Creep Wars addon

Discussion of all aspects of multiplayer development: unit balancing, map development, server development, and so forth.

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vasya
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Creep Wars addon

Post by vasya »

This is helper topic for Creep Wars addon.

Future plans:
* make CW work on any Map by it being a "modification" rather than "map rule".
* more weapon balancing (I dislike some parts of the current design)
* more built-in documentation/information (like "guard" abilities with small explanations, leader abilities which would tell what they already bought)
* decouple your gold&score from enemy gold&score. Simplify both. This is my personal idea that is a bit long to describe, so I better just do it.

Balancing guidelines:
* Leader should be in relative danger when fighting 3 creeps at once with no route to escape (except some units with ultra-high defense like elves)
* Leader should be in great danger (or dead) when facing 5+ creeps and no route to escape
* Obviously, Leaders should be stronger than creeps
* Leader should be able to defeat 2 units standing on good terrain without any real risk
* There should be as many challenges & choices as possible. Having multiple possible upgrade combinations is VERY good. Having many linear alternatives is good, too.
* Guards should be hard to kill initially. Once creep types reach their natural maximum, it should be doable though. Having a threat of an early attack with poison or lvl-up is good.

Things to consider:
* make HP depend on leveled-up unit HP, not initial HP.
* make HP linear to unit's HP (the current value is 14 + 50% initial)
* remove some weird Guard upgrade options (does anybody buy them at all???)

Historical note
Creep Wars [Dev] is built upon the old "Creep War" add-on. Current changes (diverge):
* more creep types. All units from Default era can appear as creeps.
* good built-in documentation.
* games can be re-loaded (finally!).
* adding support for more Eras (work in progress). Currently, some balancing is achieved by downgrading lvl2 leaders. Also, Era units can be used as creeps on wesnoth development version (1.13). Also, Creep Wars on wesnoth-1.13 do not ship their own Era at all, because they can be easily used with any other Era. Will have to wait till a wesnoth major release would be made though.
* internally, all new parts are written or re-written in Lua. Which, IMO, helps maintainability a lot.

Contacts:
* vn971 on irc.freenode.net (I often visit #wesnoth-dev)
* Bitcoin: 148AvMtozrKs3MzXCNMGNUTHLoqahw3fCo (Note I'm not the only author. I'm only responsible for the "Dev" addon.)
* JID:novikov971@jabber.ru.
* vasya @ wesnoth :)

Have fun!
PerseusStoned
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by PerseusStoned »

Can you please elaborate what the various mirror modes are and what they do? Is it possible for all players to choose from any selected hero?
vasya
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by vasya »

PerseusStoned, hi. If you want to keep all manual choices you made, choose "Random". I probably should update the wording for this entry, thanks for the remark.
Now, "Mirror" means both teams will have the same leaders, so that game would be as "fair" as possible.
"Same cost" means that corresponding leaders will have the same cost. So, leaders are chosen at random until their cost equals. There are no recruits, so recruits don't matter.

Hope that explains it, happy playing.)
vasya
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by vasya »

I've updated the wording for the last entry, it now says "Manual/Random".
PerseusStoned
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by PerseusStoned »

Thank you! I did notice the changes yesterday and the 'Manual' has made it much more clear to me. Having a lot of fun in Creep Wars, thanks for designing/maintaining it. One more question: is it possible to choose a Calvary unit, like a Horseman, or a Ghost with drain for your hero? If not, is it due to balance decision (e.g. those units are OP) or coding limitations (e.g. those units are not natural leaders and are a hassle to choose)?
vasya
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by vasya »

PerseusStoned, as far as I understand how Wesnoth works, it's not possible indeed. When you select leaders at game creation room, the client has no knowledge of the map and the custom "downgrade" code yet. So you're only allowed to choose between leaders already-present in the Era.

That being said, there are some work-arounds:
* you can choose "mirror" or "same cost" leader types, in which case cavalry would be possible (I think). Ghost too, if you allow over-powered units.:)
* you may choose Era providing more unit types. One example is "Ageless RPG" (the "RPG" is important).

