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| Thread: Training Creatures vs Recruiting Creatures | |
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RedSoxFan3
Admirable
Legendary Hero
Fan of Red Sox
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posted July 18, 2003 06:44 AM |
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Training Creatures vs Recruiting Creatures
Personally I do not like the idea of supplies as it would only add more micromanagement to the game instead of adding more strategy. Micromanagement should be involved, but fairly limited. As for me I have found the building in HOMM to become routine and almost micromanagement. I would like to see some more strategy in HOMM in building and recruiting creatures instead of just "build this" and "here are your creatures."
However, I do like the idea of training units. I would like to expand on this.
Well my thought is to use your idea of "supplies" and the idea of "training units" to make my own idea.
First I will start by saying that creatures can still be recruited every week as always. But this will be cut in half or cut even more than that. Example: 10 centaurs would be the max recruiting every week.
But... you can "train" an infinate amount of creatures. However only a certain amount of training can take place at one time. For example you could train let's say 5 Titans at once or you could train like 50 elves at once.
Training will take place from one building, the barracks or whatever you want to call it for each town. You must research how to train certain units at the barracks instead of building creature structures. It is basically the same, but will fit better this way in the senario of training troops instead of recruiting.
Bare with me for a sec, but Do you know how the spell points are used universally instead of having points for each spell as they were in HOMM1?
Here's my idea. The barracks is able to train only a certain amount of troops at one time. This will be universal for all troops just like spell points are universal for all spells. This is realistic in that a barracks can only do so much at one time, and could concentrate on training one desired troop instead of seven different troops all at once.
To add another piece to this thought, let's say a barracks has training points. Certain towns would generate different amounts training points than other towns. This would make every town unique.
Creatures take up training points while being trained. Once they are trained the training points are available in the barracks again. Creatures also take different amounts of time to be trained. A titan would take up maybe 100 training points and it would take 10 days to train it. However a magi would take up 15 training points and would only take 5 days to train. Maybe some units would take a really long time to train, but require a very small amount of training points. Let's say that Archangels would require only 50 training points, but take 2 weeks to train they also only cost like 2000 gold and 1 gem. Allowing them too take a really long time to get them, but still allow other creatures to be trained in the mean time making that town that has Archangels unique in that respect.
The player is now thinking. Do I want to stay back and wait for those Titans or rush them in a couple days with Magi and Gremlins. I think this would make HOMM add a new aspect of strategy on choosing creatures and would allow towns to be even more unique instead of methodically going along.
BUILD LEVEL3,
BUILD LEVEL4,
BUILD LEVEL5,
BUILD LEVEL6,
Oh! It's a new week! Now I get to recruit my creatures. OH yeah! Now I get to wait another week.
BUILD LEVEL7,
BUILD CASTLE.
To keep the upgrading creatures aspect, you could research in the Barracks ways to improve your creatures after they are able to be trained. You could improve armor, speed, etc. You could also research how to recruit certain units faster or allow your barracks to train more creatures at once. So I guess I do like your idea, lol. I just I think wanted some more strategy in building towns without the hassle of one building a turn.
I just realized this!
How to tell the difference between micromanagement and strategy in new ideas:
Does the player have a choice in what is happening or is it simply a requirement before the desired result happens?
Please take this as constructive criticism. I find that requiring supplies for creatures is only micromanagement, however I think your idea can be built upon by adding some choices to the player on how to use your "supplies" or separate cost for getting troops. The more choices the more that micromanagement becomes strategy.
That is why chess is pure strategy. Everything is a choice.
btw, I've always hated towns like rampart, tower, etc. because it basically forces the order of building on you with its massive prerequisites. Where is the strategy in that? You can't really choose what to build first.
Note: This post was originally in H5 building/Resources, but I decided to make my own thread as it is a radically different topic evolved from that thread.
