separate them.


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Posting some feedback from @Wazzz & my responses (Please Note: he was responding to the v1.0 of these guys)
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Please don't underestimate what you've made - I just played it, and it's very fun already

That's good (& surprising) to hear! I think one of my big blind-spots is "what is fun" & gameplay in general, so it's gratifying to hear that I more or less stumbled onto it

I think a lot of the unit designs are already interesting - did my Lightning Revenant inspire some of the concepts, perchance? If it did, I'm very touched, if it didn't, then we share some very similar ideas, so either way I'm happy

I think it would be difficult to argue that there was no cross-pollination, especially since I loved your design & we both picked the same unit (Lightning Revenants) to feature in our factions, lol.

That being said, I actually only came around to "lightning = siege" circuitously; my earliest brainstorming (ha) was that when I thought "what would Air Elementals do to knock down buildings (i.e. siege)?" my first thought was actually "tornadoes" (& to a lesser extent, hail). I also had made the determination early on to basically just remake the Terran Siege Tank 1-for-1, so I needed some sort of 'two-forms' concept, and thought it would be sick if the artillery-range mode summoned a miniature twister onto a building to wreck it. (& maybe shoot hail in the regular mode)

But the tornado SFX/my ability to code a convincing "channel fire" (as Winter has done with an orbital laser tank) was... also not very great. The tornadoes sorta flopped for me.

So looking about for alternatives, I eventually remembered a sick lightning SFX from many years ago by Callahan, featuring multiple 'versions' of big, multi-pronged lightning. Honestly too big/flashy for your average unit, generally... But for this? I tried it & immediately fell in love. I'm not too humble to admit I think it's really cool; maybe one of my favorite things I designed. I based it on the Mortar Team & the mobile version is weaker than them, but the artillery mode is much stronger, and seeing it tear through buildings en masse with giant, scintillating bolts of forked lightning is quite satisfying.

So a few issues, some of them I'm sure you're already keenly aware of, but these should be relatively quick fixes:
- Maelstrom Form for the Stormfather doesn't have an attack

Ah, this was intentional (& I've made it more clear in the tooltip); the toggled morph needed a downside along with the upside & I opted to remove his attack. (Kinda replacing it with the "Updraft" ability though)

- Levelling the Stormfather's Q ability (Felling Winds, I think it was?) doesn't increase the damage further, so I'm not sure if this is a persistent issue across other hero abilities or not

Intentional again. It wouldn't be impossible to make it increase damage, but it would've been harder, and I wanted to increase the AoE instead.

- Sylph uses the Y hotkey, which is unfortunately shared with the "Rally" ability - there's a few other instances of shared hotkeys, just something to be mindful of

Oh man I appreciate this; I rarely use hotkeys so I don't often give them enough thought, and I definitely forgot about the hotkeys on buildings. Gratzi.

- The Caladria costs 0/0/0, so I spammed quite a few of these since they're totally free

Fix'd (based it off a creep)

- I'm not sure how the intended design is meant to be, so this may not be an issue depending on what you are going for, but there is a lack of techtree requirements for unlocking units - if the goal is something more along the lines of a "Naga-styled" campaign faction, then nevermind

Fix'd (hadn't yet gotten to it)

- Lots of debugging texts for just about every action - don't forget to disable these in your final entry (like I often tend to do)!

Fix'd (another obvious one)

Some of what I really loved already:
- Storm Elementals are just awesome, I love using them for the early damage (despite being Siege damage, I just think they're neat), and the attack in their Artillery Form is super cool!

See above; agreed

- Hurricane Elementals spreading a lot of damage around with their Tempest attack is awesome

That's good to hear, because I really thought that these guys were perfect conceptually, and then when I implemented them... I felt very underwhelmed. A combination of not having the ideal model, and running into weird issues with the various attack SFX I chose not working (per Winter, I was trying to do either "big wind attack + lightning upgrade", or "big lightning attack + wind upgrade", but neither way 'worked'/looked good, and I was also getting worried about way overusing Lightning Attack/Monsoon.mdl).
So of course the solution was to overuse Monsoon.mdl by making it just his whole entire thing. xD
Anyway I did what I set out to do with that guy (big classic T3OD with just a big deadly attack & a single, passive, attack-enhancing, research-gated ability), but I haven't quite fallen in love with it, and I'm not sure how to. But I don't hate where he ended up (turns out if you make the projectile speed super-high, you can still have a Missile attack type but make it appear immediately on the target; looks pretty good en masse), and I'm glad he resonated with someone!

- The gameplay style for the faction overall feels pretty smooth, like I had no problem getting into playing the faction and being active on the map with them, which is honestly half the battle for custom factions to feel good like that

Per my initial comment, I wouldn't mind if you elaborated more on this, because I really don't know how I succeeded at that.

