Era of Ilthan

[Turuk]

I'm trying to create some kind of desert undead. They have rather strong elite units than many weak units. They are a little Egypt-style, however, there are also some other things wich are not at all Egypt-like. I'm half finished with doing the art and creating the units. However, I think you can't do this without a mummy-like unit, so I want to create one of those. But I have no idea yet for this unit. Because many people have more ideas than they can do themselfes, I wanted to ask, if anyone here has good ideas for the mummy? Of course, bad resistance against fire as in all games. Maybe a small ability to make this unit a little different from the normal units or something like that. Furthermore, I have no idea, how I could call the lvl 2/3 mummys and it would be boring to call them elite mummy or something like that. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Corspe --> Mummy --> Ancient Mummy

Give the corpse some minor rags (as if it has not been fully mummified yet), and then make the fully wrapped Mummy, and then an older, dirtier, dustier looking Ancient Mummy.

Resistances could be weak against fire, but something that has no organs or the like would be strong versus pierce and blade.

Still lacking of ideas for the earthman, although I gave them a slinger and a normal fighter. We decided, that they'll get a unit with the ability of the Ulfserkers. (Forgot the english name)

It is the ability called Berserk.

ninja student ------ ninja --------- master ninja

Try something other than Ninja Student, it sounds a bit... unimaginative.

doggy -- dog -- hound

See above comment. Repeat.

However, this faction does not only consist of lizards but also of dragons. These two races have an alliance and help each other. (Although until now, the dragons where never those who needed help.)

Hmm, so this is the drakes then pretty much? Not a bad unit tree (different than drakes I know), but you might want to try to vary your description at least a little bit.



Sounds interesting though, I would like to see the artwork and stats for these units when they are ready.

[Skizzaltix]

"Pharaoh" for the level three mummy, maybe?
For the ninja... Level one could be something like... Maybe "Shugyousha"? It's not really right (It literally means, "One who learns", but it refers to a samurai who does not yet consider himself worthy to join the service of a lord yet), though... This is getting a little silly, but you could call it a "Mijukuninja"--"Whippersnapper-Ninja"

[Civhai]

Thanks a lot I renamed the ninja student to Shugyousha and the dog has now the following names:
terrier -- torturing dog -- giant dog

I hope I understood it correctly that terriers are those small dogs who bite people in their legs. (Of cours not all of them, but just the cliche of the small agressive dog)

Then I noticed, that I forgot a unit of the black army:
light infanteryman -- two swords fighter -- elite swordsman
----------------------------- incendiarist ------------ pillager
Weak melee unit with many attacks, smallfoot movetype. Gets fire or a fifth attack in lvl 2. I made him rather a little too expensive, so you'll rather prefer the black infanterist, but you just have to build some of these to occupy good terrain and they are useful to finish off wounded units with their 4 attacks, too.


Before I do anything else, lets first finish what I began.

wood pirates
------------------
They live in the forest in the northwest of our island. They are very useful for campaigns, because they always have a reason to attack, if you want to fill in a simple battle and have no idea for the historical background, just let them make a small raid. Their role is somewhat similar to orks in the mainline or even more like the marauders in the IE. They live in the forest and it is really not nice to go into that forest, because there, they are extremely strong and half the army has the ability ambush. However, the mountain mages and the main human faction have to do that sometimes, because they like to trade a lot. Except the pirates, they are rather not as good as the other factions in direct combat, but faster and they have all these dirty abilities.

pirate -- corsair -- capitain
axeman -- warrior of the forests -- master of the forests
--------------- axe thrower
standart melee fighting units, the axeman line is better in forests, the pirate line is not that bad in water, although it is not really an amphibic unit. Axeman has ambush and we're still thinking about something to make the difference a bit bigger.

blowgunner -- wood bowman -- wood longbowman
standart ranged unit, ambush

slave catcher -- slave trader -- men hunter
ranged slow attack, gets money for killing units, but it is not yet decided how much.