I have not yet decided about this. The idea credited to DoddtheSlayer is for rush training. Now I was thinking that it would be cool to have this option, but aren't there already smaller creatures that take less time? So I thought that it would take care of the problem that way. But what if you need a big tank and those take a long time for a certain town to train and you need them quick. I thought that they could go out early, but would often freeze in combat due to low morale. Creatures that do not have morale would "look confused and do nothing." Or there could be something like the spell forgetfulness so a stack of "rush-trained troops" forget to attack or something like that. Perhaps the creatures require experience like the Heroes gains experience. After a certain amount of experience, they become fully-trained. This way you can recruit some big creatures quick and train them as you battle.
That gives me another idea. Creatures should also gain experience like Heroes gain experience. A certain amount of experience of trained troops makes them veteran troops, but this would be hard to program or it would be confusing, so maybe the creature stack would just increase as they fought instead kinda like necromacy.
There could be a hero ability called "training" that increases the amount of experience gained in combat. This could be a specialized art kinda like skeleton farming or demon farming. I really like those parts of HOMM3
Does anyone have ideas for some penalty or cost for "rush-training?"
I was thinking that maybe you could pay resources for rush training.
Another idea for creatures. You could hire mercenaries. These are creatures that you recruit, but you have to pay to fight. The harder the battle the more money. This doesn't mean that attacking Level 7's will cost more than attacking Level 1's. It means that if you attack Level 5's with a weak scout it will cost more than attacking Level 7's with like 40 Archangles and a great hero.
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Go Red Sox!
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Gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted July 18, 2003 11:21 AM |
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yeah, that's a good point that there's only one building and the same training points are required to train any creature. the idea of training is not very new, but this might be the functionality that would actually make it work the way it should. and actually i would rather call it training space or something like that, maybe training capacity, instead of points.
now i wonder if and how this system could be appied if we had a few different upgrade trees and built one training building for each tree.
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Draco
Promising
Famous Hero
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posted July 18, 2003 03:52 PM |
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I have another radical idea.
I like your idea on the training but... how would you justify a behemoth? no amount of training will make a goblin a behemoth, or a thunderbird (im using heroes 3 units)
How about we leave the system in heroes 4, no upgrades at castles, but.... here is the major idea i have, units upgrade, when you fight a battle with any given group, you have can earn experiance.
Your unit needs to inflict its HPx2 in damage to the ennemy to upgrade, but instead of upgrading instantly after battle, thus using up your free slots, it gives you a exp meter under the units.
you have 500 goblins,
XXX
XXXXX <-- pic of goblins
XXX
200exp
Upgrade 20 (200/10) (you can upgrade 20 because you hit 200 damage so far)
when you want to upgrade them, you simply double click and it there will be a upgrade button.
This adds an immense amount of strategy to the game, do you upgrade right away and have a weak group of upgraded units? or wait for them all? maybe giants you want to upgrade right away, to make titans?
With this system people will be foreced to decide if they can win a battle or not, if you cannot win the battle you may just leave instead of allowing the ennemy to gain experiance.
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Gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted July 18, 2003 05:53 PM |
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if 'immense amount of strategy' would be as simple as having small stack versus waiting for large stack..
ok, back to the topic.
you don't actually have to upgrade goblins to behemoths. to get behemoths in the training dwelling, you probably have to do something anyway. and this something could be a behemoth dwelling. the dwelling grants an invisible behemoth population of undefined size. to recruit them you have to train them in the recruiting hall. isn't too complicated, is it? well, there could be some other solution, but i think it could work that way without any trouble.
the upgrade tree could work the way that the upgrades could only be trained from the basic units in the training hall. you just keep the units you want to upgrade in the training hall and pay the gold and wait for the training to be completed. the space available in the training hall determins the amount of creatures trained at a time.
maybe you might even be able to upgrade the training hall or build multiple training halls. maybe an upgarde of the training hall would be needed for higher level units and you could have multiple training halls with different levels of upgrades. or maybe the training hall capacity would increase with the castle upgrade. or maybe this multiple and upgraded training hall idea is not a good one at all.
as an alternative i wouldn't exclude training creatures in combat, maybe more or less the way you (draco) mentioned it, but there could also be some principally different ways to do this.
whatever.. i start to like the training hall idea the more i think of it.
