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nocaplato
Adventuring Hero
Lover of Ancient Philosophy
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posted January 06, 2008 03:47 AM |
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Ghost Mode
I'm not sure exactly how to approach this topic. From the sheer absence of discussion my assumption is that no one plays ghost mode. I've played with ghost mode a few times and have had my tail handed to me by players in strategically weaker positions purely because of ghosts, so I understand at least part of the silence. On the other hand there are good reasons to have a discussion including the simple fact that it's in the game.
We were playing a three way contest. Each of us was newish to the game, but I'd been playing for the longest and had the advantage by at least 4+ months of game time. During the first week I was fortunate enough to capture a second town within a few days (picked the right direction and path). I also had the benefit of starting with my favorite secondary hero, Kythra. I know, lots of people don't like the minotaur, but they're great tanking units. If you place them well and use their moves to block, they are very effective at protecting your Blood Furies from cavalry. The Estates is just icing, plus you're likely to get Recruitment with a Dolmen, a random chest or a few level 1 mine battles. My luck continued when I captured a 3rd town by the end of week 2.
However, early success leads to becoming the odd man out. Both of my foes (new, but each excellent strategists) ganged up on me during the 3rd week. By that point in the game I wasn't too worried. Warlocks gain their strength from mana, which comes back remarkably fast compared to troops. Sinitar was much higher level than either of their mains. I felt confident he could win either hero, even with his cobbled together army of troops I was able to send him... Strong enough to win a single fight, though not one after another. That's when the ghosts started hitting.
Ugh, lets just say the results weren't pretty.
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Despite that early spanking, I've always like ghost mode. It gives you something to do during your opponent's turn. It lets you scout the land and nullifies disadvangtages due to map ignorance, it grants you scouting ability if you possess a few well placed neutrals. In the end, it's just fun.
Unfortunately it's broken. On the bright side, there are a few simple steps that could fix it, making it a viable arm of strategy and discussion. This thread is dedicated to the Ghost Mode, including ideas for improving it, and strategy discussion.
The documentation in the manual is terrible. So far as I know, this is how ghost mode works:
The ghost has stats, like a hero, and they are able to move around the adventure map. You can only see scouted terrain the ghost has uncovered during your ghost turn. At the same time, whatever area you've scouted with your hero isn't visible by your ghost (until he scouts it).
Ghost stats are scaled in simple numbers. A 1 is low, while a 17 is really high. For simplicity's sake, the point breaks between one number and another is like the hero level breaks. The higher you go, the harder it is to raise the stat. The ghost stats, and a description of how they seem to work, are:
Devour:
This is the ghost's fighting ability. Fights between two ghosts happen whenever you dispel (or have yours dispelled) a curse, possession or haunting. It seems to be a straight comparison of numbers with the highest number winning. If you win you damage the enemy ghost (lowering his stats). The damage you do seems to be based on the difference between your devour stats. The bigger your devour skill, the more you damage the opponent's ghost. Each ghost is able to initiate one fight per turn so most of the time you'll only get in one ghost battle each turn, but you could get in as many fights as there are enemy ghosts (+1 for your own).
By the way, ghost battles are boring. They happen entirely off screen with no movement or tactics. It's just some statistical comparison. You often won't even know you're ghost was in a fight until your turn starts. At that time you'll get a message telling you the results of the fight.
Haunt:
This allows you to mess with enemy mines. According to the rules you are able to reduce enemy production from a haunted mine, and if your Haunt skill is high enough you'll actually start diverting the mine's resources to your own stockpiles. It's hard to tell if and when it's working though, 'cause there are no messages that you're getting less than you should from a mine, or that you've earned any extra resources from an enemy mine... You can haunt only one mine per turn with each ghost, but once haunted, they stay haunted until dispelled by an enemy ghots. That means you could end up seeing every enemy mine hautned.
