Community discussion: Custom characters (select your spells and stats) Skirmish

Started by redmoth, July 04, 2012, 08:36:12 PM MT

redmoth

Good day Hero Mages, redmoth here. Im a strategy game fan and part of the Revamp mod team for Supreme commander 2. Ive recently taken interest in hero mages.

Brace yourselves Hero Mages, long post incoming!

Ive spoken briefly to Ross about this Idea, and Im bringing it onto the forums so we could maybe flesh out completely such an Idea and, who knows, someday see it in game!



LETS GO!

AS THE TITLE SAYS , the Idea is to have the ability to customise your party entirely to your liking in the custom battle offline mode. Eventually of course, it would be great to bring this to multiplayer, but personally, I prefer premade chars, since it lets Ross implement new interesting characters over time, and it makes you think to develop new strategies with existing chars without it being overpowered and unbalanced, great for competitive online play! Custom offline battles with custom chars would be a feature to have a different game every time, when you are not feeling like playing online and just want to relax and have some fun.


CUSTOMIZE YOUR CHARACTERS?


Yes! when in custom battle mode, you select 1 Mage and 2 Guardians for your party. Customised characters would appear in that list. Customized characters would be based off premade characters.


TELL ME MORE ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN DO


If you could swap up everything and work from scratch, it would be a bit extreme. How to have a fun experience against one or multiple AI players?

These are the things you can customise on a character: Lower will be an explanation for each

1: NAME

2: ABILITIES, PASSIVES

3: STATS


HOW WILL YOU CUSTOMIZE THESE?


Name: of course they will be based off premade chars, but dont you want a "Zoink, the spellcaster" mage or a "Porkchops" guardian? In all seriousness, the name will let you differenciate the characters when you pick them, so you dont pick the wrong character by accident.


Abilities, passives: you would have 2 or 3 ability slots per Guardian, and 4 ability slots per Mage. Take any ability available, and just put it in your character! A Barbarian with 2 Mage spells seems a bit unbalanced, so there should be some nuances on spells here and there, certain classes should not have access to certain spells.
these abilities will be refered to in the next point: Stats.


Stats: 2 Ideas.

1: When you finish building your characters with their abilities, you get 5 or so "points". You may use these points in some manner to add to the stats of your characters. Each "point" is equivalent to 1 stat point. Seems complicated? Here is an example:

My character

Beefcakes using Class: Fighter Mage (Incidently it uses Fighter Mage base stats)

STR: 4
DEF: 14
HP: 6

These are the abilities I gave to Beefcakes (4 slots) :

Relentless (passive): cannot be stunned

Sacrifice (cost 1 card) : kill ally creature to gain 3 health

Dual wield (passive): you can attack twice, but gets -2 defense

Lightning bolt (costs nothing) : roll 3 attack dice against an enemy in the same column or row, and each unit in between




I USE 5 "POINTS" ON BEEFCAKES to give him more defense, strengh and health:

STR:4 --> 5
DEF:14 --> 16
HP: 6 --> 8

Beefcakes has now better stats! my party is ready for battle!
I used all my 5 points on Beefcakes, now both of my guardians are weak   :-\



IDEA 2: Instead of having 5 or so "points", you may exchange ability slots on your characters for points. Each ability slot Is equivalent to 3 "points"

Say I have Beefcakes, I take away relentless In exchange for 3 "points"

STR: 4
DEF: 14
HP: 6

I exchange relentless for 3 points and put them all in DEF. now Beefcakes looks like this:

Beefcakes using Class: Fighter Mage

STR: 4
DEF: 14 --> 17
HP: 6

These are the abilities I gave to Beefcakes (now 3 slots) :

Sacrifice (cost 1 card) : kill ally creature to gain 3 health

Dual wield (passive): you can attack twice, but gets -2 defense

Lightning bolt (costs nothing) : roll 3 attack dice against an enemy in the same column or row, and each unit in between



HANG ON A MINUTE THATS COMPLETELY UNBALANCED!!! BLARRRGH!!


