Your view on an era about being balanced or not. Underground

[Bast]

Hello,

I'd like to design a new original new era which will be balanced with default era. It's my first one & complelty theorical so there will be certainly lot of dumb things :p
So here we go for the descriptions.. and sorry about my bad english.
don't hesitate to give any comment aswell on balance than on background.
Not that due to my bad english, the names aren't definitive at all & i'm more trying to give the spirit.
I'm also not entered in the details of level 2 to let the post readable & get the feedback firsts.
The era could be about 7 units but there is only 6 described here for now as i feel they are enough. Though i put an option there to add an unit.

Name of the Era: not defined yet.

Background: It's the underworld creatures. They were trapped but the dwarfs digged to far & opened a breach for creatures of the underwold to get out. Most of them lived for centuries under the ground where belongs amazing & terrible creatures. Having an hard time to survive, they became really strong & developped amazing abilities.
The underworld is mostly ruled by the drows. They are dark elves (yes nothing knew in there), Wesnoth is kinda based on fantasy so... It's a matriarchal society with poor fighters but powerful priestress. Their alignement is mostly neutral evil or chaotic evil. But there is also mythical & legendary creatures into the underworld that are even stronger than them.


Units

----------------------

The 3 Drows units

All Drows: Terrain predilection Villages/ caves (1move) / montains (2 moves): 60%
Hills (1 move)/Forest (2 moves): 50%
They developped a good cold resistance due to the hard conditions though the underworld & a weakness to arcane.
Alignement of the Drows: SunFear -> Means -20% at day but normal damages the rest of the time.


Drow Warrior. 13 gold - 39hp - 5 moves
Melee: 3-4 (Cimetars - Blade) - Ranged: 6-1 (Arbalet - Pierce)
resists: 20% impact / 10% cold / -10% arcane / 10% blade / 10% pierce
Special trait they can hit: Fearless.
Used to be tortured by priestress, Drow warriors developped a great constitution compared to their elves equivalent but they are poor fighters.


Dridder 19 gold - 36hp - 6 moves
Melee: 5-1 (Bite - Pierce) poison - counter (always 60% to hit when defending)
Ranged: 7-3 Pierce Bow.

resists: 20% impact / 10% cold / -10% arcane / -10% pierce

A drider is an aberration that was formerly a drow (dark elf). Driders are centaur-like creatures appearing as drow from the waist up, with their lower portions replaced by the abdomen and legs of immense spiders. They are most commonly found in the Underdark.


Drow Priestress - 21 gold - 26 hp - 5 moves
Melee: 6-2 (Whip - impact)
Ranged: 7-3 (Arcane Magic) - Curse
A cursed unit will loose it's zone of control until it is cured on a village.

resists: 10% cold / 0% arcane
It can get leadership on one of it's level 2.

The Drow Priestress are powerful magic users that are feared by most of the creatures of the underground. They can curse their ennemies & are grants by their gods the control of arcane magic.




---------------------

The Creatures


Bugbear - 15 gold - 33 hp - 6 moves
Melee:
-> 4-3 blade backstab
-> 5-3 pierce
No ranged attack.
Alignement : Chaotic

resists: 10% cold / -10 arcane / -20 blade / -10 impact / -10 pierce
Def: 70% on cavs & montains. 60% on hills & forests. 50% on flat & villages
Can evolve to rogue type or barbarian type. (Xp to level : 22)



Phoenix Baby 17 gold - 24hp - 8 moves
Flying unit (1 move everywhere, 2 on mushrooms)
Alignement: Loyal
Melee: 5-3 Claws - Fire damage
no traits.
Defense: 60% everywhere, 80% on lava.
Resists: 100% fire / 30% arcane / -50% cold / 20% blade / 20% impact / 20% Pierce
Abiliy: Revive: The phoenix will regenerate all his hp when the sun rise (at the begining of the morning turn). ( I hesitate with a reborn ability that allow to recall him with same xp after dead)

In the deepest lands of the Underground, near the heart of the planet exist a land where lives extraordinary creatures that are known to be immortals. These creatures unlike the rest of the underground are used to live on sunlight & feed from it as they live into magma.



Young Purple worm 16 gold - 32 hp - 4 moves
Alignement: neutral.
Melee:
20-1 (Swallow - Blade damage)
15-1 (Impact Tail)
Defenses: 20% water (2 moves) / 40% for the rest (1 move).
Resists: -20% fire / -10 % arcane / +30% cold / +30% impact / +10% blade / +30% pierce

[8680]

Lloth is the intellectual property of Wizards of the Coast, and thus may not be used in your add-on.