The outcome of your haunting is based on the haunt skill in some obscure way. If I had to make a total guess, I'd say the system was, Haunt skill of 1-10, the enemy has a (10 X Skill) % to lose production on any given day. Skill of 11-20, not only does the enemy lose production automatically, but you have [(Skill-10) x 10] % chance to gain production from the mine. This is pure speculation. In spite of trying to observe it in action, it's just too hard to tell.
Possess
This is a nifty ability that lets you possess a neutral monster. Any hero who comes into contact with that monster from that point on will permit you to watch the battle taking place and occasionally, take over the neutral creatures involved in the fight. This skill is much more straigh forward than Haunt. It seems to me that you have a 10% x Possess to take over any given creature. Once I hit 10 Possess I don't remember ever not taking control of a neutral stack. Your ghost can possess multiple neutral stacks per turn.
Curse:
Allows you to curse the enemy hero, reducing his primary stats by some number. The reduction is based on your ghosts Curse skill and acts kind of like an anti-artifact. They don't drop all stats evenly, but are scattered across the board. Exactly how much a ghost's Curse stat lowers the hero's stats is up for debate. Like Haunt, your ghost can only curse one hero per turn, but can curse mulitple heroes over time.
Revenge:
This is like Devour, but for the losers. It lowers the stats of a ghost who defeats yours by some amount. I'm not sure how the much Revenge effects an enemy ghots, but I'd guess it works like Devour.
Speed:
A ghost can move really, really fast. Way faster than your hero. They also aren't stopped by combats. They are stopped by impassable terrains though, and monsters count as impassible. If there's no space at all around a monster, your ghost can pass the area. Speed determines exactly how much movement your ghost has. The higher your speed, the greater the total number of movement you'll get. I have a theory about how this works, but it's complicated so I'll leave it for now.
So there it is, the beginnings of ghost mode strategy... There's lots more to talk about, so see you soon.
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nocaplato
Adventuring Hero
Lover of Ancient Philosophy
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posted January 06, 2008 10:22 PM |
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Ghost Strategy
Basic Ghost-play
Each opponent turn you have a ghost turn (and if you have multiple opponents you have multiple ghost turns) though the mechanics are handled differently for TotE than they are for the early versions of the game. For non TotE games, at the beginning of your ghost turn you receive 5000 energy points you can spend on movement, ghost actions or increasing the ghost stats. If your opponent took a long time on his prior turn, you'll end up with more ghost points than the 5000 base, I've seen as much as 12,000 ghost points at the beginning of any particular round.
In TotE, because of simultaneous turns, the first player to finish his turn goes straight into ghost mode. You'll only be allowed 2000 points to do your actions. Though you still get bonus points if your opponent took a long time, the amount is much smaller (it runs in 200 point increments and I've only seen it as high as 3200). If you're the last player to finish your main turn, you do not get a ghost mode.
Ghost points do not accumulate. Any points you have must be spent that round or they evaporate.
Spending your points:
Moving:
Ghosts move around much like heroes do (though faster, as mentioned before) revealing the map and acting as scouts for your main game. Moving takes ghost points, but depending on your speed skill, it takes the least amount of points to move. Terrain has some effect I don't understand (it's connected to the kind of ghost and the favored terrain of that race, but there seem to be other variables as well). Basically each tile of movement takes around 200 ghost points at Speed 1. At Speed 2 the rate drops to 100 per tile, Speed 3 66 per tile, and so on. You can see the pattern here. As your speed stat increases (let's say you get it all the way up to 10) you'll see the ghost can move incredible distances (as many as 250 tiles for the early versions of the game! To put that in perspecitve, a hero with Expert Logistics, Boots of Speed, a stable visit and on a road can travel maybe 30 or 40 tiles.)
Increasing Stats:
You can allocate any amount of your ghost point pool to the stats. A low level stat takes little to increase, (2000 energy points moves you from 1 to 2, 3000 from 2 to 3, 5000 from 3 to 4...) while a high level stat will take a bunch of points to increase.
