Faction-specific content?

[Lukc]

Are factions supposed to have their own specialties except from different villages and castles? I know that elves, at the moment, build villages a bit differently (and they are immediately universities) and that mermen (who ain’t exactly a faction anyway) can build underwater villages.

But are other factions supposed to have special features/options/things? This could be a way to improve balance between the various ANL factions, as well as add little bits of gameplay diversity (undeads could plant mushrooms or dwarves build directly on cave tiles, for example).

[Robertdebrus]

Other factions having their unique benefits is something that I would love to have. Also having balanced factions would be good. I haven't been able to play with this enough against other people to get a feel for what factions are better than others right now, due to needing to have time to play, so any suggestions are welcome!

[Lukc]

A few ideas that come to mind:

• Some factions could have a different (or at least slightly altered economy), like undeads having to build shrines or elves having to plant great trees instead of farming.
• Some constructions could cost less (like camps for outlaws and orcs) or more (elvish or dwarvish castles?).
• Some sides could have more than one type of worker (woodsmen, soulless and troll whelps come to mind as good candidates).

Balance would have to be taken into account. Many parts of the code should also probably be cleaned before this is worked on, though.

[Lukc]

@Robertdebrus, @sevu, any opinions as to how far this should go? I see that the swamp-digging and mushrooms-planting for undead were appreciated, but what would you think about new workers or altered gameplay for certain factions?

[sevu]

More diversity would be good, currently it comes down to

• having different unit types, with different recruiting prices.
• each faction can obtain units from all factions, just the ones of the own one are slightly easier to reach
• sometimes different prices for buildings and varied castle & village types, maybe an bonus option

More gameplay variety would be a good thing.

Point 1 – price matters probably the most. Undeads being unplaguable may be notable too. Point 2 – I think the best strategy for mainline is to immediately go for the dwarvish fighter. Point 3 can be expanded further / get more of a concept instead of random differences.

A different economy – sounds interesting. Payoffs besides the visual part?

A troll whelp as worker – sounds quite OP, especially with the healing ability. In general the prices for level 1 units would be too low for them being workers. A faction which gets such a boost would need some other place which makes this up. It will also affect general gameplay in case players fight each other (though they have lvl 1 mages anyway) or on the ANL map as the enemies are at level 0. Having to research that first might help. Woodmen could be directly enabled for humans and outlaws. Should woodsman have another job, like hunting in forests, as they aren't farmers? Would probably have disadvantages in making it more complex with researching. On the other hand, making hunting in forests not researchable avoids this and they have still a defensive bonus. Maybe it could scale with advanced woodsmen like it does with mages for researching.

You mentioned somewhere to use generally tents for outlaws – why not, currently they do it only on sandy terrain. An idea I had would be to let some factions directly build (some) things without prior terraforming – e.g. factions who use encampments could build them without removing forests. Though, in case of tents, one would expect the terrain to still have forest properties, which is non-trivial. (custom terrain, custom graphics?) I'm not sure what to do about terrains with embellishment overlay – they need an extra round to be cleared for... removing flowers. That's where above idea originated, together with the fact that there is one separate tent village for tents with cactuses.

Mermen Workers are a hidden gem – they can give unique abilities like build directly a castle in the water. Building prices could be reconsidered, they are very high and the former code was contradicting about if prices should be low or high (copy-pasting mistake). As for mermen priests, should be allowed to study, and if, where, as there are no suitable villages (previous code referred to non-existing terrain codes) I think they should just remain normal units.

In general, if you have something you want to change, it probably will go in. With adding new things, I would keep in mind the complexity and side-effects. As the more complex things become the harder it may be to keep a balance.

[Robertdebrus]

@sevu makes good points here! I am definitely open to more variety. Just noting a few points here:

• Removing embellishments: This was one of the first pieces of code I ever did, and some of the design decisions back then were not very good. If there was no removal turn, I don't think it would be a huge deal
• Mermen Workers: Hidden gem is exactly what I was thinking. The reason for the high prices was to make it hard to build a whole island in the middle of deep water, forcing your opponents to get Workers of their own or start researching lots of flying units, which some factions do not have by default
• Encampments without prior terraforming: While I think this would fit thematically, I feel like the extra turn gained by not having to spend a turn clearing the ground would be difficult to balance. Maybe either make slightly more expensive, or making them really easy to tear down, akin to the AI tearing down player buildings.
• Different castles costing more or less: while this sounds cool thematically, if combined with things like the point above, could mean that the Outlaw faction could rapidly build castles to spam their cheap units from, while Elves and Dwarves would take longer to build castles for their more expensive units
• Woodsmen: I like it! I think the older woodsmen producing more could work too, and I feel that it would give chopping trees down more tactical advantage. And yeah, not researchable sounds right, I don't feel like you need some mages in a university to teach a master woodsman hunting.
• Undead shrines, Elvish trees: Do you mean like a village, for upkeep? Or some other requirement?

Maybe we could work on another era within this addon, with more advanced features. You guys are really making me want to do more with this!

[Robertdebrus]

Also, about the Merfolk priestess, the terrain code does exist, it is a merfolk village on top of muddy quagmire. This was originally an option for the Merfolk Worker to build, which could or could not be reenabled. The reason for the unusual terrain code was because a floating elvish/city house would look rather odd, and I wanted something that did not usually happen naturally

[Lukc]

Alright, so many good points coming in; I'll try to answer as many as possible.