The descriptions and images you provide for the bugbear and purple worm are copied from the relevant Wikipedia articles.[1][2]

The descriptions are thus under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, which requires that you (a) cite Wikipedia as their source and (b) publish them under “the same or similar license”. You do not mention that the descriptions are from Wikipedia, and anything posted to these forums is automatically considered to be published under the GNU General Public License unless otherwise noted, so you have failed to comply with both these requirements. Moreover, published add-ons are required to be under the GNU GPL, so you may not use the descriptions in your add-on.

The images, according to Wikipedia,[3][4] are copyrighted, presumably by Wizards of the Coast, and thus may not be used in your add-on.

Please remove these elements or replace them with equivalents of your own invention.

[Bast]

Ok, thx doing it right now. Always thought wikipedia was somehow free to use as the users are the ones to add the informations to it. Thought thx for the informations.
Thought i use these cause it were easier than using my own english & do watch a spirit. The era isn't about copying anything.

Meanwhile, wesnoth factions are about races: elves, humans, ..
and origins: northeners

They're inspired by common fantasy background that everyone knows & which everyone uses freely by now.
That's i searched something similar, known, but free to use.
So Dark elves & an "underground" world looked adapted to that spirit.
Edited.

[8680]

Thanks. Your races themselves are fine; Lloth was the only setting element in need of replacement.

[Dixie]

From my experience, it is mostly impossible to balanc4e a faction from theory, unless it was mostly a copy of an existing faction, in which case it is not very interesting.

From my experience, it is more effective and flavorful to start a faction by thinking about its play style, how you want it to feel. What is it for yours? For exemple, drakes are expensive and mobile. Loyalists are balanced and versatile, Dwarves are slow and specialized, northies are cheap, etc. And not every faction needs to have a leader, a mage and a healer. Sometimes, it's not what the faction has that makes it feel unique, but what it lacks.

Also, factions are balanced against factions, not units vs units. Each faction have at least one very cost-effective unit, but that unit can be countered, so you also have to rely on much less cost-effective units. For loyalists, itwould be spearmen and cavalrymen. Undead would have skellies and adepts, Northies have grunts and trolls, etc. Taking the latter exemple, Grunts and trolls provide more HP and damage by the buck than the average unit, but they are slow and lack range, so you have to throw a couple of underwhelming wolf rider and orcish archers (or assassins). What unit will be overwhelming in your faction, and what will be its weakness - how can it be countered? You have to think about this kind of thing too.

One last thing I can comment on from your designs, though: your faction sorely lacks a scout and will most likely lose the economic war. Every faction has a 8 movement points unit and maps are built with that in mind. Some are expensive or rather weak, but at least it's there to grab villages and clear the fog: your faction needs one.

Also, I haven't read it in some time, but I remember this being an excellent read on designing factions and I strongly recommend it to you (it is a sticky in this forum).

[Bast]

I think you didn't tooked the time to watch closely at it. There is a glider (pheonix) which have 8 moves & fly, while being extremely weak to cold.

I've read the guide, ti's a great one but i already knew all these informations

The faction is meant to be hard to play but strategic for the reason that there is no strong melee unit which aply you won't give much retaliation.
Meanwhile they have a good defense with warriors being resistent & costly Dridders boring to kill.

Meanwhile the damage dealers are the bugbear when he can backstab & the priestress (less dangerous against humans). Th ebugbear his helped for his job to backstab by the priestress which can put off the zoc. But the bugbear is a bit weak & cost 15 gold.

So the faction is meant to play some positional gameplay. The units that are resilient do not inflict much damages & the units that inflict damages are weak. Thought it's fast & got the ability to put off the zoc & combine it with a backstab.

I guess it requires the opponent to not being able to hold a too strong interrupted line, using the fact that most units are fast to split the opponent army. Dridders & bugbear are both 6 moves &most units need only 2 moves on montains, 1 on hills & cavs.
So you will have to lure your opponent & the faction would take benefit from maps where you can attack from muliple spots like silverhead more than he maps like weldyn.

Thought the faction wouldn't be played the same way dependly of the faction they confront.

[IPS]

I'm not kinda sure at all, but I had read somewhere that the max defense that may be considered as balanced is 70% because if it's higher than that value it will be too luck dependant the ressult. Phoenix in that way is probably a not balanced unit (but lava is not a so common terrain). It is totally interesting that their fire atacker is a mele, movible and fragible unit like the phoenix, but it has to be tested for clearly define if it's ballanced or not.

The worm is a somehow interesting unit aswell. It is more likely a fragible version of the wose that doesn't regen, that has one single strike of impact or blade. Worms seems to be something boring to move but funny when fight time, similar to heavy infantry. It has probably some troubles when atacking units in too high defenses because of being a unit of all or nothing, remmembering that it's their main mele atacker, it's a way too risky.