Curse/Haunt/Possess:
These three are all the basic actions the ghost can take and if you click on a hero/mine/monster respectively, that's the default action. Each of these actions can be taken multiple times per turn based on how many ghost points you have. Each of these seems to take around 500 energy points, so it's possible to move to a place, haunt it, move to a hero, curse him, move to a monster, possess it, all in one turn. The higher your speed stat, the more you'll move and the more ghost points you'll have when you get there.
Dispel:
If your enemy has been actively using his ghost in your area, this is the counter your ghost has. Unlike Curse/Haunt/Possess, only one dispel command can be given to a ghost each round. Dispel is the ghost action which leads to ectoplasmic battles. Dispelling takes 500 points to execute, just as the default actions do. There's one other important item here, dispel is also used to eliminate the defend action...
Defend:
Here's one the manual is incredibly silent on. Your ghost is also able to spend an action defending mines and heroes (maybe creatures too, but I've never tried that). This works like the Curse/Haunt/Possess skills in that you can defend multiple objects per turn and it takes the same amount of points. Once you've defended an object, a shimmering field of force will spring up around it. From now on, in order for an enemy ghost to say, Curse your hero, it has to first eliminate the protection your ghost has put up. Dispelling the defend command works just like dispelling the Curse/Haunt/Possess commands.
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted January 06, 2008 10:54 PM |
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Thanks nocaplato, truth be told I have never tried that and was a bit curious how things work  I don't see myself playing it in the future as I value the time inbetween, some games already take too long and I would not like to spend time controlling the ghost too.
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H5 is still alive and kicking, join us in the Duel Map discord server!
Map also hosted on Moddb
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The_Gootch
Honorable
Supreme Hero
Kneel Before Me Sons of HC!!
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posted January 07, 2008 03:02 AM |
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I started serious H5 play with Ghost Mode. For all the things you can supposedly do to affect the map and potential strategies you could use, it didn't work.
And it didn't work because of 3 things. First, Devour is too important a skill to not pump nearly everything into it. That leaves precious few points for everything else.
Second, Possession was too powerful. I personally loved the idea of playing creeps on the map against my opponent. They would notice the possessions and either dispel them(which makes it a devour fight) or just avoid the fight altogether. Doubling a stack's attack/defense through possession was too dangerous.
Third, ghosts move quickly, and even more quickly when you put a little speed into them. This gives way to unnatural and unfair scouting advantages that reminded me of looking over my buddy's shoulder during his turn while we were hotseating H3.
Loved the idea of ghost mode. But I won't play it again.
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nocaplato
Adventuring Hero
Lover of Ancient Philosophy
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posted January 07, 2008 03:34 AM |
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I agree The_Gootch. Ghost mode as it stands now is simply broken. My own gripe with it centers on the curse ability. Even extremely high powered heroes are reduced to drooling imbeciles when they've got a whammy on them. The stat reduction is so bad that you'll end up doing better if you could just leave the troops at a garrison or town and send the hero off to curl up into a festering lump somewhere in a dark hole.
However, in the games we've been playing we've adopted some 'Gentlemen's Rules' that have made ghosts more viable as part of the game.
For one, ghosts in our game are 'attached' to a hero. From that point on, the ghost is only allowed to effect the world in a 1 day marching radius around the hero (the hero's marching radius, not the ghost's). If you want your ghost to possess a creature, the associated hero has to be near enough to reach it. That cuts down on possession/cursing/haunting spams dramatically. It also means that ghosts will rarely have much impact in an opponent's area unless momentum has already started swinging (or on daring hero raids). Scouting is still allowed without a restriction, but scouts are not allowed to influence the 'real world'.
We've applied a few other restrictions and limitations on ghosts in order to make using them interesting, but not outright stupid.
