Steelhive Faction feedback/balancing

[Zerovirus]

Lol. We should totally make the Sentient a leader-only unit or something, that'd fix the problem- it could be a really powerful unit in low XP but the player'd be too cautious to use it much. That plus what Wesfreak said would work really well imo.

[fog_of_gold]

No. That wouldn't be a good idea. The only really useful advance is the move increasing - you don't use your leader to hold positions and especially not to attack. If you get in trouble's, you normally try to escape. The things I'd suggest is, to, like wesfreak, suggested, to give +1 + +20% experience per level up and to increase the starting stats and experience. That would make them easier to use and balance: They won't get to strong to fast and they won't be killed to fast.

[Zerovirus]

Right. I tried the new idea- graphing a faction's strengths and deficiencies. This has left me with some conclusions.

A: We need more ranged variety.
B: We need stronger impact attackers.
C: We could consider throwing in a cold-based attack unit.

I'm thinking about an extra line for the Slasher that turns into impact attacks. And maybe giving the Larva line a ranged cold attack.

Yes, some stats aren't the same as in the latest version. I'm twinking with the stats on my local version, but even so, you should get an idea of just how imbalanced our attack types are. And now to apply this to Terrain lump sums.

[JackBarber]

A. Plenty of the units could probably have one.
B. Sentient to 6-3...?
C. Add an evil air conditioner >:O

[RenoOfTurks]

why the lightshifter have not the auto-reapair?actually the lightshifter is unuseful...

[fog_of_gold]

It's made to make the enemy believe having a special unit. Why should it have self repair?

About the cold attack unit, add maybe a frost titan. It should be strong and expencive. Its attacknumber and defences should be less but it should have much hitpoints, resistences, damage and at least an ability makes him able to get healed in snow. An attack could be cold aura(magic+defend only, 5*2) and frost attack (maybe 14*1).

[RenoOfTurks]

i dunno...in the old version of the steelhive the lightshifter have the autorepair....and for me was a nice thing for this weak unit

[Trans]

Hi all,

I've just modified a little bit the faction by adding the "learning abilities" to Choriote (level 2).
Each time "she" levels, a choriote can learn things and can choose (exactly the way Sentients do it) amongst:
- impact resistance
- fire resistance
- cold resistance
- blade resistance
- pierce resistance
- max move+1
- max hp+5

To give it chance to kill (and by that way to learn), I added 10x1 ranged weapon (with marksmanship) which can be used when
attacking. With this unit, things change a lot if u know how to manage Steelhive.

In other words, just another unit with the "machine learning" concept change the balance and the faction
can be played well now.

I am looking for your suggestions and your help to achieve the balance of this faction
Trans

[Trans]

Is anyone still looking at this faction? Who maintain it?

Don't double-post in the future, especially never quote your prior post unless you've got something to add to it. Use the edit button instead.
--shadowmaster

[Zerovirus]

Well, if you want control of maintenance, I'd be more than pleased to cede it to you. As it stands I have other projects to work on, and since I've basically lost all my work in progress files for all wesnoth-related coding and sprites, I can't really keep maintaining this.

[Trans]

Well, if you want control of maintenance, I'd be more than pleased to cede it to you. As it stands I have other projects to work on, and since I've basically lost all my work in progress files for all wesnoth-related coding and sprites, I can't really keep maintaining this.

Hello, I am working on it. First, I am trying to balance this faction step by step. Main ideas are to develop the concept you created first: MACHINE LEARNING
Thanks

[Mal_Colay]

Hello. This is my first post, but I have played Wesnoth for about a month. I recently got into survival challenges, and was looking at units when the bladewhirler caught my eye. I have used it ever since, but I am wondering why the excess attacks do not actually count in its berserk attacks?
Sorry if I necro'd.

[Siraander]

Hi
I wouldn't mind overviews of the unit instead of ''oddly not much is known about this unit'' for example For drones ''Is used by our enemies to scout'' or for Choriate description- i thought they were just better amonites (I should have read the entire profile)
Also the bladewhirler would suit another 2-6 limbs.
other than that, cool

[Celtic_Minstrel]

I was curious about this, so I downloaded it from the 1.8 server (at addons.wesnoth.org) and tried it on 1.10. I was surprised to find it actually works pretty well, though the electric weapon special may be broken. At first I thought lightshifter was broken too, but I was doing AI vs AI; I guess it's just something the AI doesn't know how to use. It worked for me as a player controller, except for a Lua error when trying to masquerade as a leader (but it seemed to work despite that).

I dunno if there are any changes anyone made that never made it onto the server.

I'll also note that savegames using the faction seem to be considered invalid. A possible culprit is the colons in the unit IDs; I had a similar problem with hyphens in unit IDs at one point.

I've fixed one thing already – the Fideliant did not become loyal as it was supposed to. The fix was quite easy and actually a lot shorter than the previous method. As a bonus, you can see in the level-up choice dialog that it'll become loyal, which the old method wouldn't've done if I'd merely fixed it.

[Celtic_Minstrel]

Alright, so I've been working on this era, and have made tons of changes:

• Wired in animations that were unused
• Made a few new animations (mostly using existing frames plus missiles/halos)
• Fixed several bugs
• Re-implemented the lightshifter's transformations in Lua
• Added an Age of Heroes era
• Tweaked stats
• Added fluff to unit descriptions
• Changed the electric status to display as a status icon instead of an overlay
• Added traits for Steelhive - each Steelhive other than the Sentient gets one random trait from autotarget, antigravity, reinforced, optimized
• Added a Steel Hivequeen leader-only line
• There are probably other little changes that I've forgotten.

It has been on the add-on server for a few days now; I'm just about to upload a new version with an actually working lightshifter. Regarding the lightshifter, the only thing I'd still like to do (unless I've forgotten something) is make the AI able to use its ability. Unfortunately, when trying to do so I got cryptic errors ("PANIC: unprotected error in call to Lua API (attempt to index a nil value)" even when I commented out my entire Lua file, but not when I commented out the [engine] tag that calls the file), so it's probably going to take awhile to figure this out.