Walking corpses changes

[Neoskel]

You'll now have a drake zombie stuck floating over the middle of a chasm.

Not a issue, with my experience on a campaign map where a wall barrier suddenly appears, you can still move off of it, at least if it's no more then 2 tiles wide. This would almost never come up, and if it was a issue, you could simply make no WC able to be over chasms.

Consider if a flying drake is on a chasm tile, with chasm on all sides,

Ahem.

As to your 'solution', stop any WCs from being over chasm? That's just an unnatural restriction on many units that makes no real sense to resolve a problem with a handful of units. If you have an appliance which uses a different plug than the sockets use, do you go around and replace every socket with ones compatible with your plug? No, you get an adapter.

[Molean]

As to your 'solution', stop any WCs from being over chasm? That's just an unnatural restriction on many units that makes no real sense to resolve a problem with a handful of units..

What's so unnatural for zombies to not be able to stay up in the air continuously enough to navigate a chasm? It's the most simple solution to the rare issue you mentioned. You say only to resolve the issue against a handful of units? Well theres only like 1 or 2 WC that can go over chasms in the first place. Why would they need such a ability?

Our reference point should be standard WC since thats the base of the unit we would alter, not drakes or other non-WC fliers. Standard WC of course can't cross chasms.

[pauxlo]

I think more natural would be that you cant't plague a flyer over chasm at all (not only drakes, also bats, gryphons, dragons and UMC flyers ... anyone who could go over chasm).

The "fluff" explanation: plague works by first killing someone, and then raising its corpse. If you kill a flyer over chasm, the corpse falls down, and you can't raise it. Simple.

[Zarel]

I think more natural would be that you cant't plague a flyer over chasm at all (not only drakes, also bats, gryphons, dragons and UMC flyers ... anyone who could go over chasm).

The "fluff" explanation: plague works by first killing someone, and then raising its corpse. If you kill a flyer over chasm, the corpse falls down, and you can't raise it. Simple.

Meh, why? It's easy enough to say, you can plague a flyer, but if the resulting WC can't fly, it instantly dies. Fluff explanation is simple enough. From its description, plague sounds more like it works by killing someone, whose corpse instantly becomes a WC (hence "plague" instead of "kill and subsequently raise from dead").

[wesfreak]

i don't think zombie drakes would be an issue: burners wouldn't be able to kill them, but augurs would be (and pretty easily, considering these guys have around 20hp. also: quite frankly, it's almost impossible to plague a drake, mainly because of their impact resist and even footed-ness, so it would be easy to fly away before any w.c. can get you. the player that makes that particularly hard kill deserves that reward.

sorry to go off topic.

[Neoskel]

It's the most simple solution to the rare issue you mentioned.

It would be much, much simpler to just let drake WCs fly than to remove flight from the others. And the only real barrier to doing so is the art, which i will be taking on myself at some point in the future.

[solsword]

Well... how about a compromise? Insert a WML even to kill walking corpses that don't have the right movetype when they're created over a chasm. Then when they get a flying movetype, they won't be killed. I really like the idea of plagued drakes falling into the chasm because they can't fly: it adds some flair to the game, just like the berserker laugh when attacking a dark adept, and I think that little bits like that make the game really shine.

Also, it's entirely reasonable to posit that plagued drakes can't fly: they use magic to fly while alive, which they presumably don't have when they're dead. Other flying corpses that I know of don't necessarily use magic to help them fly while alive. Of course, it's also entirely believable for them to fly after death... hence my suggestion that we go with both/either, but at least patch the problem for now.

[thespaceinvader]

My logic is that their wings can only just support them as it is - rotted into tatters, they simply don't work. Bats' wings stay more intact when they are corpsified.

[StDrake]

I'd say it's not about staying intact, cause looking at the bat WC it's a wreck, but bats are overally much lighter than drakes, so it's less of a problem to support the weight on something that overally has problems not to crumble into dust. Drakes are heavy and their wings abused comparing to real dragons - if they take too much punishment they won't keep them up.

[Molean]

Well on a more basic level, presumable the game was balanced with regular WC's in mind. So for the purpose of keeping that balance, If there is any question regarding the changes to the stats of a special WC, it would make sense to error on the side of default, not further away from it.

@solsword
Your solution wouldn't be the simplest since it would require programing, where as changing units stats is very simple by comparison.

What about those other changes I suggested for other WC?

[solsword]

@solsword
Your solution wouldn't be the simplest since it would require programing, where as changing units stats is very simple by comparison.

As Neoskel pointed out, changing the stats (to make drake WC's fly) also involves changing the artwork at some point. Which is vastly more complex than coding a simple event to kill them when spawned over chasms. The code really isn't that difficult. In fact, here it is:

Code: Select all

    [event]
        name=die
        first_time_only=no
        [filter]
            race=drake
            [filter_location]
                terrain=Q*
            [/filter_location]
        [/filter]
        [kill]
            id=$unit.id
            fire_event=no
            animate=no
        [/kill]
    [/event]

Of course, another problem that I noticed while testing that code is that the gryphon walking corpses use the drake sprite, but they fly, whereas the drake corpses don't. This is quite confusing, as two identical-looking units have very different move types, and the unit description page includes information on the variants... I'd be in favor of making it so that gryphon WCs can't fly, but I wouldn't really mind if we let the drake WCs fly, or came up with another solution. In any case, I suggest that we think about adding a mouseover to the moves left for a unit that gives movement stats for that unit (i.e. unit type + variant). I mean, yes, you can get them by hovering your mouse over various terrain hexes, but depending on the map, that's not really complete information. It might be better/also good to include variant information in the help page somehow.

P.S. The one coding-related issue with the event as it stands that I can think of is that it might interfere with other name=die events for specific units that are defined in a scenario. Does anyone have information on event execution order in this case, depending on where the proposed [event] is placed (i.e. in the unit file, in an equivalent of an era file, etc.).

[thespaceinvader]

The gryphon WC is in need of artwork, basically. There aren't any art devs currently working on it, unfortunately.