In the end though, I've noticed so many of the ideas the community discusses become part of the patches as they role out. If we have a healthy dialogue about what works and what doesn't, at least it's a good starting point for change.
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted January 07, 2008 06:30 PM |
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Apparently not many people use ghost mode but it's good that you at least covered the basics and gave some insight in the ghost strategy. It seems that ubi found a feature that had potential but did not think it though as much as they should and later did not bother to fix it because it was not popular.
One question: You say that you gain some ghost points in the beginning, how do you gain extra points - according to your opponent's real time rounds? Also is it possible to curse/possess a neutral so your main can defeat it easier?
Also if you had to make some balancing suggestions what would you want changed?
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H5 is still alive and kicking, join us in the Duel Map discord server!
Map also hosted on Moddb
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phoenixreborn
Promising
Legendary Hero
Unicorn
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posted January 07, 2008 06:48 PM |
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This ghost mode wouldn't work with Sim turns either, so I guess they didn't think it through. Still an interesting read. I had forgotten about ghost mode.
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nocaplato
Adventuring Hero
Lover of Ancient Philosophy
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posted January 08, 2008 12:56 AM |
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Quote:
One question: You say that you gain some ghost points in the beginning, how do you gain extra points - according to your opponent's real time rounds? Also is it possible to curse/possess a neutral so your main can defeat it easier?
Right, couple questions I hadn't thought of... Ghost points in non-simultaneous games are awarded at a base rate of 5000 per round. Your opponent has some pre-set amount of real time he's allowed before you'll start accruing extra points, and it seems like a pretty good length of time. Most turns you won't get any extra, even turns that seem kind of long. But there's a break point at some time length (likely somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, but that's just to give you an idea, I haven't bothered timing it).
In simultaneous games (i.e. Tribes of the East) you get only 2000 points, but they seem to accrue more quickly (there isn't as long a real time break point, less than five minutes for sure). Also, because turns are simultaneous till you are likely to meet, you won't get much time to spend those points on the ghost.
As for possessing neutrals, no, you do not get to control the neutral stacks if your own forces are fighting them. Also, if you're playing in allied mode and you possess a neutral, your ally must still fight the neutral as normal. You don't even get to see the battle (in other words, allies can gain absolutely no benefit from possessing neutral stacks for each other).
Quote:
Also if you had to make some balancing suggestions what would you want changed?
I really do want to talk about this most... It's really important, and the best reason to keep this thread alive. But, if it's okay, I'd like to talk about ghost strategy at full length as it stands in the game right now. If we talk about this a bit, talking about suggestions for change will have some context for richer discussion.
Real quick though, in response to
Quote:
This ghost mode wouldn't work with Sim turns either, so I guess they didn't think it through. Still an interesting read. I had forgotten about ghost mode.
Actually, ghost mode does work in simultaneou turns. It's just altered so that you get only the time between when you hit 'End Turn' and when your opponent hits 'End Turn'. If you play your turns faster than your opponent, you'll get ghost modes pretty regularly.
A Word about Devour
The_Gootch had it right to a great extent. The way ghost mode works now is that your Devour stat is so critical that it's difficult to spend points in other areas, like Possess or Curse. It's difficult not to pour every ounce of points into the Devour stat, but at the same time, doing so becomes self defeating. I liken the situation to the battle of wits from the Princess Bride. Do I put the poison in my own cup, or do I put the poison in yours? If know the devour skill is ultra important, do I just pump them in there, knowing you are likely to do the same? Or, should I diversify to make my ghost worth a little something, knowing that you know what I do...
It's all very confusing, but the situation isn't quite as cut and dry as it's been presented.
First, Ghosts do need to move around for you, and that takes ghost points. If you really want to move, you should spend some points in speed, or you'll end up wasting tons of time and ghost energy moving around. Paradoxically, not spending points on speed reduces your Devour stat. The question is how many points should you spend in order to be effective, but still leave plenty of room for the Devour stat (without a doubt the most important Ghost skill).
