Items will become food

[DreadKnight]

Items system will get an overhaul. The items will actually become consumables (food), the page will be a subpage of the shop, a 7x7 inventory will be displayed if player is logged in an owns an item, clicking a food item will display details underneath in similar fashion to how Google Images behaves.

The reasoning for this is that I want the bonuses to be temporary and rather small, just a little edge that can make the difference between life and death, while not implying any sort of visual modifications to the characters, basically trying to avoid the idiocracy from moba games such as Dota2, where you have visual items that don't affect any stats and you also have temporary in-game items that are all about affecting stats and not visuals (only Heroes of Newerth did some work on this by having some avatars changing appearance based on in-game items equipped, but it's very limited and rather rare stuff as those avatars cost quite a bit), plus having a bow item on a purely melee character never makes sense (idiocracy), also the backpack icon for movement stat will make more sense overall. This change will also have more consistency with the current food drop from slayed units.

This will affect issue #42 and will also go well with having unit set tab buttons along with inventory in-game (we'll need support for multiple unit sets).

Hovering/clicking in-game an item from the inventory will display the changed stats on the right unit card. An unit can consume up to 6 food items per match (a meal). After clicking a food item, you'll have to confirm it's consumption with the selected unit by using the button under the unit cards. When the inventory is selected, the consumed food will be displayed over the left unit card's artwork.

Food will only be usable in a limited number of game modes, such as ladder or even battle (optional) and will be obtainable from (bulk) purchases (of merchandise, card packs), various rewards (achievement, leveling up, winning matches, contributing to the project) or events (playing during certain days, tournaments).

[DreadKnight]

Some food items could also be achieved by crafting, erm, cooking. That way they would be more efficient regarding slot spaces or bonus stats. Such items might display an extra row with the actual ingredients. Some recipes could be hidden though. There should be an UI widget allowing for cooking stuff (stove).

[DreadKnight]

Food might not make it into the game at all because it could break the game play by causing balance issues or increasing the match length by having to spend time to feed individual units. Also, the current creature drops will probably no longer affect stats but offer bonus score, similar to the ones in Pac-Man.

[DreadKnight]

Another idea would be to keep food since it's balanced thanks to the limited 7x7 backpack, while either having units drop relics (non-food) which won't affect stats but only provide tiny bonus score or keep things the same but display their effect on hover, by temporarily inserting the information in the combat log UI.

[DreadKnight]

I did more research into free-to-play games and their business methods, most of them are pay-to-win relying on whales. Also took another more in depth look at Scrolls and Hearthstone since they're some of the bigger competitors that keep in mind business. Will avoid a microtransaction pay-to-win nightmare, so no more food to keep things more fair. The pretty much only income method from microtransactions will be purchasing (unlocking) units in the online ladder/ranked mode so that they're always available, but about 7 or more distinctive somewhat random units will be provided each day for free to each and every player. Most likely more units if that player comes to play on a constant basis, perhaps daily or something like that.