wood thief -- wood assassin -- wood killer
ambush and ranged poison -- +backstab -- +melee poison and an extremely powerful poison in ranged, wich both kills the opponent and makes him unable to continue fighting. (poison and slow in one attack)

forest rider -- forest knight
scout with decent ranged attack.

mountain mages
------------------------
They are the best friends of the main human faction. They live in the mountains and almost everyone is a mages. From childhood on, they have magical abilities and they learn how to use them for war later. There are also some people, who just don't have any magical abilities. They are only few and so their live is hard. The others regard them as inferior and stupid. They think that this is a sign of weakness and don't treat them very well at all. They are treated like slaves and have nothing to say. Because they learned this from childhood on, most of them even accept this and think that it is true that their destiny is to do what the others tell them to. Because they often have to get herbs for magical experiments of the others, and they are hardly ever given any other weapon, some of them tried to fight with their sickle. Some of them join the army with their sickles and always go to the foremost front so that only their lives get lost and not those of the mages.
However, the strange thing is that this prejudices only counts for members of their own people and not for other factions. They even tried to teach some other peoples a little bit of magic. They aren't good at things wich are much easier done without magic, so they like to trade a lot with the main human faction. Because they have to get across the sea or through the forest to do this (ok, there is also a way through the mountains, but this is not what you want to do with a lot of luggage...), their most hated enemies are the wood pirates. In a war, these people are most likely to help the main human faction. In their home, the mountains, there are many caves. Many mages like to go into them to kill monsters as an exercise. At least this is what they say. But probably they are searching for something. They make a lot of expeditions through the mountains and become greedier and greedier and go deeper and deeper. Nobody knows why, because they don't even tell this their best friends, the main human faction. They tell, that this is just for exercising, but who believes that? However, this causes them to be in a war with the earthmen. The beginning of this war is not clear, but it seems rather clear that the mountain mages are the "bad guys" in this war. They just slaughter earthmen where they can, while the earthman try to give their best to defend their homes. But mostly, hundreds of earthmen have to give their live to kill one mage.

light sickle fighter -- sickle fighter -- scythe warrior
melee fighter, rather weak

mage -- yellow mage -- red mage -- great mage
----------- flying mage --- flying master
similar to mainline mage, flying mages are the most couragous experimentists, and they found out that they can fly using their magic. However, they have to concentrate on this during the whole battle, so they are slightly weaker.

fighting mage -- yellow fighting mage -- red fighting mage
----------------------- tank mage
melee unit, better in melee than sickle fighters, but slightly below average, therefore, they get decent magic ranged, too. Tank mage gets more hp than yellow fighting mage and some resistances, too.

fire spark (lvl 0) -- fire storm (lvl 1)
Are created by magic. But not even the mountain mages are powerful enough to make such a magic fire live for a long time. They are cheap and extremely offensive. Easy to kill, but can do some damage, although not much. Lose two hp per turn and can also die due to this hp loss. (Funny: Right now, they are rather too weak, but when we created them, they where much too good and I hadn't codet this ability yet, so nobody could win agains mountain mages and no mountain mages recruited anything else than fire sparks. You just saw an army of fire heading towards you and couldn't stop them...)

magic rider -- magic knight -- magic fighter
Scout with decent ranged cold magic. gets arcane in lvl 2

earlier, they had also bowmen and swordsmen, but we took those out.

earthmen
-------------
description already posted

earthman worker (lvl0) -- earthman fighter -- earthman warrior -- earthman king
standart melee unit, extremely weak, gets leadership in lvl 3.

stone thrower (lvl 0) -- slinger -- master builder
standart ranged unit, extremely weak

cord binder (lvl 0) -- net thrower -- monster hunter
extremely weak, ranged slow

All the other units I mentioned are already created, for these three, we have nothing but the unit tree.