I'm not sure how much it suits you, but it's about what we have, as far as I know.
Tondo
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by Tondo »

Hey Vasya,

I made some tweaks to the wide map (attached), will you take a look at it? Here is the list of changes:

- the guards would be placed on flat terrain instead of castle (indicated by road) to remove magical/marksman advantage for guard attacks. Guards can be given like 30 - 40% resistances to all attack types instead. Guards could also be upped to lvl 4 marshals to provide higher leadership to defending units.

- added two more guards a bit further out - not that these are meant to be attacked, just so that they allow you to get out of your base in case of "creepplug"... when a guard is attacked in current setup, the creeps often clump around the attacker and you cannot attack him with your leaders from inside. This effect is often exploited by attackers, but I don't think it should be so.

- also made access to guards a bit narrower for attackers, so that now a single unit can screen off a guard (unless the attacker is a skirmisher, of course)

- added three villages per side. These can be captured for more gold. The village gold will make only a minor contribution to the overall budget, but I think it would add a nice twist. Villages are placed out of typical combat zones, so they would not affect the fighting much. I don't know if scoreboard can account for this gold, probably not - you can capture varying number of villages with your various leadears, so the total amount of gold per each leader in a team would be different.

- added campfires for better gameplay experience :)

Please let me know what you think,
Attachments
wide Tmod.map
(5.55 KiB) Downloaded 488 times
vasya
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by vasya »

* regarding guards. I'm not sure it's good to remove magical/marksman bonuses altogether. After all, it's common that non-magical and non-marksman weapons are more powerful. On the other hand, castle is a bit like overdoing it -- which is exactly why recent versions of CreepWars reduce terrain defense to 50%! Check out yourself. Flat could be an option as well if you like it though, but I guess people would prefer the more common 50 or 60 % defense (say, hill or castle).

* trying to make the "bottleneck" tactics a bit less important is something I felt like doing as well. I tried to reduce importance of that a bit with the "middle" map. It's definitely cool to check out other ideas, too.

* not sure about villages & gold. The upside of current rules is that you see how many gold each player has. I tried to play with gold as well (the discontinued "Vortex" map), but in the end decided against it. Maybe villages will work because they're simpler than what I had. I guess only players will tell in the end.

I don't have time right now, but I'll try to take a look at in the days. Ideal schedule:
* I review the map. If there's something critical, like incompatibility to current Lua code, I ask to fix it.
* when reviews passed and it's good for merging, I add it as an experimental alternative to current maps
* if time passes and people start consistently playing the map, I drop off "experimental" flag and it becomes a mainstream alternative.

Thanks for your work! Will try to reach back in time.
vasya
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by vasya »

intermediate review:
* I like hills at 11-5, 12-5 very much.
* the map is not symmetrical (12,17). This needs to be fixed
* personally I'm a bit doubtful on further increasing the role of water creatures (4 water villages, the other 2 are adjacent)
* btw note that said villages will also provide healing, which will make poison less lurkative (both as a natural trait and as Shop weapon).
Tondo
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by Tondo »

Thx for your feedback.

I think I found&fixed the broken symmetry, but didn't find it at 12,17...

As for those villages - this is the only really new thing that I could come up with that would bring in a new strategic element - i. e. decision whether to pursue killing creeps, or capture villages, or retreat/advance to some better position etc. Every turn of your leaders is valuable and you have to decide what to do with it. I decided to use one dry, one water and one combined (swamp) village per side to account for balance with water/non-water units. I also tried to put them in awkward places so that players would need to move out of usual zones a little bit. But heavens know how the villages and their placement will turn out in real games... maybe players will try to stick to them and action would move there. The villages could actually prove to be superb positions if you attract creeps into swamp/water where you can kill them easily... (well, most unit types).

True, it would mess with the scoreboard and it would no loger be possible to keep track of gold of each team/leader. Personally, this is a price I'd be willing to pay - you know how much each side made from kills, and village income stays hidden.

