The Official Neorice topic.

[Vyncyn]

I was personally thinking the toys are posessed by the souls of children who died horrific deaths in the midst of wars raging in wesnoth.
Years and years of constant slaughter and fighting over villages has resulted in the rise of the army of lost children.

Thats dark. I love it.
I hope at least some of them are fire resistant, cause high evaision isn't gonna help against loyalist mages.

[Neoriceisgood]

I was personally thinking the toys are posessed by the souls of children who died horrific deaths in the midst of wars raging in wesnoth.
Years and years of constant slaughter and fighting over villages has resulted in the rise of the army of lost children.

Thats dark. I love it.
I hope at least some of them are fire resistant, cause high evaision isn't gonna help against loyalist mages.

I imagine that the wood horses + puppets go up in flames as badly as woses.

The other characters are generally made of material that's not significantly more flammable than human skin. (even the metal ones are actually made of metal rather than humans wearing metal, so may suffer from fire less than a human would.) But Loyalist mages would be a fairly good counter against a lot of the evasion-based units. (which is iirc a usual trait for l.mages)


That being said, here's some new additions:

level 2 giant teddy keeps the teddy's drain hug, but also adds a very tough blunt attack that hits about as hard as an adult wose.

level 2 kite marionette turns into a sandman, fairly similar unit that can easily move around with skirmish, but can now cause slow with its dinky ranged attack. (there's no sleep status effect right?)

[The_Gnat]

Great it sounds as if you'v worked ouf most of the details already! The bear line should definitely go to at least lvl 2 though maybe even a huge teddy as lvl 3 because it seems like the default melee unit for these guys. Also it would be good to get the kite up a few more lvls as well its a perfect scout for this otherwise slow moving team.

Also for the puppets awful blade and fire and impact resistance but great pierce (so hard to pierce them) arcane (they love magic) and cold (probably not as good against cold but since their not human thet dont care if thy get cold). Also it seems like they would have good defense like other fly units and though their melee attack is weak maybe they can enchant enemy units to be slowed, ensnared, trapped, or poisoned.

Overall looks real good! I look forward to it being finished!

[Neoriceisgood]

@gnat

Yeah I think most of the toy faction's units have a fairly sharp divide between weaknesses/strengths. (similar to undead in that)


The faction currently has 7 unit lines as seen here:

(new units: level 3 version of bear, marionette & horse rider toy)


There's a few units I still want to add here:
1. a possible level 3 evo for the miniature knights.
2. more branching paths and final evos for the puppet line.

I might wanna add 3rd evos to a few more evolutions, e.g. the squad of toy soldiers as an alternative to the nutcracker. But I'll probably focus on finishing up the puppet's evos first.


Current roles are:

- horse and kite marionette scouts with different perks. (horse is slightly stronger and sturdier, marionette can fly)

- toy soldier & bear make up the bulk of the toy army as relatively cheap but hard hitting ground troops.

- the girl doll is kinda pricey and basically a fairly meh magic unit at low levels, but will provide a great boost to all the fodder bears

/

- the miniature soldiers are specialized units kinda like the goblin assassin/wose/thief etc. I think a combination of skirmish/ambush/etc + ridiculous evasion makes
them extremely obnoxious ways to screw with enemy plans.

- the puppet is a fairly expensive but all around solid fighter. I think against any enemy that can't exploit the weaknesses it has it may be a ridiculously tricky unit to fight,
but it'll go down fast quickly to fire and slashing. Probably the one unit that's got the most of a "pick your battles wisely"-set up.

[The_Gnat]

Cool! The new 3rd level advancements are great and it would be good to get some more puppet options (you could even do it like the loyalist spearman and have 3 options to advance to) have you started animating or coding any of these units yet or is it still i design phase? Are you going to make a new addon Default + possessed toys to release this in?

EDIT: I like the new ideas for the units it seems to not have as many units as other default factions though, maybe you could add one more unit line that is a healer (that can be very critical in wining or losing battles) or you could have the healer as an alternative advance of the doll?