Second, if you want your ghost to do anything, you'll need to spend points. You need points to protect your mines, haunt his, defend your heroes and so on. That all takes energy points from Devour too. In the end, if you become so fearful of his ghost that all you do is throw your points into Devour each round, you'll end up hating ghost mode because you missed the point.
Third, because you accrue extra points when your opponent takes long turns (and this will happen from time to time) your ghost is going to get extra energy, thus extra action/stats from time to time. Getting only one or two isn't going to alter the game much, but if you get them enough, if your opponent is a cautious thinker or a careful planner, you will have an edge in ghost mode.
Fourth, at the higher end, stats are incredibly hard to raise. By 17th level it starts to take 4 rounds or so to raise a stat by one. But a 17 compared to a 17 is equal. If you've dumped 14000 energy into Devour and get beaten in an equal fight, you've just lost all that extra energy. Energy which could have been spent raising other stats, and raising them much higher (like going from a 1 Possess to a 6 Possess for the same amount of points).
Fifth, when you face an opponent and win, your ghost is going to take damage based on the opponent's revenge stat. That means even the winner will have damage to his ghost. The damage comes in small number increments. You'll get a message like "Your Ghost has defeated the Blue Ghost. Your Shade is -1 Possession and -2 Devour". Your opponent will get a similar message, however, because it's so much harder to raise a stat from 15 to 16, losing a point of Devour that high is going to hurt a lot more than losing a point of Devour for your opponent with a skill of 10 or 11.
Taken together my point is, if you're going to play ghost mode, there are too many variables to assume you can't do anything but pump your Devour stat. Hopefully all that makes sense, and you'd like to do more with your ghosts... So, how do we spend our stats and what do we do with our ghost?
Ghost Strategy in the Current System
First, don't move a muscle. Moving at the beginning is just a bad idea. At least until you've put your speed stat to a decent amount. I'd suggest somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-8 depending on the size of the map and what you decide the ghost is going to be doing most of the time. Pumping your stat passed the 8ish range isn't a good idea because, who needs to run laps around the map with your ghost anyway? A good way to decide the top end of your speed stat might be to set your ghost at the middle of the map (after you've gotten the speed up to at least 5). From the middle, can your ghost reach the corners? If not, you might want to increase it till he can. If you want a faster ghost, you might want to be able to run from map edge to map edge in one turn, but no more. I can't really imagine why you'd need to do even that much, but heck, some people like to go fast. I generally like a speed stat of 6 for normal maps and 7 for large and extra large maps.
Next, your first ghost is going to be best used as a defender/attacker. Fortunately the Devour stat rules both ghost actions. Thus, start boosting Devour. Keep boosting it whenever you have points or nothing else to do. I've never had a Devour higher than 17, but I figure if you can get up to about that high... you should still pump extra points into Devour.
Now, you can't just pump his Devour stat. You must also use him to protect your mines and your heroes. That's going to be his first real job, and it should happen right away. A ghost can protect any number of heroes and mines. It's not critical that he defend them during the first few days, but you'll want to defend your main by the end of the first week sometime. If possible and opportunity presents itself, do it when your hero comes near your main castle to pick up troops or something. Don't make a special trip with your hero just to get ghost protection thought. If you're hero is too far out there and can't return, just send the ghost. That's why they're so darn fast.
Once your speed is up to a decent amount your ghost should also run around to each of the mines you've flagged and protect them. This is critically important. Do it. If you don't, you will regret it. The reason: Ghosts can haunt as many mines as they can reach and have points for the 'haunt' action in a single turn. That means one turn your production and mines could be swimming along great, no problems at all. The next turn a fast ghost could have just put the noogy on every one of your resource generators (except the silo). If you've used the Defend action though, all that stops. Ghosts are only allowed to get in one fight per turn. That means, if they come up to the gold mine your ghost has protected, they have to dispel the curse before moving on to the sulfer mine right next to it. They can't just whammy the mine and skip along to the next. This slows down enemy ghost actions massively and forces your opponent's ghost into fight after fight as he works to dispel, then whammy your mines/heroes.