I really hope we get to see this get more fleshed out, even after the contest is done. I honestly did not know how far someone could extend the concept of Air Elementals, and you've done a really good job of sticking to a very challenging theme so far.

I'm gratified you think I've succeeded (I've loved Elementals for a long time & wanted to see them fleshed out), and look forward to hearing your thoughts on my v0.2.


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Posting some feedback from @FlameofChange & my responses (about the current v2.0):
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Your faction is absolutely broken especialy in the early game. Cheap units, hard hitting, great scalability, and too much things accessible at tier 1. Why not having a true tier 2 ? My other notes
☼ Worker walk animation speed is too fast
☼ Warmill far too cheap
☼ Barracks ground pathing too large
☼ Mixing warmill and item shop is a bad idea due to available icon slots
☼ Pylon maybe a bit too expensive and tanky
☼ Pylon farm sound
☼ Tier 1 spellcaster ??!
☼ Tier 1 siege unit ??!
☼ Tier 1 air unit ??!
☼ Healing strictly accessible only at tier 3 ??!
☼ Tower rush goes brrroken since you can summon them instead of building them
☼ You could have taken custom arcane observatory model so it has proper build animation
☼ T3 building should be counted as tier 3, can't get 3rd hero at the tavern
☼ Spark revenant
► Too large selection circle
► Galvanize could be auto, but is broken in the early game. +10 damage is +66% damage without upgrades, and not behind a tech. Maybe a Tier 3 tech.
► Daytime 0.25 regen is too low
► Attack sound should be medium wood blunt or medium metal blunt
► Too high side per dice, it scales too well for its cost, it gets +33% damage per upgrade, should be +20%
► Damage point is too late
☼ Stormfather
► Has 52 base stats, should be 50
► Has +5.45 stats per level, should be +6
► Too low base HP
► Doldrums also hits magic immune !
► Fell gale requires a unit target, despite being an AoE visual
☼ Wind serpents absolutely broken, super high attack rate and damage per dice for dirt cheap
☼ Conduction does not add bouncing attacks at all, what does the Conduction trigger do ??! Do you wanted instead to make the tower lock in place the target ? In this case it's broken in another way.

Alright, so most of these appear to be balance/numbers concerns, which is fine (& instructive for me), but there are two big reasons I'm gonna just sorta 'skate on by' them: 1) the Criteria of this Contest don't weight 'Balance' very heavily/prominently, so I wasn't worried overmuch about it, and B) I'm horrendously bad at/uninformed about balance . Very little 'real' play experience & it shows. Bottom line: you are probably right about most/all of it, but I was just ball-parking & I'll never claim to do a great job of it.

I'll touch on a few balance/numbers notes here though:

☼ Worker walk animation speed is too fast

Weird. I didn't touch their movespeed when I copied them over from the Peasant.

☼ Pylon maybe a bit too expensive and tanky

Huh. Tried to find the middle ground on it's cost-vs.-Food creation. More importantly though, I really wanted to give this some kind of alternative function ala 3/4 of the racial 'Farms'... But alas, few good ideas & no time.

☼ Tier 1 spellcaster ??!
☼ Tier 1 siege unit ??!
☼ Tier 1 air unit ??!

As aforementioned, I kinda messed that up unwittingly. Originally it was all just 2 Tiers & those were all T2. A last-minute addition of the mill/shop was in part my way of allowing for a sort of "pseudo-T2" ala T1.5, which I thought might be clever.

I failed to recognize that T1.5 is barely a speed-bump (only one building separates it from T1), so maybe it's not really enough to separate by. Especially for the Flyer, which I had asked about, been warned about, and was going to uphold (no T1 flyers)... but then I just sorta forgor

(I will say I don't think a T1(.5) Caster or Siege are inherently wrong, though. I could totally see those working (though I don't know that mine here do). I at least kept the big-boy artillery siege to actual-T2).

☼ Tower rush goes brrroken since you can summon them instead of building them

Yeah... another thing I remember us talking about, but I kinda forgor to do something about . Not sure what I would do to fix it (w/o removing the summoning). Would have to ponder some fixes.

► Galvanize could be auto, but is broken in the early game. +10 damage is +66% damage without upgrades, and not behind a tech. Maybe a Tier 3 tech.

Perfect example of failed ballparking. This was based heavily on Vampiric Potion, and I halved the duration/removed the lifesteal + factored in the life loss, so I figured going from +12 to 'only' +10 was good enough. In reality, sounds like it should boost way less, or cost more life... Or even both? (-25 Life/+8 Attack? -50 Life/+6 Attack?)