EDIT 2: looking back at the thread you said you dont enjoy animating so the answer to that question is probably no but I was thinking a standing anim for the kites and puppets, of swinging back and forth, would be good since flying units would never be totally still. If you dont want to do that no problem though I dont think many of these units need animating to make them look good (it would be fine if you just make them move into enemies as their attack like the cavalier, grand knight, etc)

[Vyncyn]

How many ranged attacks do they have? Currently I can see toy soldiers gun and doll magic and maybe another one for the kite marionette. The rest seem all like pure melee (at least on lvl1).
Mainline standart seems to be 2 ranged focused and 1 with a weaker ranged attack.

[Neoriceisgood]

-> toy soldier decent melee/slightly stronger ranged
-> doll is basically this faction's "mage", magical ranged attack.
-> kite marionette has no melee, weak ranged attack. (probably has some advantage to it like sharpshooter)

The miniature soldiers get a ranged attack at level 1 (as you can see it's a group of swordfighter, spearman, bowman)
(I'm not 100% sure if I want the miniature soldiers to start at a single guy for level 0 though; that line I'm still thinking on)

bear/horse are basically entirely melee lines, puppet starts out melee but will get some ranged alt evos.

There's definitely room for a more dedicated ranged fighter if I decide to add an 8th unit line to the faction.

/edit

Raptor btw. for who wants to use it:

wes-dino.png (1.84 KiB) Viewed 7452 times

[The_Gnat]

Sounds good. And if you add an eighth unit line it should definitely be a healer

Also as I mentioned in my last post the kites and puppets should have standing anims!
Also if you want any help in making cfg's for these guys id be happy to (but its so easy you probably dont need any help )

[Neoriceisgood]

Yeah anims and stuff for flying units I'll do when I have all the base designs finished.


Final line added btw, ranged hand puppet juggler.

[Samonella]

Maybe you already thought about this and just made a stylistic choice, but... watch some videos of actual jugglers if you haven't. We have our fair share of pet-peeves, and one of them is cartoons/animations where the juggled objects just fly in a nice circle. It's possible to juggle that way (sort of) but that's rarely how it's actually done. And one of yours makes no sense at all; a puppet seems to be throwing downward, and the balls magically curve back up:

toys-wip-what.png (3.96 KiB) Viewed 7320 times

Besides that, it is quite rare for both hands to be empty when juggling; in the majority of patterns/tricks, one is always occupied. And it would make sense if they started juggling clubs instead of balls on lvl 2 or 3.

All the other units look good btw. I especially like how the kite flyer ends up on the moon. Just a wild idea for you: what if on higher levels he had an ability that prevented enemies from attacking him with melee, since he's so high in the sky?

[Vyncyn]

The Sandman (lvl2 kite marionette) seems a bit weird in closeup. What is the brown thing in his hand?

All the other units look good btw. I especially like how the kite flyer ends up on the moon. Just a wild idea for you: what if on higher levels he had an ability that prevented enemies from attacking him with melee, since he's so high in the sky?

That's no moon... at least no real moon. It looks more like a cheese-moon toy, so it doesn't have to be out of melee range.

[Neoriceisgood]

@Samonella: Yeah I know juggling looks different from that, I just simplified that into a circle as I figured it wouldn't bother anyone. Guess I was wrong!


@Vyncyn: It's a bag of sand.

[Vyncyn]

@Vyncyn: It's a bag of sand.

But isn't there already a bag hanging from his waist? I don't think he would need two bags

[Addan-Shem]

I think it's the same bag, the front piece (relative to the unit) is its opening end and the back one is the bag itself. At least that's how I see it now, had some trouble reading this sprite as well. Initially I thought that the two bag parts are shoes, but that totally confused me. The issue might be based on a lack of a more distinct face, like on L3, and also his rather monotonous one-piece pajamas that make his hat and extremities all too similar. And, in my case, total lack of knowledge about this kind of toy.

Otherwise, I must say I love both the idea and execution of this faction! Had an idea to offer: this toy, a unit, starting from L1, that leaves a smaller, one level lower one after death. So a L3 one would turn into L2, then that one into L1 and, finally, that one - into L0. But, on second thought, it doesn't really fit the faction theme. You decide.

[Neoriceisgood]

Yeah I've considered one of those russian nesting dolls, but didn't think it fit the faction thematically.

As the faction already has 8 different lines the base characters are pretty much done conceptually though, as most mainline Wesnoth factions only have 6-8 unit lines.

So evolutions + evolution ideas is where the focus is right now. (I was thinking of a jack-in-the-box alternative evo for the juggler line for example.)