I just envisioned a DVAR Juggernaut hero running threw an explosive car holding his double handed hammer high. On a serious note though, would there be any benefit for a hero not being on a mount? For example, during the amazon stream, the DVAR hero had a sniper rifle. I can't see a hero on a mount with a sniper. So perhaps instead of a mount, a hero could get some thing such has enhance stabalizes? Which could perhaps allow the sniper anchor down and gain increase range or something of this sorts? This would be in the mount slot, but ofc would not be a mount. Just a though.
Age of Wonders: Planetfall - Dev Diary #29: Hero Development
- Thread starter LennartGS
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Now you've got me thinking about Dvar running through enemy tanks.
The mounts go in the primary weapon slot. If you're on a motorbike, you use the motorbike's guns instead of your own. So that's the tradeoff. You either get a sweet sniper rifle, or a sweet mount.
Interesting, nice to see the point system for skills is still present. I preferred that to the "choose one out of 3 random abilities" from older games.
Pity though that Hero spell casting is gone. That was their main strenght.
Pity though that Hero spell casting is gone. That was their main strenght.
Instead it appears their main strengths are:
- Certain active/passive ability Hero Upgrades, many of which are potentially unavailable to normal units, and also including party-wide buffs.
- The option for either a fancy weapon or turning into an improved version of T2 or T3 units(i.e. base function of that unit, but with hero upgrades and secondary weapon and fourth slot added in). I imagine that many of the higher quality weapons, and being an Infantry unit for mod eligibility, makes not being Mounted remain viable as an alternate even at higher Hero levels. Considering T3 units have better base stats than a Hero.
- The extra versatility of a fourth mod slot.
It seems you can no longer spend upgrade points on health and armor, right? I guess it makes more sense to let that depend on whether they are inside a vehicle or not and maybe there are some mods that can boost those.
I think every mod slightly increases health, damage, or armour but none will do that as the main affect because they don't want you to have to choose between a boring stat increase and something more fun. Not being able to spend upgrade points on stat increases is probably for the same reason, and you shouldn't need to because damage related mods increase damage and health related mods increase health so a damage focused hero will automatically get higher damage.
Including the minor races or only the six big ones? I would love to see some unaligned heroes as a quest or treasure rewards too.
Typo?
Mind control made the game much more fun to play for me. It allows to combine units that would otherwise be impossible to combine (there are interesting units synergy that are impossible to use otherwise), or with abilities that they could not have otherwise (the class buff that works on different class units). It also makes mind controlled units very precious when they can not be produced, and much more (positive!) drama when they die.
I believe that the biggest issues with MC in AOW3 were:
- heroes that can MC anything/large spectrum of units: rogue is the biggest offender here. Almost every battle provides the ability to increase army strenght. Something like druid MC is much more bearable.
- MC that is guaranteed to work and multiple MC abilities: of the necromancer. Guaranteed MC from greater resurection is largely OPed, it turns the undead lairs into freebies where you get a free T4 every battle, in the case of archon lair it also happens to be a rare T4 that is one of the most brutal melee unit. The weaker MC can be used to get some lower tiers as fodder reliably on top of it. And of course if the ennemy is living, there's a bunch of ghouling that can be done.
- ability to MC units with MC ability: you have a rogue, he MC a nymph, which MC a bard, and in a handful battles you end up with multiple mind controlling units for faster snowballing. You don't even need to be rogue leader to do that, getting an early rogue hero does the trick too. Either these units should be immune to MC, or they should have very narrow MC ability (say ability to mind control spiders only, the ability is powerful in iteself but the opportunities too narrow to turn it into a snowball strategy).
That sounds indeed very restrictive. I wonder if it had worked better with “soft caps”, so the skills are still available but get more expensive depending on the other skills the hero already has.
In these kind of skill systems its often about finding the proper mix between two extreme positions: The first one makes just every skill globally available. This gives the player a huge amount of choice but in reality all these skills can never be balanced among each other. Finally every hero looks almost alike because the player picks every time only his favorite skills.
On the other side of the spectrum there’s the extreme form of restriction that basically forces every hero into different skills. (One way to do this would be a complete randomization of upgrades.) This leads to totally different heroes but eliminates the choice.
I think it's worth to compare the different ways among games that try to find a balance between choice and variation. IMO the most important are:
TREES / PATHS (Restrictions through requirements)
One of the most typical examples are probably schools of magic like fire magic and air magic that often appear in fantasy settings. Heroes usually need to fulfil a lot of prerequisites until they can get the best spells of a school. Whats the purpose of these restrictions? Of course they should prevent that the player can pick the best damage spell from fire, the ultimate Freeze spell from water and at the same time a hast spell from air magic.
With these kind of trees not every separate skill has to be balanced but only the magic scholls themselves. It can be a interesting question if you want tier 3 fire spells and only medium water spells or if you want to have more flexibility through medium fire, water and basic air spells.
