Too OP for a flying unit?

[Lord Aiden]

I'm not arguing with you there, all I'm saying is it can be useful

 

[Lord Alyx]

Yes, if you can balance it right, but HP is easier to balance than armor type + hp

 

[Lord Aiden]

Just to be accurate here, destructors don't have fortified armor anymore, its medium armor now

 

[Lord Alyx]

lol, irrelevant details

 

[Lord Aiden]

Obviously balancing hp alone is less difficult than balancing hp and armor, all I'm saying is in certain cases the armor needs to be modified as well as hp

 

[Lord Alyx]

ok I agree, but only in a small number of instances

 

[Lord Aiden]

lol, you finally conceded to something which I think most of us think is pretty correct

 

[Lord Alyx]

Just because lots of people think something is right does not make it so, but look in my experience as a modder, I rarely had to modify the armor for flying units, only in the case of flying machines and also did you know about normal armor?

 

[Lord Aiden]

Normal armor ?

 

[Lord Alyx]

There's a special armor type called "normal" that I don't believe is used by any regular unit in wc3, you can change its name, stat chart, etc. to whatever you want to and use that as the armor for heavy air

 

[Lord Aiden]

I think I've heard of this, you ever try this ?

 

[Lord Alyx]

Yes I believe I did, it was to make a unit really damage resistant

 

[Lord Aiden]

Interesting

 

[Lord Alyx]

You can change it via advanced>gameplay constants and advanaced>game interface

I would highly recommend that you play around with that, see what you can accomplish

 

[Lord Aiden]

Thanks for telling me this, Ima check this out right now

 

[cleavinghammer]

With regards to the building being a spellcaster: unless you make it possible to prevent it from casting (stun/silence/sleep, mana drain/burn etc.), maybe limit it to channeling spells that target an area if it takes too long to kill.

 

[Lord Aiden]

@cleavinghammer you talking about the ward? I think what was meant by this is a unit summons a ward, the ward is made to cast a modified cloud on itself, and for 60 seconds, or as long as the ward is alive enemy units within close proximity of it cannot use spells.

 

[ArchDuke]

Did you guys know that you can use the cloud ability to disable all spell casting on the map? Simply make an invisible/invulnerable ward that casts a tweaked cloud that disables spell casting, change the cloud around to have a duration of 0 and set the targets to friendly as well as enemy, and thats it you got it.

This can be very useful...

 

[Lord Alyx]

Ye, the cloud thing will likely work, but there's very little use for it unless your want a map where you can't use magic

 

[Lord Aiden]

Can you make it so that when a certain objective is completed all units on the map can now use magic?

 

[Lord Alyx]

Probably, experiment with it if you wanna find out, you probably just get it to stop channeling to stop the effect

 

[Lord Aiden]

So what do you think about that whole Chimaera thing ?

 

[Lord Alyx]

I opened up the editor and checked it out, basically it has a range of 850, but only against buildings. So you could come by a base and take out its structures from afar, but you're gonna have to come close to get at its units, this is just a weird situation. I wouldn't give anything flying a range of over 450 even if it meant you had to upgrade it because the thing would be abused, as far as those airships in Arkain, from what I understand they have a huge (~12) food cost and therefore cannot be spammed, also even with medium armor an airship with just 1000 hp can easily be taken down, however if it outranges the defenders this can be a problem, A good counter would be to mass flying machines, gargoyles, or hippographs. In fact gargoyles or hippographs will be more effective against these because normal damage does 1.5x damage to medium armor

 

[Lord Aiden]

@-Phoenix- You seemed interested in that heavy bomber unit, how would you tweak it and how much food would you make it cost if you had to use it in gameplay?

 

[Lord Alyx]

Not sure, the thing is OP like crazy. Probably like 20 food, lol. But seriously it can level an entire base by gliding above it with the bombing attack.

 

[Lord Aiden]

I think the bombs can only attack buildings, so any unit can fire from below without being targeted

 

[Lord Alyx]

I think its because of the way the missile would look. Bombs can only be dropped, so there's no aiming it, plus it can wreck everything below it if it could target units.

 

[Lord Aiden]

I believe its the aiming issue, it just doesn't look right if doesn't follow its original path once it was dropped. I believe the author was the one that told me about this...

 

[Lord Alyx]

Interesting unit, the person who made it should've used a different model though, that looks like a spaceship

 

[Lord Aiden]

I agree, but aerial models are difficult to come by unless you either make them yourself or import from other games

 

[Lord Alyx]

Nowadays yes, but there were many sites with warcraft 3 resources in the past that had them. One thing I remember doing was importing good models from other campaigns whenever I found some.

 

[ArchDuke]

Ye it sucks, lots of resources that were available on other sites are nowhere to be found today, at least we have such a great community despite the fact that wc3 was released over 10 years ago

 

[Lord Alyx]

Couldn't agree with you more

 

[ArchDuke]

If you're stilling willing to assist me with wc3 editor stuff I wanted to ask you this:

Suppose you have a melee type map, how would you distribute items on it, also what about gold coins?

