WIP Village Builder/Heroes and Empires

[Mordred]

Description​

This is a map I've had in my head for a while now. I enjoy maps such as Village Builder, and Heroes and Empires, but I've been wanting a nice medium between the two. Village builder was nice, but often poorly made and no real room for independent heroes except for one slot that was more often than not, broken. Heroes and Empires was amazing, and fun to play, but too overcomplicated for casual games most of the time.

So the idea was to make a map with 8 slots as Village Builders, and 4 as Heroes.

Builders
The Builders start with a building that has the race choices. Each race would follow the same guidelines, but would be different in some way.
Ex:
Every race would have a basic melee unit, two ranged units, a more powerful melee warrior (Knights, etc) and a special unit that is unique to each race.

Humans would be the base race, nothing real special and good all around
Elves would have higher ranged damage, but would have less health
Dwarves would have strong melee, more health and slightly more income, but their units would be more costly and their range does very poor damage.
Etc.

You would start with a king unit and two city builders, which can construct farms that generate income, a healing fountain (that would cost food to limit how many you can make) and the main building, which can also train war builders, which take care of the military oriented buildings.

Each race would get two heroes, one melee oriented and one ranged.


Heroes
Each Hero would start with a wisp. This wisp would be invisible to prevent it from being killed off at the start and screwing them over. The wisp could then build an altar that gives the player a choice of heroes; all of the heroes the builders could choose plus two only they can choose that are again, one melee and one ranged. They pick their hero and the other options disappear, and now the altar serves as a point for the hero to revive if killed, and provides 11 food. The food can be used to create a small squad of units that are slightly stronger than normal equivalent, but not way over the top.
Ex.
Player puts down altar, picks Ranger-General hero
Player can now train 11 archer units named Ranger Elite to serve as a squad for the hero.

Hero gains a small amount of money from units that are killed, or from another player that they allied with.


Heroes would work as they did in village builder; you can make as many of them as you want if you are a builder. However, in this, I would like to cap it so they can make as many as they want, but the heroes don't level past ten; wheras the people playing as heroes can level to twenty, and in turn gain more stats and skills that the common village heroes would not have.


I have a general outline for the ideas, but I would like some suggestions for balancing, racial perks, hero abilities and the like. I would, as far as builders go, like to keep things simple like 5, 10, 15, 20% differences in things such as HP gains/losses, DMG gains/losses etc. Oh, and a suggestion for the name since Village Builder and Heroes and Empires is taken; and Heroes and Villages sounds kinda silly.

Also something I am just terribad at is terrain. While I like the established bases in Village Builder, I would prefer to make it a make-your-own base kinda deal with the walls; however I don't like the relatively few nice large areas for base building that were in Heroes and Empires

Layout so far

Spoiler

Human     - Base
Elves     - +range dmg, -hp,
Dwarves   - +hp, +income, +cost, -range dmg
Trolls    - ++dmg, -hp, -range
Gnolls    - -cost, -build time, --hp

Specialty
H - 
E - Arcane Archers
D - 
T - 
G - 

Heros
Human
 - Paladin
 - Archmage
Elves
 - Battle Mage
 - Ranger-General
Dwarves [Possibly only exception to one ranged/one melee hero]
 - Brewmaster
 - Warleader
Trolls
 - Warlord
 - Shadow Priest
Gnolls
 - Champion
 - Shaman
Hero
 - Wanderer
 - Rogue



Unit - Requirements

King
City Builder  -Town Hall
War Builder   -Town Hall
Footman       -Barracks, Forge
Archers       -Barracks, Mill
Knight        -Barracks, Forge, Stables
Specialty     -Barracks, Speciality, Varies
Spy           -Black Market

Forge         -Barracks
Mill          -Barracks
Stables       -Barracks, Forge
Specialty     -Barracks, Altar
Black Market  -Barracks, Altar, Specialty, Town Hall

[Black Market would sell the spy unit, allowing for.. spying, along with items like
armor and weapons to increase damage and armor respectively]

Wall          -Town Hall
Tower         -Town Hall
Gate          -Town Hall

[Towers are normal walls, but they can detect invisible units such as spies]

Wall, Archers -Town Hall, Mill

[Walls are 1x1 units, to enable you to effectively make your own 
base that looks nice and seamless; wall, archers are upgrades to the walls 
that are to simulate you training an archer and have it go ontop of the wall to 
help defend]



City Builder
 Town Hall
 Farms
 Fountains
 Gate
 Wall

War Builder
 Barracks
 Altar
 Forge
 Mill
 Stables
 Specialty
 Tower


20 Farm +5
 +40;  +5
 +80;  +5
 +160; +5
 +320; +5

Any help/suggestions are very welcome, will update and probably tack on a test map soon

Update, tacked on a small little test with basic units, give it a go and say what you think!
Features:
City builder
-Town Hall
-Farm
-Wall
-Gate
-Tower

War Builder
-Barracks
-Forge
-Mill

Wall supports allowing the two types of archer to go onto the wall; actually does show the unit on top of it and is target able separately from the main wall.
Farm upgrades up to 5 times, each one giving 5 more gold. Income trigger will show you how much gold each farm gave you for nice visual assurance and to look shiny.

 

[WindexIsBack]

One of the main problems with village builder is it got boring after the beginning.
-Each race should have a list of upgrades
-Raiders should get a special selection of units (but rather costly for them). These could include flying transports
-Income should be kept as units. Main reason for this is simplicity, while making them an easy target to kill
-Make the terrain less 'castle-esque' and more natural. Players should build where they want to, not in 7 or 8 places.
-Some special events (The dead begin raising for example. Demons rain down from the sky, ect)
-Races should deviate from each other as much as possible, not share the same basic units.
-There should be 2 types of raiders. 'Quick' raiders are useful in the beginning as they have fast movement and generally higher stats.
'Strong' raiders are the opposiate - they're slower, they require more upgrades, but their upgrades are more effective and become much stronger late game.
-Even late game, raiders should still be a menace. Perhaps base their income off number of players?
-Freelance Hero (special hero, designed around survival and hit-n-run tactics)
-Heroes should NOT become a 1 man army. They should always be easy to kill, yet very dangerious.
-Income should be based on a slope - the more you have, the less income each one grants. This encourages not spamming civilians

 

[Mordred]

Heroes wouldn't be super strong and able to solo an army, but wouldn't be able to be just floored by units either; at least able to hold their own for a little. Would not be any raiders, just the other villages. Definitely considered putting in upgrades, but it isn't a top priority.

As far as the income goes, was planning on having it a farm for about 20g, gives 5g, then you could upgrade it for 40g to gain an extra 5 per upgrade until it maxes at 25g (Whereas dwarves with say, 20% income bonus would get 30). Feel as if civilians would be kind of tacky, whereas farms are just as functional, upgradeable to conserve space, and in general look nicer.

 

[WindexIsBack]

Ugh, hate the building income.
It limits players to whoever has the largest base.
Creating income is extremly tedius
Income is much harder to be destroyed via hitnrun

This has quickly formed into a poor rts. =[

 

[Mordred]

Well, seeing as 'whoever has the biggest base' is really dictated on how big you built your own base, that isn't really an issue.

Creating it isn't that hard, instead of queuing up a bunch of civilians and throwing them in a corner you just build, hold shift and place them really fast and the peasant goes about his job building them.

Then you go back and upgrade at your leisure.

Wouldn't be that much harder to hit-n-run cuz it wouldn't have insane HP, it'd be fairly low as well.