Now, when you play ghost mode, you'll likely encounter a new artifact out there with your hero. It's called a soul stone and it looks like most other artifacts, with a blue/white shimmer of light around it. If you see one, get it. That little bugger adds a ghost to your roster in ghost mode. A second, third or fourth ghost is very useful, and in all the maps that shipped with the game, you'll be able to get that many or more.
The second (and successive ghosts) add a layer of strategy to the ghost mode. My suggestion for the new ghost warrior is to isolate specific skills you want each ghost to have and specialize, specialize, specialize. Each ghost should end up with 2 skills over the 10 range and, of course, speed around 6-8. The skill every ghost needs is Devour, so even your secondary ghosts will need a decent Devour stat. Then, decide what you want the ghost to do... Haunt, Curse or Possess, and pour points into that skill also... possibly even more so.
Don't try to make one uber-ghost who's great somehow at everything. You'll just end up with a ghost who can't really do anything well. You could also create a purely evil Revenge based ghost where you split the points between only Devour and Revenge (though just revenge is interesting too). That ghost can become your hatchet ghost, a ghost you send intentionally to lose, just so you can damage an enemy ghost with a Devour skill through the roof.
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nocaplato
Adventuring Hero
Lover of Ancient Philosophy
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posted January 11, 2008 02:15 AM |
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Drawbacks to the Current System
Legion. The ghost mode setup is in desperate need of a reworking in order to make things balanced and interesting. Whether it's the way haunting or cursing works, the amount of actions your ghost can perform, the incredible speed your ghost can attain, or the pure power a ghost has, the ectoplasmic mode is so fraught with difficulties it's a difficult to know where to begin or how to start talking about it.
Harkening back to the story I told at the beginning, Sinitar against paired opponents, Necromancer and Inferno, offers a wedge into this conundrum. As mentioned earlier, Sinitar was a very powerful hero in our game, though his army was comparatively weak. In the end, however, because my opponents were succesful at cursing him, the game became a parody of its own roots. The careful strategy of building the hero and establishing an empire became entirely secondary as the Ghost Mode crippled my 'real turns' by making Sinitar so weak he couldn't effectively do anything. The Curse on him was so powerful, once my defending ghost was dispersed, that fighting with my hero was actually a drawback. Furthermore, once my defending ghosts were scattered, it becamse so difficult to lift the curse that my only option was to intentionally allow Sinitar to be defeated in battle so I could hire him back uncursed.
The same happened to my resource production. I've mentioned that your ghost should defend your mines early in order to slow down the onslaught of enemy hauntings. I learned that lesson when I failed to defend my mines. Once the Inferno player decided to start a war with me (rather than the Necromancer) he used his ghost's hauting skill to incredibly effective results, haunting all my mines within two days and stopping almost all my resource income, crippling my ability to develop as well as income from gold mines and resource sales, not to mention dramatically slowing my Tier 7 creature purchasing power (without the sulfer, there are no dragons).
In the end, the 'actual' game, my 'actual' turns, were all but pointless.
All this boils down to one, possibly surprising, fact. Ghosts are simply overpowered. It seems surprising because, to me, ghost mode should be an extra little something you get to do during your down time. It shouldn't supercede what happens with your money, your towns, your heroes, your artifacts or your armies. Unfortunately it can do just that.
It doesn't make much sense to try to redesign the entire ghost system, or to make changes so dramatic that they can't be easily executed in a patch. For that reason, I feel the changes should be simple to implement and shouldn't dramatically alter the way ghost mode is currently handled. Here are a few ideas that I would think could be added pretty easily:
Speed
To start with, the formula for ghost movement needs to change somehow. Ghosts are incredibly, ridiculously fast. Even with a little energy expenditure, your ghost becomes an uber-scout, not only ultra fast, but also able to bypass almost all obstacles, scouting terrain very far afield. As I see it there are a couple possibilities, changing the formula for movement, or adding a fog of war effect to ghost vision.