Anything else likes me mostly ok.

[siddh]

You can't use Drow either, it's copyrighted. Dark Elf is fine though. EDIT: Or that's the impression I was under, had ran into the Drow thing in another circumstance. But I just now (much after writing this comment) ended up googling about this and it seems complicated, like basically some of the material is copyrighted, and I still don't know if the word drow is usable or not.. Well I didn't intend to do harm

[TheEmptyLord]

Looks like it could be very interesting!

I especially like the Phoenix's ability and I think the the reborn ability would be a lot of fun, and probably not too overpowered because spending 20 gold on a scouting unit mid-scenario is generally a tough decision anyhow. Perhaps though you could add an addendum to keep it from being used as a throw away. You could allow it to be reborn only if it was killed during the daytime, which wont happen too often since it heals at the beginning of the day making the player be much more careful with it during nighttime. This makes it a bit specialized and potentially fragile which I think fits the phoenix idea well.

Just a suggestion of course, cannibalize it as you wish.

I also love the Drow Priestess's curse attack. A small enough status effect that most of the time it's not worth pulling the unit out to cure, but when your army gradually all gets cursed... A great ability imo. Not over-powered for a lvl one, but very useful in the long run.

I also like the idea of the bugbear when it levels becoming either the bulky resistance tank or the scrawnier offensive attacker. Nice level of flexibility for a main unit.

Good start! Keep at it, I'd love to play around with this faction once it gets going.

[Bast]

Thanks for the feedbacks ! I'm looking forward trying to learn how to build eras & scenarios, so any tips would be appreciated, or even much better, a clear help on the dev part.

After all these years playing wesnoth, i finally decided to try to add stuff of my own, or help the developpement of new possibilities (looking forward to design maps on the map contest too).
I think i could bring up ideas that wouldn't be too unbalanced & also originals.
I'm also interested to work on a on-going project if there is one, i have a lot of ideas on scenarios & balanced factions. So let me know if anyone is interested.

Have a nice day.

[Velensk]

Just a quick comment.

What you have here is a faction and not an era. I think in general single faction + default eras tend to be a bit harder to get momentum for than an independant era because there's less reason to play it (just like any other era people need to get an add-on and learn new things but in this way they only get one new faction to play with to make up for the inconvienience and this faction frquently has no connection to mainline lore or theme). That said, it's several magnitudes easier to balance and get art for to do it this way. There used to be an era dedicated to these 'one off' factions called the Grafted Era which had some of my favorite UM factions (even to this day the Nightmares and the Halflings stand out to me) but I don't know if anyone is maintaining it. If you're interested in developing this it might be a good idea to see what's going on with that era.

As for the faction itself, it looks about right in terms of raw power (though I'd dial the priestess melee back a little and a couple things about the young purple worm bother me). You are right though in that this would not be an easy faction to play. For the purple worm, I think you'll find that a unit that slow and frail (trust me, in play it'd demonstrate itself to be relatively frail against any of the mainline factions except knalgans and even then) would have a hard time justifying that cost. Also, I think it might be a good idea thematically to make it so that swallow isn't it's main attack but a powerful alternative (and the main attack having a higher strike to damage ratio). In this fashion, a person is only likely to use the swallow attack if it'll kill of the enemy in one blow which is fitting considering the name as opposed to units being swallowed and still standing there.

[Bast]

Thanks for your feedback Velensk,

My original plan was to make several factions to create an "extended default". But i wanted each of them to have an unique gameplay & aswell unique abilities that wouldn't be overpowered, like the curse on this faction or the "reborn" ability, while being in the same "spirit" as default era.

The true goal is to get 2 or 4 new factions balanced with default for better experience in 1v1 & 2v2 games (including some new fun) where each factions would shine even more. I know it may be more like a dream than something easyly achievable but i'd like to give it a try.
I wanted to imagine them one by one, to make it easier & to see if it's achievable.
So i guess i must take a look on the Grafted era you mentionned & see if there is something to do with it ! So another thx for the information.

I agree with your tips about this faction. The whip may be too powerful as it is. The idea here was that overally the undergrounds are ruled by those scary priestess where they are the most fearsome character.
About the gameplay, those dark elves have a bad alignement (-20 at day / normal rest of time), so i thought it would be ok to give this priestess some boost on being killed. Do you think 5-2 would be good enough ?

At start, i thought the worm would be used because it's some nice "flat" tank for 16 gold, with great damages against low def units. His 4 moves being not as disturbing as on wose on HI because he have almost 1 move needed everywhere, just as the dwarfs. But i agree that it need more thought. Maybe better to make it some water unit..