They are supported by a lot of cave monsters. We didn't invent them yet, but we decided that one of them gets beserk and at least one not-mainline ability should be included as well. Maybe bloodthirst. (found that somewhere in the wiki)

undead
----------
They were originally two factions, but we decided to merge them together because none of them is really playable alone in multiplayer. But in campaigns or storys, they'll be different peoples. One of them are the swamp undead, wich are invoked by dark adepts. There is a big swamp in the eastern part of our island and here, many battles have been fought and especially a legendary knight army disappeared here hundreds of years ago and these dead bodies are reanimated by those dark adebts. They are a mass of weak units.
There was once a great ancient people in the desert. They are a bit in Egypt-style and have extremely strong elite units.

dark adept -- swamp sorcerer -- swamp necromancer
like mainline, but slightly better in swamps.

ghoul -- necrophage
like mainline ghouls, but are unvisible in swamps.

walking corpse (lvl 0) -- soulless -- giant zombie
like mainline, but with lvl 2 extension

walking corpse slinger (lvl 0) -- soulless slinger -- giant zombie slinger
you can imagine

walking corpse rider (lvl 0) -- soulless rider
you can imagine

desert skeleton -- desert guard -- grave guard
------------------------- desert halberdier -- desert slayer
strong melee fighter, guard and grave guard have extremely good resistances and steadfast, halberdier and desert slayer are extremely offensive, the halberd is not like a normal halberd, it is only a long staff with a blade on top and has no pierce damage.

sand archer -- desert bowman -- desert longbowman
standart ranged unit

desert rider -- chariot -- elite chariot
chariots have 7 MP, but an extremely bad movetype, decent hp, good resistances, bad defence, bad damage, but get triple damage while attacking (and the opponents damage doesn't get tripled). Will probably be hard to balance. lvl 1 is extremely weak and stupid, only purpose is to level them. They are not even useful as scouts, because once they level, they have a too bad movetype to scout.

I'll add a flying scout for the desert undead, too.

Corspe -- Mummy -- Ancient Mummy
didn't create this unit yet

prince (lvl 2) -- pharao
similar to halberdier, but even stronger, no leadership, as one might think. Can only be chosen as leader

prince on chariot (lvl 2) -- pharao on chariot
similar to chariot, but even stronger, no leadership, as one might think. Can only be chosen as leader

main human faction
-----------------------------
Extremely similar to loyalists, but an era almost needs one of those. (Yes I know, there are lots of eras without one) They get decent cavalery, mediocre mages and melee fighters and good ranged units. Of course, there will also be a leadership unit. Maybe we'll just copy the loyalists and change some minor things

bowman -- longbowman -- master bowman
best nonmagical ranged fighter in this era, gets marksman in lvl 2

horseman -- knight -- ??
decent cavalery

..not invented yet..


---------------------------------
You want me to show some art. Now, don't expect too much, as always, the ideas for the people are better then the skills of the creators. The art is either just frankensteined, although most of the frankensteined units have at least two extra details, or they are extremely terrible. However, here is the art of the black army, which is at least much better than the other factions. Some of them are even anmated.

should be clear wich unit is wich, right are higher levels.

The team colors don't work properly yet and the other factions are extremely terrible, but we decided, that we only begin to improve finished art after having completed every faction. I think else, we would never finish this. You can really see, that the people who made the art didn't do anything like that before and the most stupid thing is that you can really see, that they have been made by two different people.

@turuk, yes, sounds a bit like drakes, but funnily, they weren't inspired by drakes at all. The lizards were inspired by another game we made a long time ago. The dragons were added later. Also, the lizards don't remind you much of saurians. They walk on four legs and have no armor or anything like that, they look extremely differently, more like the lizards in our world. The dragons are maybe a little bit more similar to the drakes, but still they aren't directly comparable.