That is why we must have an Intelligent conversation on this to completely flesh this out, fellow Mages  ;)


POOR AI, IT WILL HAVE A ROUGH DAY


Not if it gets randomly generated characters every game, or if it has somewhat of a smart way to spend its "points" and build its characters with abilities! Never will there be the same Skirmish match happening twice!

This would also let difficulty or handicap being inplemented in game, by letting either AI or player having additionnal "points" to spend.

Situation: give yourself 10 aditionnal "points", now you can try to fight off 2 AI players (6 chars) with your buffed up force of 3 courageous fighters. Or give more points to the AI, and good luck on beating its unkillable characters!



FOR THE FANS OF A FUN OFFLINE MATCH, CONTRIBUTE TO THIS TOPIC BY POSTING UNDER! PLEASE KEEP IT CLEAN!


Battle simulator: (for balance purposes)











Gorstak

I think that all efforts should be on making multiplayer part of game better and not offline at all,and i think idea 2 is more better.

redmoth

I agree, but offline play is a great feature on the mobile devices, lets you play offline wherever you are. Any improvements make It sweet! The first post might be long, but It is still only one feature, not a game changing overhaul. The hardest part is finding good balance so it does not become ridiculous.

Ross Przybylski

I think this idea has some great potential to add some additional fun to the game, especially if there was a good system to balance it.

The AI would be able to play customized characters effectively. Their intelligence is based on the abilities they have, so they'll naturally find ways to use whatever powers they're given.
Manager of D20Studios, LLC

redmoth

Ok, Im just putting this forward:

credits to diesbudt who found a few things about the battle simulator:

if def = 15 or more, a point of def is worth more than HP
if def = 13 or less, a point of HP is worth more than def
at 14, they are about even.

So, my Idea of a first rule for stat "points":

1. you cannot give "points" into def on your character if it has 15 or more def.
(eg. beefcakes has 13 def and I have 5 "points": I can only put 2 "points" into beefcakes def.)

2. you cannot give "points" into HP if your def is under 13
(eg. beefcakes has 12 def and 5 HP, and I have 5 "points": I need to put 1 point in def before putting points in his HP. I can put up to 3 points in his def so it gets to 15, then put the 2 others in HP)


Seems like a radical way to balance stuff, but it seems mathematically true with what diesbudt found, although ill be running tests on this.


Heres another rule forwarding: (2 ideas)

either you can only put 1 "point" in strengh per character
or
it takes you 2 "points" to add 1 strengh on a character.
(this is not tested, I need to run a few tests on the battle simulator)

please tell me what you think!

Archie

OK first welcome Redmoth and great to see someone come to the party with such great ideas. Secondly I am reply after seeing this so these are my very first thoughts.

One

Love it. I used to play Car Wars a lot and the thing I loved was making custom vehicles and then thrashing them to bits against each other. The building was just as much fun though!

Two

This would tie in perfectly with the offline multiplayer human vs human option that Ross knows I am a big fan of. Being able to pit my custom builds vs each other would be so much fun.

Three

In defense of offline - I live in the country and the internet connection isn't great - you have to live it to experience it. Also I play Hero Images on the train on the way to client assignments and the signal is rubbish. Being able to play this offline is a great boost to the fun I could have.

Four

There should be some caps to the modifications. The example character above is too powerful, I think, at first glance. For every strength there should be a vulnerability.

Five

Custom pictures - if we have a custom character then the avater should be something close to our imagination. Either there is a bank of twenty pictures you draw from or you can upload your own. Also the way they look on screen in the game should be in some fashion selectable, again to reflect our imagination.

MagicMissle

This is weird because I was just thinking of customizable characters last night. This would be great! i usually play against AIs more than actually people, so this is an excellent idea :D I have no complaints or disagreements with your original post

Zelanius Forcys

I agree with Ross, that there would be balance issue, especially if one spends all the points on a mage's Def and Life, making the mage nigh invulnerable. However, custom characters can be fun, so perhaps we have to limit the points to have a cap on how much can be spent per stat.

Zela