Current balance

Some factions already tend towards slightly different gameplays:

• Elves have high defenses on a terrain they can build for very cheap: forests;
• Undeads being able to build swamps very fast (cheaper than water) and mushrooms (grants 60% defense to skeletons) also gives them a good ability to turtle.

A few other things are also noteworthy (I think) in the current version of ANLEra:

• Drakes have terribly high mobility and can build remotely very early, get trapped units easily, or even turtle behind inaccessible areas (btw, there are several of those in the mainline ANL map, which we use);
• Dwarves are slow and cannot extend their terrain advantages, and I think they are a bit underpowered compared to other factions. IIRC their workers are good fighters but expensive for simple workers;
• Outlaws have real cheap workers and are therefor better farmers than loyalists, and they are probably the most economically-viable faction, which probably does not fit their thematic.

So we have:

• two factions with good defensive options (Elves, Undeads);
• a faction with a strong, unjustified economy (Outlaws);
• a faction with the ability to exploit map oversights (Drakes);
• the vanilla, reference faction (Loyalists);
• orcs, that are pretty bland unless I missed something.

It may also be worth noting that mainline is meant to be fought with loyalists and against undeads and orcs. Dwarvish fighters may be a strong option in mainline, but with the several factions we have there are other strong options (eg. trolls or woses).

If we add different scenarios, the AI adversaries may also be of different factions.

Different workers/researcher

• Woodsmen: I’m uncertain about having level 2 (and above) units produce (and more). I feel a bit like this could be overpowered, but this would probably have to be tested.
• Troll Whelps: to balance them, those could be workers with less options, or even workers unable to farm. They could also have to be researched first and be secondary workers. I’m actually more worried about people building castles systematically before attacking.
• Soulless: considering the unit is very similar and has no further advancement, this probably wouldn’t hurt on its own. But the fact it produced more workers before that should probably be balanced another way (see the “Different economy” proposal).

A few ideas about other units to import that were not mentioned before in this thread:

• Wose Sapling: should probably not be able to build much, but could be another “hidden gem”.
• Wose Shaman: maybe a researcher that can be obtained only through diplomacy (even for elves)? I saw discussions on the Wesnoth bug tracker to alter the unit as it’s not thought as being very interesting ATM.
• Troll Shaman: again, a researcher obtained only through diplomacy?

Different economy

The raw proposal I had for alternate economies was something like the following.

Undeads:

• Walking Corpses cannot plant farms and undead players cannot increase their agriculture level;
• Walking Corpses have another village upgrade besides universities: shrines (or they could corrupt/haunt/whatever villages, it doesn’t matter how it’s called);
• Dark Adepts (and their evolutions) can work to produce gold in those buildings at the beginning of each turn;
• possibly, Walking Corpses should be prevented from mining too or start with lower mining skills;
• probably, the production of gold over shrines/haunted villages should be increased through a “summoning” research (or whatever other, more appropriate name you find).

This would make undead build things in a different order (and manner) than other factions: no mass-producing workers to get gold, having mages split between research and economy (and reallocation is possible). This would also solve the “early-game kills grant undead more workers” issue, as those workers would not provide gold anymore, only building opportunities. Undeads would also recruit less walking corpses early game.

I have no idea how much gold per turn should this building produce and how much it should cost to be balanced.

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Elves:

• Elvish Civilians cannot produce universities;
• Elvish Civilians can convert forests to Great Tree tiles (preferably at a somewhat high cost);
• Elvish Shamans (and evolutions) can produce research on Great Tree tiles.

Again, different build. The fact that they don’ t build universities would mean they’d have to build dedicated villages to take care of upkeep. I’m also tempted to say elvish civilians should somehow produce gold in forests and not on flat ground for farming, but I don’t know how this could be done with current terrains.

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If any of those two sets of ideas are implemented, we’ll certainly have to rethink how technologies are defined, stored and handled. And we should probably find ways to differentiate other non-loyalist faction a bit more.

Various

• Encampments without prior terraforming: good idea, but it should indeed cost more or have to be done by specialized workers (woodsmen sound like a good start for this?).
• Different castles costing more or less: it could be a problem for cheaper builds if mixed with other advantages, but more expensive builds could help balance other advantages too.
• Embellishments: probably better to just build directly if there are flowers/waterlilies/mushrooms.
• Merfolk Civilians: I’m really uncertain about those. Although they have interesting build options, investing so long in diplomacy to get a worker that’ll require special conditions to be used seems… well, disadvantageous.

Other raw ideas

There are of course many other ways to have a faction be played fundamentally differently. Very raw ideas include:

• Having no units to unlock through research, with research being used to obtain one-time immediate advantages (recruiting new or stronger units, diplomatic boosts, you tell me).
• Having workers and researchers be the same unit for a given side.
• Having worker units be split (one unit to build and terraform, one unit to farm/mine).
• Passive terrain conversion under (possibly even in proximity of) specific units, and having to build on that terrain for a given faction. Would be like Zerg creep, and I have no idea how playable that would be in Wesnoth. Could be the basis of a Merfolk or Elvish faction.

No idea how playable any of those ideas would be. And, again, where would the limit be before it’s not “A New Land” anymore?

Edit: sorry about the huuuge comment. :x

[Robertdebrus]

I'll respond in detail later, but let me just say this now: a I would think that an "ANLEra Advanced" or something similar being added to the addon would not be a bad idea. That could be really fun, while still leaving the regular ANLEra for those who want it.