Hello,
Since there are a few spellcasters in the game (vampires, shamans, and the keeper), I was wondering if “magic” weapons such as staves could become a more refined part of the game. Just as there are many different classes of “normal” weapons (one handed, ranged, two-handed), I think there could be classes of magic weapons such as wands, staves, sceptres, and so forth.
I think this could be done without adding any new creature attributes if:
So you could have:
Conveniently, the existing formula to compute a minion’s level (c1*STR + c2*DEX) would still make sense.
Okay, so now on to the types of magic weapons. I’ve thought of a few types:
– Staves: A staff is like the assault rifle of magic weapons. It is the primary weapon that a spell-caster would carry and they need to be equipped to be used. A staff has 100% accuracy (unlike ranged weapons and melee attacks) and it must be cast at a target. It has two statistics: power level and charge battery. A (9/2) lightning staff, for example, would deal 9 + DEX damage, and it would have two charges. Charges slowly replenish over time. A staff can be augmented by a scroll of weapon enchantment.
– Sceptres: A sceptre is like a staff, but it functions like a normal, ranged weapon in that it can only be shot along a diagonal and it is affected by a minion’s accuracy stat. Like a staff, a sceptre must be equipped and it has two statistics: damage and charges.
– Wands: Wands are magic items that don’t need to be equipped and require some minimum level of dexterity to operate (which can be as low as 0). A wand has several charges and once it is depleted it disappears. Wands have effects and they are aimed at targets like staffs (so they always hit), but no damage statistic.
– Orbs: An orb is technically not a “magical” item, so it can be used by ordinary creatures, but it otherwise functions like a wand. Because of their accessibility, orbs don’t have overly powerful effects.
That’s all for now. I don’t know if you had some system for magic weapons in mind, but hopefully this can provide some ideas.
So then, here’s another proposal for learning spells. This one doesn’t use magic weapons or items at all. It also involves what the game calls “skills” (e.g., knife throwing), so I’ll collectively refer to spells and skills as “abilities.” Here’s the idea:
– The total number of abilities in the game is brought up into the hundreds.
– Some creatures have some natural abilities along with their natural traits…
– … but most abilities must be “found” on the world map as books that must be retrieved and stored in a library tile. In order to accumulate this knowledge, the player must constantly grow his library.
– Once in the library, an ability can be studied by a minion. Just like crafting, learning takes time and the player has full control over what he wants to teach to whom, but minions can only learn so many skills and they take their knowledge to the grave, so study wisely!
– Every ability that is found has a tier (e.g., basic, advanced, expert, master). The “sorcery” research items are still present in the research tree, but they no longer grant a package of spells and they are renamed to “abilities.” In order for a minion to study an ability of the “basic” tier, “basic abilities” much be researched. (This is simply to prevent the player from being able to use an overpowered ability early on in the game; Brogue does this by making heavy weapons require lots of strength, and FTL does this by making powerful weapons require lots of energy to use). It’s sort of like how you can build a forge, but you still have to research “two-handed” weapons in order to make a battle axe.
– Certain abilities are restricted to certain types of creatures. (Yes, this means that there will be thousands of potential creature-ability pairs that need to be defined. But I or other people could help to define these pairs if need be)
– Naturally, the player is only going to see a small subset of the available abilities in each game. This is what helps to make each replay a bit different.
– As a subtle point, floors affect learning rate, and once an ability is placed inside a library tile, it’s magically bound to that bookshelf forever!
– This system could also be extended to crafting stuff. Eg: the recipe needs to be discovered on the world map, and then learned by a specific unit.
– Beasts probably wouldn’t be able to learn new things by studying because they can’t read. In this case, you could recruit a proxy unit (e.g. satyr, centaur) who could learn abilities and teach it to the beasts. Or do something else clever like that. idk
All of that covers how abilities are learned. But it still doesn’t cover how powerful an ability is going to be, or how much its cooldown is. If an ability is scalable, then it will do so as a function primarily of the attribute values of the creature. As I said earlier, I would suggest borrowing from MOBAs and creating an abstract attribute called “intelligence” or “ability power,” which would be used by most abilities to determine the scaling power of the ability. However, some simple abilities might be independent of this ability power stat (e.g., a stat boost ability which simply multiplies an attribute by some constant factor for a short period of time).
If you get a minion with some ability, is it able to pass it to other minions or do you still need to get a book?
Generally, one book can teach infinitely many minions (but maybe some books have limited use). When one of the player’s raiding parties comes home, it would drop any books that it has collected at the entrance to the dungeon just as it does with all of its other loot. The only difference is that books get placed on library tiles instead of going into general equipment storage.
Would minions do any learning automatically or all of it needs to be micro-managed?
When you want to assign an ability to a minion, you would do so from the minion inventory window. Let’s say an orc has a free ability spot available; you click on the free ability spot and tell it to learn “strength boost.” It goes over to the library tile that has the strength boost book inside of it and it starts training to learn strength boost.
I don’t see much point to automating the learning process. I suppose that you *could* make an addition to the immigration UI panel that tells X creature to automatically learn Y ability when recruited, but idk if that would be of much use.
I don’t like the fact that you need to do additional research on top of finding abilities. Maybe just add minion level or stat requirements per ability?
This would work, too, and it would be less tedious than waiting for a minion to explicitly train a new ability like I suggested. I just think that minions should have a limited number of ability slots (maybe they get more as they level up).
I think technology should exist in books that are not possible to research for yourself in the library. Especially the most powerful versions of spells.
Only when you find the master sorcery book you get the more advanced spells.
You could put more basic level spells in the library to be researched. Eg. Add basic necromancy for your Vampires etc.
That’s a possibility. Maybe researching basic sorcery, for example, will also automatically give all of your creatures access to a complimentary package of basic spells that don’t need to be found. The way I see it, the game is going to have a large number of spells that will all be divided into “tiers” (e.g., basic, advanced, expert, master, to use the existing terminology). Any spell of any tier could be potentially found on the map, but by researching “basic sorcery,” it would be like giving you a one-time of bonus of 4-6 complimentary basic spells. Perhaps these are the same 4-6 basic spells each game or perhaps they are different each game.
Only when you find the master sorcery book you get the more advanced spells.
To be clear, I was suggesting that “master sorcery” (or “master abilities,” as I think it should be called) should still be researched at the cost of mana, but the individual spell or skill is what you would find in all of these books that are littered around the world map. So, even if you found a really powerful spell early in the game, you wouldn’t be able to use it immediately because you haven’t “unlocked it” in the the tech tree.
But maybe a cleaner way to do what I’m describing would be to require that “good” spellbooks can only be placed in higher-tier libraries (so we could have wooden shelves, iron shelves, steel shelves), which would be unlocked with ironworking/steelworking. So if you found a powerful spellbook, but you only had wooden shelves, you’d have to wait until you unlocked steel bookcases. So, then you wouldn’t need the “sorcery” research branch any more. Well, it’s just another idea. If you think it’s horrible, I won’t take offense :p
I like the idea of fusing to the production facility.
Could you fuse the runes to a production queue? Current production queues are:
Library
Workshop
Forge
Laboratory
Jeweler
Steel Furnace
There is a production queue screen already 🙂
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ps. Do “Sorcery” and “Keeperopedia” still belong on the production queue screen?