[Turuk]

I was going to go through and quote a few points, but that would make quite a long post. My suggestion for you is for unit lines like the following:

light infanteryman -- two swords fighter -- elite swordsman

I would look around to try and come up with names that are possibly a bit more creative. I know you are busy enough working on your era as it is and often times the simplest terms work the best, but two swords fighter is a bit too simple. Even if you make up your own names, it will sound a bit better than just simply describing the unit by the function is has within the faction.

This can go for a few of the other unit lines as well. Just a thought to help make you era a bit more unique.

[Civhai]

Artons is now the name of the "main human faction". They're not playable yet, because they only have bowmen and mages, but funnily, the computer already wins against himself with this faction sometimes. He always makes me laugh if I let him play against himself. Once he fought with undead against Artons and had almost won, only the leader remained, but then, he decided to go into the water with all his units who easily could have surrounded the Artons leader. And then the Artons won...

I changed some of the desert undead. Now it is:
mummy -- ancient mummy -- prince -- pharao
------------- priest ----------------- high priest

mummy and ancient mummy are mixed fighter with mediocre arcane melee and mediocre magic arcane ranged, they become extremely powerful at lvl 3. Prince is one of the strongest lvl 3 units and also has decent magic ranged, maybe a bit too good, I'll look how inbalanced this will be, but it is hard to get him, so that's maybe still ok. Pharao is even more powerful, but needs a lot of XP, though. priest -- high priest is a mage with "burning sun" fire attacks additional to the arcane ones. He also has a snake, wich gives him weak poison attacks in melee, or he can fight with his staff, wich is rather weak, but stronger than most mages melee, the staff gets magic in lvl 3.

lvl is leftmost

mummies.png (200.7 KiB) Viewed 3493 times

I also made a map, I'll have to do a definite map the next days, but just that you know about the geographic of our era.

sketched map

I also made a lot of name changes, especially I avoided those color names (black dragon, white dragon, red mage, yellow mage lizard etc).
Still names are thebiggest weakness of our era. We'll have to find names for the geographic, too and even the era has no definite name. Because we had to give the directory a name, we thought about something and then I saw CHANGELOG in my last "ls", so we called it era of change, but that doesn't really fit and I hate this name, so we'll have to change that, too.

[JW]

I must say that the thought of mummys in Wesnoth makes me smile.

[Civhai]

We now called the island you see on the map Ilthan island and named the era after this island.

First, I didn't want to make the era downloadable without having finished all the art and all the animations and so one and I was too shy to show my terrible art and unbalanced factions, but now, I saw somewhere in the wiki, that it was recommended to "Share Early". I would be very grateful if anyone wants to playtest our era and give me some feedback about the balance. It is very difficult to test balancing stuff with battles against the computer, because I'll also win with inferior factions and matches between computers are even more ridiculous.

Stupid thing is, that one of the reasons why I didn't want to show it yet is that we began to create this era in german and only half of it is translated, but I hope that will not cause any serious problems because things like unit names are not that important for playtesting. I think all the important stuff like ability descriptions are written in English. Another thing is that in the beginning, we didn't know anything of WML and so we just copied existing things and changed a few things. The result is, that there are a few fragments of the copied units or factions left and we didn't delete all of them yet, because the first goal was to make it playable first and then begin to improve existing things. So there are a few units with completely wrong attack names or wrong attack pictures, but that are rather minor things wich don't affect gameplay directly, I hope. However, now we are almost finished and we are working on those things.

And you should also know that most art is more a placeholder and only the black army and some of the desert undead are pretty finished, except some team color stuff and of course the animations.

edit: Download removed to save space.

[Civhai]

I began to make a small campaign for my era. Nothing big, just to get a feeling for the era. Normally, I have already enough to do with the era itself, but one can't just do the same thing for a whole month, it gets boring if you don't make a brake, so I decided to do something different and what came out was this campaign. Only 4 of 7 planned scenarios are playable right now, but the others will be finished in the next few days. You can try it if you want, here is it. Feedback is welcome, although I would be even more happy if I could get some opinions about the era itself. (not the art, as I said...^^)

edit: Removed the downloads to save space.

