Antimagic ability

autolycus · Post by **autolycus** » July 6th, 2004, 9:31 pm

I've been a fan of Wesnoth since I first found it.

What bugged me was that you had little defence against magic, and typical magic attacks are huge.

Here's a little ability that might be useful:

Antimagic - unit with this has an aura like the white mage. But in it, all defenders have 10% higher resistance to magic types of attack.

Invisible Philosopher · July 6th, 2004, 9:42 pm

That's the point of magic. Hard to resist. If you can recruit units that resist magic attacks, use them. Otherwise, get fast melee units that get the first attack on the mages. Anyway, your antimagic is really weak.

autolycus · Post by **autolycus** » July 7th, 2004, 1:36 am

If it were stronger, it would perturb the game too much, I'd say. Having an antimagic unit allows you to shield a melee-only unit so that it has a higher chance of surviving a longer period in contact with a mage, and hence offer it a second chance to kill that mage if it fails first time.

Imagine a paladin charging a red mage. A miss the first time could mean death - since not only does the mage have a melee reply on contact, but a magic reply the next round to which there is no response. The presence of an otherwise weak unit (say, a grey antimage with lousy melee and range attacks) in contact with that paladin gives a higher chance of survival but not one which would make us have to rewrite all existing scenarios that drastically.

What would be stronger is an individual trait of magic resistance which reduces damage taken as well as chance to be hit by magic, and it comes up randomly and your paladin has it... then you have a fearsome charging healing (recharging?) damage-dealing maniac who can't easily be killed by magic. That would probably unbalance things as they are.

Elvish_Pillager · Post by **Elvish_Pillager** » July 7th, 2004, 10:00 am

autolycus wrote: then you have a fearsome charging healing (recharging?) damage-dealing maniac who can't easily be killed by magic. That would probably unbalance things as they are.

Then you

A) kill the Anti-Mage, who was impeding the paladin's movements anyway or
B) kill the paladin with arrows. Magic is only marginally better at hitting a Paladin than arrows, and paladins are vulnerable to pierce damage.

autolycus · Post by **autolycus** » July 7th, 2004, 11:19 am

Well, if the antimagic ability were as weak as you said it was, you wouldn't have to bother with either of these things.

If it were a trait, like leadership, conferring a defensive bonus against magic attacks to neighbouring units, then the antimagic unit would probably be surrounded by the units it's shielding. You'd have to kill the paladin if you wanted the antimagic unit behind him, or at least outflank the paladin. The paladin would of course be slowed down by his antimagic protector, which balances things a bit.

If it were a special ability, like dwarvishness, which just makes you harder to hit by certain things, you wouldn't have to make it explicit. Units would just be given better defense% against magic. And you would indeed shoot them with arrows instead.

It's the first option I'm talking about, and it excels in defensive situations.

Post by **turin** » July 7th, 2004, 2:39 pm

leadership is not a trait, it is an ability.

and, just wondering, are you talking about modifying the chance to hit magic unit will have, or modifying the units resistance to fire, cold and holy? neither of those is allowed to be modified, they only vary on a per-unit basis...

autolycus · Post by **autolycus** » July 7th, 2004, 4:38 pm

If it's a unit-based ability (like elves having 70% defence in forests) then it's easy to code magic-resistant units and people would do those anyway as part of unit definitions. What I was hoping for was a randomly-assigned ability - an antimagic field like the light aura in range, but which increased the defence of those within the field by 10% against cold and fire. This would be peculiar to certain randomly-selected individual units.

Now that you've explained things, I think it's still a good idea, but not one that can be implemented easily under the current circumstances. Thanks.

Dacyn · Post by **Dacyn** » July 7th, 2004, 4:45 pm

autolycus wrote:What I was hoping for was a randomly-assigned ability

you mean a trait. And it should not be a trait, because traits are not supposed to affect other units. Anyway, it would make 1/3 of all units have the trait, way too many.

autolycus · Post by **autolycus** » July 7th, 2004, 4:52 pm

Dacyn wrote: you mean a trait. And it should not be a trait, because traits are not supposed to affect other units. Anyway, it would make 1/3 of all units have the trait, way too many.

Well, Turin said leadership was an ability not a trait; but it is coded the same way as 'loyal', 'resilient', 'strong' etc. So perhaps I'm confused about this. Is there a way of reducing the %chance that units develop 'antimagic' as a trait? Is there a way of restricting this trait to specific factions, or changing the %chance by faction?

Post by **turin** » July 7th, 2004, 5:00 pm

autolycus wrote:
Dacyn wrote: you mean a trait. And it should not be a trait, because traits are not supposed to affect other units. Anyway, it would make 1/3 of all units have the trait, way too many.
Well, Turin said leadership was an ability not a trait; but it is coded the same way as 'loyal', 'resilient', 'strong' etc. So perhaps I'm confused about this. Is there a way of reducing the %chance that units develop 'antimagic' as a trait? Is there a way of restricting this trait to specific factions, or changing the %chance by faction?

leadership is not random, traits are. leadership is an ability, not a trait. what you are proposing could not be a trait, because traits can only affect the unit that gets it, they can't effect other units. I think it would be a bad idea anyway, since nothing should ever change a units defense or resistance. The only way those should vary is between different types of units.

and BTW, leadership is not coded the same way as traits. traits aren't even coded, they are WML, while leadership is coded.

do you know much about WML? it will make this discussion easier if you do, so just wondering...

autolycus · Post by **autolycus** » July 8th, 2004, 1:30 am

Oops, yes Turin you're right. I looked closely at BfW again.

So leadership can be coded as a unit-type ability whereas 'resilient' etc are unit-specific, individual random traits. Antimagic (whether good idea or not) would be coded like leadership if it affected surrounding units as proposed. It probably could not be implemented as a trait - the hooks don't exist for it. So far so good?

I don't know much about WML, being a dinosaur from Pascal and COBOL days, but I've learnt a little bit about it from digging around in the resources folder (on OS X). [And also from lurking in the Coders' Corner and on all the enlightening discussions here!]

I'm also in this to be educated. Educate me!

Post by **Dave** » July 8th, 2004, 2:23 am

IMO having resistance to fire/cold supports all the anti-magic we might ever want.

David