I would be really interested in seeing how those villages would affect the game. Anyway, matches seldom last past 50 turns, by which time players usually accumulate between 500 - 1000 gold from kills. Even if you got 2 gold per village and kept holding one with each leader the entire time, you would only get extra 100 gold per leader, so not a significant ammount.

The villages could also mess with creeps, which could try to get healing there - this happened with the oasis that was present in base camps in previous versions, attracting creeps back to camp. This could be a good or bad thing, I dont know.

Poison is already not very useful, and certainly not lucrative enough to buy it in shop, only if you get a natural poisoner. It has noticeable effect only in early stages of game - later on, leaders have so much health that 8 HP from poison hardly matters, and creeps don't last long enough for poison to have a big impact. Also, curing guards became much cheaper, so guard poisoning is no longer a big thing.

Actually, guard defenses bother me the least, it optically kind of feels right that the guard should be in a castle. Placing them on 50% is a compromise gameplay-wise. But they can as well stay in castles with 60%. Or be graphically in castles, but have 50% def., that would be probably the best solution.

EDIT: Just updated the map to 14.2 - great, the guard is just like that, 50% in a castle :) But I would still prefer it to be lvl 4 grand marshall... this would give defending side a bonus for lvl 3 leaders as well. You think it would be too big an advantage for the defenders?

I like how you changed the pricing of movement upgrades. Very nice!

Attached map:

- fixed symmetry (hopefully)
- changed guard hexes to hills, to reflect suggested 50% def.
Attachments
wide Tmod.map
(5.54 KiB) Downloaded 494 times
Last edited by Tondo on August 13th, 2018, 7:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Tondo
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by Tondo »

Speaking of creeps - I think they should also get extra HP from boosts - like, 8 HP per boost level for example (or maybe more). This would give a +5 boost creep extra 40 HP. Boosted creeps have strong attacks, but their HPs are currenly unaffected, so they often die in a single engagement with another creep.
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Ravana
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by Ravana »

I have been suggesting making poison value function of current turn.
vasya
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by vasya »

Added the new map to Creep Wars, enjoy ;-)
vasya
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by vasya »

@Ravana I'm still kinda doubtful about that (on both CW and Afterlife) -- I'm afraid it'll bring complexity and something people will forget about -- with not a lot of positive effect. Ideally trying to keep it as simple as possible. I may change my opinion on this if many player suggest the same thing, but currently the idea has little traction (for good or for worse).
eurydike
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Re: Creep Wars addon

Post by eurydike »

I think it would be closer to my personal taste if some of the upgrades were based on mutually exclusive items of different types. Also I think some items should be race specific to make things interesing.Here's some suggestions:

Rings category
Thane's ring (of vigor): +20 health and 8% recovery of max health at the beginning of your turn, unless poisoned
Ring of ice: 30% cold resistance, 10% fire resistance
Ring of fire: 30% fire resistance, 10% cold resistance
Ring of celerity: +1mp, +1 melee strikes, + 1 ranged strikes
Ring of the boar: +30 health, sets movement cost in forests to 1.

(dwarven) Ring of the forge: +30 hitpoints, +20% fire resistance, +2 melee damage
(dwarven) Ring of the mountain: +10% arcane, impact, pierce, blade resistances

(elven) Signet of the council: +20% arcane resistance, +10% cold resistance, +2mp
(elven) Ring of the moon: +10% defense at night, +1 ranged damage

(orc, goblin) Crude ring: +3 melee damage, +1 melee strikes
(orc, goblin) Iron ring: +20% blade resistance, +10hp, +1 melee damage

(drakish) Ring of the sky drakes: Sets movement costs to 1 on all terrains, +1mp
(drakish) Ring of war: Grants "dauntless" ability and +1 melee strikes

(undead) Unholy ring: -20% max hp, -20% arcane resistance, +3mp, +3 melee strikes
(undead) Ring of the void: +50% arcane resistance

---

That's all I got for now. I will probably edit this further later on. What do you think?
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