 

[Lord Alyx]

I rarely used items because you need a hero to pick them up. Often times I had only 1 or 2 heroes the player gets to control and that's 12 items total, I didn't really put lots of items on my maps. But here are some effective used of items:

Depending on difficulty you could have fallen units drop items (adjustable via triggers) (Items are only usable by heroes however. so it wont necassarily effect the gameplay)
-One trick you could use is to give a rune of rebirth to certain strong units, click on the drop item menu when you have the unit in the editor then choose the rune. To adjust for difficulty have certain units not drop the rune by having a trigger that replaces the units that are set to give the rune with an identical unit, this cancels the effect. So on easy the player could resurrect several of these units while on hard it would be much less.

Set strong units to drop items.

Have an optional quest for items

Give an upgrade tablet for beating a certain enemy.

As far as for gold, I've added several denominations to the already existing gold coin, I think there was a 50, 750, 2,000, and a golden chest which was like 3,000 or 3,500 and I just put these where appropriate

 

[ArchDuke]

You're saying give strong units a rune of rebirth that a hero could acquire in order to resurrect the unit, but set a trigger that replaces a hero with an identical one without the rune as per difficulty

As far as for the gold why so many denomination, who needs a 3,500 denomination anyway?

 

[Lord Alyx]

>You're saying give strong units a rune of rebirth that a hero could acquire in order to resurrect the unit, but set a trigger that replaces a hero with an identical one without the rune as per difficulty

Yes

>As far as for the gold why so many denomination, who needs a 3,500 denomination anyway?

Look you need a 50 denomination so you could give it to regular enemies or simply put it around the map, you could also remove these via trigger to adjust for difficulty or other things

The 750 is just so you wont have to put 3 gold coins in one place

The 2,000 came in quiet handy as it was often the reward for destroying certain key structures on the map, I definitely recommend having a large denomination like this because serves as a good reward

I rarely used the 3,000 or 3,500. I remember using it about 3 times, basically it was the reward for completing a quest

 

[ArchDuke]

What kind of quest deserves a 3.5k reward? Also How do you have the player distinguish between the denominations?

 

[Lord Alyx]

It was different types of hard optional quests. From what I can recall at this point one was to eliminate a strong hero, the other was to wipe an entire enemy base off the map

As far as the denominations go adjust the rgb colors, you could also adjust the size if you want. I think my 50 was a darker yellow, while the others were lighter in color.

 

[ArchDuke]

Interesting ideas. Also about heroes you mentioned that you recommend balancing them out, how many heroes would you use for a typical map and how would the balancing be done

 

[Lord Alyx]

Strictly speaking the number of heroes depends on the storyline as well as the difficulty of the mission, the less heroes the player has the more difficult the mission is, however I always gave the player at least 1 hero (and made him more powerful if it was only 1). I originally intended to make a mission without a hero but the whole idea got scrapped when I realized just how important a hero is for gameplay purposes

As far as for the balancing I can't really give you much advice here, basically one hero does what the other can't

 

[ArchDuke]

I forgot to ask, you said that you prefered air units with a food cost of at least 3 so that they are not spammed, besides those flying machines which types of air units would you give a food cost of 2, and if you had to give a side a single air unit describe what unit you would have that side use.

 

[Lord Alyx]

Air units with a food cost of 2 would have to be weak, similar to gargoyles or hippographs or something of that nature. Something that could defeated by the enemy even if spammed, like I said I would prefer to give the player air units that cost 3 food or above so the unit can't be spammed.

As for your second question. A side having only one air unit would likely be disbalanced, but I would either give it something similar to the chimera but have it also be able to attack air units, or a very balanced gryphon like unit (weak against other air units but strong against ground units and structures)

 

[ArchDuke]

Interesting, I'll definitely take this into consideration when I decide to make air units, but I don't believe gryphons are good against structures at all -magic attacks barely damage fortified armor

 

[Lord Alyx]

I said gryphon like unit

Make it good against structures by either giving it demolish, a second attack which does siege damage, or what I would recommend the most: A tweaked liquid fire ability that damages buildings over time plus slows down their attack.

 

[ArchDuke]

@-Phoenix- I was wondering what's a good self casting spell to give to an elite unit?

 

[Lord Alyx]

I would suggest tweaking the inner fire ability, setting that target only to "self" and modifying this ability into greatly increasing attack.

Let's say your unit does an average of 50 damage, if this spell increases its attack by another 50% the final attack rate will be increased to an average of 75. You can even make it so that it increases the unit's attack by 100%, now that would be truly OP

 

[ArchDuke]

I might try this

 

[cleavinghammer]

Immolation, if they're meant to be surrounded by enemies.

Spell version of Vampiric Potion to keep them alive longer.

 

[Lord Alyx]

What I would recommend is setting a metamorphosis like spell to position 0,-11, in order to make it invisible, then giving a fake auto-castable spell (set the targets to none), then creating a trigger that basically triggers the unit's metamorphosis if the auto-castable spell is activated. The Metamorphosed unit should have the buff you wanted to give the unit, but because the buff is basically part of the unit's abilities it is un-dispel-able, Imagine a unit which originally hits for 43-67 hitting for 86-134, now that's something.