[Civhai]

Ok, now I think I'm able to call it an alpha version. The earthman have been added, although the Artons and the earthmen still need some more units. We didn't make any major changes with the rest, but a LOT of small changes, such as translation. Everything is in English now and almost everything has correct attack pictures and also most sounds are correct. Only small things you don't really see on the first sight, but we didn't do much else in the last few weeks. We began to improve the art, but only two pictures or so are already finished. The campaign is also finished, although I have to admit, that I didn't really playtest the last two scenarios yet. I tested if everything worked and played a few turns, but I didn't really test things like balance and difficulty. I hope to see some comments, soon.

edit: Fixed two things that were really strange with the earthmen.

edit: Downloads removed to save space

[Turuk]

I gave your campaign/era a try, and I have to say that I did not play beyond 7-8 turns into the first scenario. The artwork makes the units seem flat and at times I cannot even tell what the units are supposed to be. This is expounded by the fact that you drew your own units but then took armor/weapons from existing mainline units to put over top of them. The corsairs paired with the slave traders just look.... odd. The corsairs are flat, red and hard to make out with armor that is too small placed over their chests and the stolen hat from the fencer on top. I am not trying to be overly critical, but you are using Wesnoth sprites (slave trader) and parts that are shaded and positioned facing southwest to give them a sense of depth and substance while your own units look directly out of the screen.

As to your story/dialogue, watch out for using the same words repeatedly. You use again quite a bit, and you often use the wrong tense for your verbs. Be careful of your possessives as well. This goes for your unit descriptions, they tended to be very simple.

Currently reads:
"The wood pirates use to sail to coast cities and to pillage those cities."

Could be:
"The wood pirates were hardened veterans, feared up and down the coast. The sight of their flag entering the harbor could put an entire city to flight, as the people knew that a night of razing, pillaging and death was upon them."

Currently reads:
"The lizards found out very fast, that fire was very effective against the undead, so they tried to find an effective way to use fire, because just walking around with a torch is not practical for people with four legs. Getting a torch at the right moment and making it burn was another difficult thing. Soon, they found out, that the priests of the undead used it in combat, too. They used magic to get fire out of nothing, just what the lizards wanted. It took a long time to learn how to use magic, but the lizards spend a lot of time in trying this and the result is about one third of the lizards is able to use magic now."

Could be:
"The lizards noted very quickly that the undead had a healthy fear of fire, yet they were unsure how to make the most of this. Limited by their lack of hands, the lizards nonetheless persisted in studying any means that would let them use fire in combat. After observing the actions of undead spellcasters, the lizards realized the key to solving their problem lay with the enemy. They captured an enemy spellcaster, and spent years studying his secrets. Their efforts were not without fruit, and now a small part of the lizard population can use this magic against the undead."

Also, instead of Wizard Lizard you could probably call them something a bit more fitting for their fire nature. Though you did not use fireball attacks but lightning... so maybe something with that.

[Civhai]

Bad art: Yes, I know, but I warned of this problem and mentioned before, that I didn't want to upload our work that early, but because I read some kind of tip in the wiki, that you should ask for their opinion as early as possible, I uploaded it before it was really completed.
However, the wood pirates are by far the worst example, we haven't worked on their art for a long time, but we'll improve them now. We'll never get as good art as the mainline or any of the well-known UMCs, but you can look at desert undead (ok, they are mostly frankensteined, but the mummies are a good example), the earthmen, the black army and a few examples of the lizard alliance and you'll see, that the wood pirates aren't our standart either. The mountain mages are our current project, although only the mage is completed, but I think he's much better than the wood pirates, too.
One problem is, that we divided the factions among us, my brother does the wood pirates, the swamp undead, the mountain mages, the artons and the lizards while I do the desert undead, the earthmen and the black army and our art looks completely different, but it's hard to find any solution here.