The formula for energy -> tile moves needs to be altered. Instead of using a base of 200/speed stat = energy to move it should go something more like 200/(Speed * .2). A base Speed of 5 would be an 'average' speed allowing you to move 25 tiles per round, while a Speed of 10 would double that to 100 energy per tile. As it stands now the speed increase is far too fast, doubling with only a minor increase to speed and the bare minimum of energy investment. A 10 speed, perfectly attainable, would give your ghost the ability to move somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 tiles, still making him faster than most heroes, while a truely dedicated scout could move up to 75 or 100 tiles (with a Speed of 15 or 20).
To compensate for the reduction in speed, ghosts should not be subject to terrain penelties for movement. It seems silly they suffer terrain penalties in the first place, as if a ghost somehow has a harder time travelling over rocks than it does over a road. Conversely, it's probably okay for a ghost to have some sort of home terrain bonus (say +5 to speed stat on home terrains), representing the way haunts are associated with one area.
Another possibility is the adding a Fog of War to the ghost's vision. If speed remains the same, fine, but accurate information should only be possible if the ghost has traveled through the area that turn.
Between the two, I prefer reducing the effectiveness of the Speed stat because it cuts down on micromanagement. A fog of war means your ghost scout has to be set on a constant patrol.
Ghost Actions
Ghosts should only be allowed to Haunt, Curse or Possess once per turn, just like the defend or dispel actions. Executing more of these kinds of actions per turn is just overkill.
In addition, the amount of Haunting, Cursing or Possessing a ghost can do should be limited somehow. Perhaps it could be connected to the respective stat, such that your ghost is allowed to haunt or possess 1 item per 2 points in the stat. It's too much that a ghost can haunt any and everything it comes across. Tieing the amount of actions to the stats this way would also make increasing the stats more interesting and valuable, making the energy expenditure more strategically interesting. It would also make the actual haunting and possession choices more important. If you can only Possess 6 creatures, you're going to choose more carefully just which ones you pick.
Curse, on the other hand, should be much more severely limited. There are far fewer heroes on the map, so allowing a ghost to Curse one hero for every 5 points of Curse stat seems much more interesting.
With these changes, incidentally, should come the option to dispel your own Hauntings, Cursings and Possessions. That way you could change which actions your ghost has performed to fit a dynamically changing environment.
Devour
The way ghost combat is handled needs to be changed as well. Simply having a slightly higher Devour skill shouldn't mean your ghost automatically wins whatever tussle it gets into. Instead it should be some sort of ratio. The simplest way to do this would be by comparing two scores. Let's say two ghost are fighting, one with a Devour 10, the other with a Devour 5. These should be handled by a randomly generated percentage comparison so that the ghost has a change to win the fight based on: Devour Stat/(Devour 1 + Devour 2). The Devour 10 ghost would have a 66 2/3 % chance to win in such a fight. This would allow for much more fluid Ghost battles where the outcome isn't a forgone conclusion.
If that system is too skewed toward the lower stat, perhaps it could be: Devour Stat squared/(Devour 1 squared/Devour 2 squared). In the prior example, this would mean the ghost with twice as much Devour would win 80% of the time. Still though, the ghost with the lower stat would occasionally win a ghostly battle, making each fight a more dicey proposition for the tougher ghost. After all, tough warriors do occasionally lose to the weaker foe (even if it's rare).
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fiur
Promising
Supreme Hero
Map Creator
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posted January 11, 2008 06:45 AM |
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oh man ty alot for this infromation.....
you've styding this, maybe we should try this ghost mode in the ToH tourney too? what do ya think guys??
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