► Daytime 0.25 regen is too low

This is frustrating because I put a lot of thought into their whole regeneration thing & decided early to just make it "daytime regen" (technically unique), and I KNOW about regeneration values (Troll fan, remember? ) so I knew to improve it (mirroring Night Elves at 0.50 would've been the ticket methinks)... But I somehow missed that. Dang. (weirdly I checked & I didn't even keep it consistent; everyone is at 0.25 except Wind Serpents @ 1.00 & Caladrius @ 1.50 )

► Doldrums also hits magic immune !

It's just a modified 'Tornado' as a ward; same exact abilities (slowing & cycloning). I wouldn't think an Ultimate's sub-abilities would maintain it's preeminence. I think as a Hero ability I don't mind this punching through Magic Immune that much, but I'm not sure how I would stop it if I wanted to.

☼ Wind serpents absolutely broken, super high attack rate and damage per dice for dirt cheap

We talked about this so it's funny to me; I knew the deck was stacked against me basing this off the Coautl, and lo & behold here we are. xD I lowered it's base attack so much! lol
=

'K, now onto the more interesting stuff:

why no true tier 2

Because that was the whole (self-imposed, arbitrary) constraint I was designing under. I knew I didn't have a full, 3-tier techtree in me (& I was right ); I knew from the beginning I was only gonna do a mini-faction.

That being said, I quickly realized I wanted to expand just a bit from the Naga; that some element of progression was very useful (kinda built-in to Warcraft 3), so ultimately I settled on the compromise of 2.

That came with a lot of finagling & some stuff I had to work around. As far as I know I'm the only guy to ever try something like this, so it's pretty new space & I won't pretend I did it all right/it all worked out. But I think it turned out ~OK. Could certainly be improved.

great scalability

Can you elaborate on/explain this?

☼ Mixing warmill and item shop is a bad idea due to available icon slots

Elaborate. I thought this was a clever compromise (didn't want to do a Mill or an Item Shop but decided late to add both conjoined), but it may be untenable. However I don't know what you mean by "due to available icon slots".

☼ Pylon farm sound

Whoops Used to be the Windmill model & I just forgot to change it.

☼ Healing strictly accessible only at tier 3 ??!

Yeah, this is another omission on my part; I did think about the lack of early-game Healing but just kinda ran out of time & didn't have any easy options that were sufficiently unique. Would definitely improve on with some more time/an expanded roster.
(err I mean what Archie said; "RoC Orcs FTW!" )

► Fell gale requires a unit target, despite being an AoE visual

Man this is so funny/sad to me; everyone complained about this exact issue way back in the Hero Contest I originally designed him for. And I ""get"" it... except it's literally the ideal targeting format/method! It is, by design, an AoE-affecting ability which requires a unit-target ("powerful winds push everyone around a target onto a single enemy unit"). This is a unique ability, I get it, but it's clearly explained in the tooltip, and as the player you're going to want to not just know your target but the range of the ability! Tell me a better way to do both.

☼ Conduction does not add bouncing attacks at all, what does the Conduction trigger do ??! Do you wanted instead to make the tower lock in place the target ? In this case it's broken in another way.

Huh?? That's a serious bug... It was working (more or less; was a tiny bit janky in this regard) in my very last test before uploading

I just re-tested and... it's weird. It didn't work when I simply cheated my way to the upgrade, but it worked when I actually physically did the upgrade & everything. So... I'm not sure what's up.

(The trigger is the classic workaround for Orb-of-Lightning-based abilities; they are very useful but infamously never proc if the unit simply auto-attacks. A very annoying omission. So the trigger simply catches the (auto-)attack order & makes it 'official'; activating the OoL-based ability.

Apparently they fixed this in Reforged patch v2.0.3! Very nice, and useful for anyone testing in Reforged. Would make the trigger obsolete I suppose)

☼ You could have taken custom arcane observatory model so it has proper build animation

Could've. But I ran out of time for such things (you'll notice I didn't even get your fancy new Altar in there )

☼ T3 building should be counted as tier 3, can't get 3rd hero at the tavern

Huh... that's annoying. I thought I did everything necessary to make Heroes work right but I'm not surprised I missed something. Or maybe it's just impossible with 2 tiers.


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Posting some feedback from @SgtWinter & my responses (Please Note: he was responding to the v1.0 of these guys):
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what the hell this faction is awesome

The Spark Revenant is such a basic unit design but I really love the vibe of it. The stimpack-inspired self-buff, and the Static Plating upgrade really makes them a reliable frontline unit.