Thanks for the language corrections, I already updated the descriptions.

Improving the dialogs will be difficult for us since none of us was really good in English and I think the art is more important, so we'll do that, but it doesn't have high priority yet, since the era is our main project and the campaign is only a side project.

But thanks a lot for your comment! Thought nobody would say anything any more.

I'll try to think of a better name than wizard lizard, but we liked it on the first sight, because it sounds so funny.

[Turuk]

I'll try to think of a better name than wizard lizard, but we liked it on the first sight, because it sounds so funny.

I thought it might be a reason like that, I found it hilarious as well.

Thanks for the language corrections, I already updated the descriptions.

Not a problem, I make no promises but if I can find some free time I might do some work like that on all of the descriptions that need it.

Improving the dialogs will be difficult for us since none of us was really good in English and I think the art is more important, so we'll do that, but it doesn't have high priority yet, since the era is our main project and the campaign is only a side project.

Understandable, and you can always try to recruit a native speaker in order to help you correct it/flesh it out a bit.


As for the art, I will take a look at the rest of the units (I did glance through), but I thought I would bring it up because even the lizards seem a bit flat, and so it kind of dissuaded me from wanting to play through the rest of the scenario and campaign. I know this is a WIP though, so hopefully when you finish it all everything will flow much easier.

[Civhai]

Help with the descriptions is very welcome, I think almost every descriptions have to be improved, so you could pick a few examples which really sound as if they need a good descriptions, for example the dragon sword warrior.
I think most of the content should be clear enough with the things I have posted before and the existing descriptions, but if you need some more informations, you can of course ask us. The worst thing that can happen is that we have to change a phrase or something like that.

Recruiting native speakers for the dialogs and the descriptions was something we intended to do at a later stage, because as I learned in this forum, you mostly have to show major efforts yourself before you can get help, but of course, we'd accept any help with the descriptions or the dialogs of the campaign, but the latter is less important.

Help with sprites would of course also be welcome, but it's understandable that we're not yet at a stage, where people would start to do that, because this needs really a lot of time. But if someone still wants to help us with the sprites, I beg you to tell us so, because we want to avoid that you do the same sprite as we do at that very moment. Furthermore, while a description that doesn't really fit exactly into our era can be changed easily in one minute and nothing is lost, a sprite that doesn't fit into our era would be a really sad loss of time. But of course, help would be welcome. One good example would be the black army ninja, which has to be redrawn.

About the lizards: Yes, they seem a bit flat, I only meant, that there are a few good examples, for example, I like the fire lizard. But something that is really good about them is, that they are nearly completely animated, which is not often seen in UMCs. But this has of course its bad side, too: Now that I told my brother to make them look less flat and to add a border and a team-colored ridge to them, he has to update more than 100 sprites and some of them, for example the dragons have to be completely redrawn.

I tried to make a new pirate, but I don't know how others do that, but I always need a whole evening for one single sprite. This is how it looks right now, I think I'll have to darken the skin and maybe he's a bit tall, too. But the reason I showed him is the following: I wanted his right arm to point half to southwest, half out of the picture, but somehow, it just looks, if his arm is strangely twisted somehow. Does anyone know what I have to do to improve that?

beta version of the new pirate

pirate.png (1.46 KiB) Viewed 3112 times

edit: I don't know what happened, but the uploaded pirate now looks completely blurred, normally he doesn't look like that.

[Turuk]

As to your pirate, I think he is a bit tall and skinny compared to a normal sprite, maybe you should use another mainline sprite as size and proportion reference? I think his body looks twisted because the arm and leg on our left seem bent, and it is not clear if the sprite is facing straight out at the viewer or to the southeast.

[Skizzaltix]

The forum does weird stuff to color data--Don't worry about the blurriness. If you click on the image ("View image") you can see the original.