I don’t think this would work with trees for Ranged, Melee and Support in Planetfall though. To get access to a second tree wouldn’t be worth the skill points.
RANDOMNESS
The player can only choose between several random skills. The probability for a certain skill to appear can depend on the faction of the hero. I personally like these kind of randomness because it adds an element of surprise and makes the hero development not completely pretictable.
Obviously the random factor increases the variety – even the same hero will look different in a second game – but limits the choice.
BONUS SKILLS (Restrictions through factions)
It seems this is the way it works in Planetfall. I’d say it’s the most strategic approach but at the same time probably the most difficult to pull off.
In the first place, restricting some skills to certain factions can’t prevent on its own that players create an order of skills from the best to the worst:
1. […] - Best skill, take it as soon as it gets available
2. […] - Take it as soon as possible as long as 1. is not available at the same time
3. …
So additionally skills have to be designed in a way that the bonus skills from the different factions (and secret technologies) affect the value of all the other skills. For example a skill like
Killing Momentum (melee): If the unit kills another unit in melee during its turn half of its action points get immediately refilled.
would greatly benefit from
Shadowstep: The unit doesn’t trigger overwatch fire.
If Shadowstep is available the priority of Killing Momentum will most likely increase a lot. This again leads to a lot of variation depending on which skills are available.
It can be a bit difficult though to find enough skills that really synergize with each other, so I have two suggestions:
- An easy way to create a synergy is to give a particular faction a skill that slightly upgrades an existing global skill; example:
Cloaking Device: The unit can activate a cloaking device once per battle to be concealed for 1 turn. Attacking or suffering damage (EG from AoE attacks) ends the concealment.
Upgrade 1 (Kirko only): The duration is increased to a maximum of 2 turns.
Upgrade 2 (Syndicate only): Precision and Critical hit chance are increased while fireing from concealment.
- Because limiting skills to certain factions/secret technologies reduces the number of available skills this could lead to a point where the hero has already all the good skills. This undermines the idea of a choice, IE there is no choice if you can get all the relevant skills anyway. Thus it’s important that there’s always a big amount of skills to choose from. One way to ensure this would be to restrict some skills not to only 1 but 2 or 3 factions. Example:
Tireless: Melee attacks of opportunity doesn’t cost action points. – Available for Kirko, Dvar and Assembly
Stim-Packs: The unit can activate Stim-Packs once per battle to get 50% additional movement points for 1 turn. – Available for Vanguard, Amazons and Syndicate
(Kirko and Assembly might even have improved versions)
Very nice Dev Dairy! Great looking Heroes and levelling them are one of the many cool elements in the AOW-games.
And I go for: Deploy Cerebral Control Collars [Syndicate] -> I want those 'Indentured' (whatever they are).
And I go for: Deploy Cerebral Control Collars [Syndicate] -> I want those 'Indentured' (whatever they are).
This is actually a motorcycle originating from the Assembly.
The Vanguard have an assault bike too.
The Syndicate have a cool floating speeder bike.
You can acquire equipment from all races while playing.
Is that the vehicle aesthetic for the Assembly? It's not what I expected. That's not a bad thing, just interesting.
REQUEST: Please make the Hero upgrade interface better than the list-in-a-box-with-a-scroll-bar UI from AoW3. I found that interface clunky, and it was hard to tell when new abilities became available.
SUGGESTION: A tabbed interface (like a browser window) with one tab per ability source (General, Faction, Secret Tech) and an extra tab that shows only the abilities that became available in the current level (across all sources). I think the upgrade interface should default to the "New Abilities" tab when upgrading.
Cheers,
Ludomancer
SUGGESTION: A tabbed interface (like a browser window) with one tab per ability source (General, Faction, Secret Tech) and an extra tab that shows only the abilities that became available in the current level (across all sources). I think the upgrade interface should default to the "New Abilities" tab when upgrading.
Cheers,
Ludomancer
Hopefully they will now implement custom hero pools so that we can make our own. They refused to do that feature in AoW3 so now hopefully there is time to implement it proper. Have a system like in XCOM and you can select to either use the game's heroes or your custom heroes. Also being able to share through the Workshop would be a big plus.
I like this idea, it could be a simple menu choice when starting a new random game. Stock heroes only, mix of stock heroes and saved (but not in use) custom leaders, or always offer custom heroes when possible.
Good idea!
Another way to sort this would be to have a tab for commander skills (that benefit the whole party) another tab for active and one for passive abilities. New skills could be colored green, skills that are not yet available greyed out.
Especially the last point is important to plan ahead (save up skill points for the next level / look for good combinations)
Stellaris has a feature like this, where custom empires can be set to spawn never or always. Don't see why Planetfall can't have something like it.