Thanks; I know "stimpack for basic infantry" is basically the lowest-hanging-fruit & everyone's done it, but I haven't done it yet. Plus it seemed apropos & very easy (was going for "make this as simple as possible so I can finish on time (whoops)"). Would've liked a more 'official' error message.
Static Plating was interesting; I worried that auto-Lightning-Shield would be terrible because it hurts your guys as well (& these guys are by nature all bunched up on the front line).

Then you have the Djinn in place of the "ranged" unit but Electrify makes it a really strong support unit alongside the Spark Revenants. Dust Cloud helps reduce DPS of enemy armies, which is especially helpful vs ranged attackers due to their constant dps. Boreal Prison is a really interesting take on Sleep as well.

Thanks, Djinn felt like a slam-dunk (& are highly relevant in WoW... maybe that could be a 3rd Hero...?).

However, technically they were always designed as the "Offensive Support (Caster)"; they weren't supposed to be the "basic ranged infantry" unit, believe it or not. That title goes to the Gale Elemental, in the other 'barracks' (Minaret of Winds). See I suffer from an incurable love of the "Night Elf"-style of arranging units into 'barracks'; I really struggle to do the "normal" thing & have the "basic"/"caster"/"siege-n-stuff" barracks setup. I just love sticking units into a barracks based on some thematic quality that binds them, and I really shouldn't do it as often as I do.

I just really latched on to the idea of "Wind/Air" & "Storms/Lightning" being the major demarcation in this faction, seen across the units & in the Heroes. There's definitely some intermixing (esp. in the T3OD, naturally), but when I came up with the idea of sticking all the "lightning" guys together & then the "wind" guys together, things just really clicked for me.

I kinda liked the idea that, depending on your Hero, you'd build the barracks & train the basic warriors that best complemented it (i.e. Stormfather is ranged so you build the Steeple & train (melee) Spark Revenants; Son of the Storm is melee so you build the Minaret & train (ranged) Gale Elementals). Felt like a nice poetry (though obviously players can build whatever they want).

If I were playing this faction 'straight', I'd probably be doing:
(Basic Barracks): Spark Revenant, Gale Elemental, Storm Elemental
(Advanced Barracks): Wind Serpent, Djinn, Caladrius

The Storm Elemental's attacks reminds me a lot of Wazzz's Lightning Revenants in the Stormreavers, I love that you made these a Siege Tank-type unit that has to deploy for increased range and firepower.

See my response to Wazzz above; not actually super-intentional, but impossible to argue I wasn't slightly influenced. (But originally I was going for "siege = tornadoes" & only came around to lightning when the SFX situation was so much better).

Yeah Siege Tank was literally the one thing I had written for this guy. xD I really wanted that goodness (& I think I mostly succeeded).

Caladrius feels like a strong support flyer and anti-caster, providing the faction with some much needed healing. (Although you forgot to set a cost to the unit, so I avoided trying to spam it)

Fix'd. Yeah, support flyer with a tiny anti-caster bent; probably would be fleshed out more in the long-run. This one is one of the weaker/more chance-y designs; not everyone knows about this mythological unit (despite Age of Mythology) & I really went in a kinda weird direction with it, I think.

The Hurricane Elemental you've managed to make it feel like a very powerful force of nature with the AOE lightning zaps.

I'm really glad to hear that; as I mentioned to Wazzz above I never really got to feeling like the Hurricane Elemental was 'exciting/cool'; on paper it's perfect, but in practice I'm kinda low on him (& I don't want to be).

The Son of the Storm hero is pretty cool too, although for some reason has like 5 spells instead of the usual 4. I assume Chain Lightning is a leftover or something and you wanted to replace it

Yep, that was a late possibility I was considering before "Kugelblitz" & the whole 'german' thing I went for, lol. Realized that Chain Lightning could actually increase the damage on the jumps, so I figured a simple-but-technically-unique DD ability could be achieved by simply making a 2-shot CL which would double the damage on the 2nd target (but debuff (stun, etc) the primary target).

That guy is a personal favorite of mine, conceptually. I'm actually (spoilers) going to be redoing it whenever I can next get a Hero Contest rolling; I've been in love with that model since before it came out (Jigrael got some input from me on the animations, which is why they're so weird ), and I was so tickled to finally find the perfect place for my "Stormfather / Son of the Storm" naming dyad. (Not to mention his name serving as a reference to the sadly-dead Blizzard artists website).

And when designing his abilities I was having such a hard time naming them (other than "Blitzkrieg")... until I hit upon the Mirror-Image Ultimate & realized I could call it "Doppelgang" & have 2/4 German words as abilities, then I knew I had something, lol. "Kugelblitz" for his 'ball lightning' ability was pretty easy (if a bit of a stretch for "common German phrases in English"), and then Angst was a tight fit for his passive but it made it in. So now the whole guy is German-themed, somehow.