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RedSoxFan3
Admirable
Legendary Hero
Fan of Red Sox
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posted July 19, 2003 05:54 AM |
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Then with troops like that you could say it's "breeding" or "summoning"
So now there are 3 different places. Barracks, Breeding Pit, and Summoner's Guild. So you can summon, train, or breed them. As for the building tree...
Town hall --> Barracks + Breeding Pit
The Barracks and Breeding Pit each give 3 creatures of levels 1-6.
Mage Guilds --> Summoner's Guild
Summoner's Guild gives creatures from levels 5-7.
Upgrades to the Barracks will require other structures or upgrades to be built.
Upgrading the Summoner's Guild requires the Mage Guild to be at higher levels.
The idea that training, breeding, summoning, should take time, I also think that building should be the same way. This way you can build more than one thing at a time, but it will take time for it to be completed.
Actually let me change my whole thought again. All the building, getting creatures is in one town, so shouldn't this all be grouped into one category of Town Effort based on population. And you can have a certain amount of people building one structure, a certain amount of people training creatures, and a certain amount of people researching to upgrade buildings, spells, or troops.
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Go Red Sox!
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Gerdash
Responsible
Famous Hero
from the Animated Peace
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posted July 19, 2003 12:21 PM |
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as far as i understand, you mean there is some number of points of town output per day, you assign 70% of the points to be used for training (if you have the barracks) and 30% of the points to be used for building, right?
maybe some efficiency limitations would be appropriate here, i wouldn't expect all the town population to train troops in barracks or all the town population building one small building.
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and i would suggest to keep the population invisible if possible.
the towns could have effort or command that could be dependent on the levels of fort or maybe also town hall. fort levels could imho be interpreted as increasing the influence of the castle, making it harder for the peasants to rebel and making the nobles bolder in their demands.
so at same town upgrade levels the town output would be the same in all towns. i don't see a serious reason to make the population visible here.
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Djive
Honorable
Supreme Hero
Zapper of Toads
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posted July 19, 2003 09:11 PM |
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Edited By: Djive on 13 Aug 2003
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My take on the towns is that they have a population. You get both the population and the training centre when you buy the creature dwelling.
The population produces recruits but is limited by the access to limited "recruitable" material.
1. Only a small portion of the population are eligible for becoming recruits. (Mainly because population are needed for keeping the town going, too young, too old, temporarily wounded, used for breeding or whatever.)
2. The training fascility by itself cannot train recruits unless they fulfill special input requirements.
When it comes to creatures gaining additional powers then I prefer my "Leaders" idea (accessible through my profile). It avoids the nasty problems you get when creating a creature XP system, by assigning improved stats to a particula creature which is called "Leader".
With this background there is two ways to increase production.
1. Increase the population. (Town size, or rather the seize of the relevant population. Having lots of Elves will not increase Unicorn production.)
2. Improve the training fascilities so that it has greater capacity. (How many creatures that become recruitable each week.)
So I've always felt that training already existed in heroes, it was just not obvious that it was there.
Edited: Decided to give RedSoxFan a +QP for this topic.
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"A brilliant light can either illuminate or blind. How will you know which until you open your eyes?"
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RedSoxFan3
Admirable
Legendary Hero
Fan of Red Sox
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posted July 21, 2003 05:36 AM |
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I understand your points of how Homm does train their troops, but I see this as the creators mistaking this for conscripting or hiring the creatures instead, since training doesn't happen instantaneously. Recruiting creatures is similar to training creatures, but I think that I would like the system of training taking time better, since you can choose and plan what creatures you want to fit your style instead of getting X amount of creatures every week like in the other Homm's. It just feels like the game is less restrictive this way.
My whole purpose in this was to keep the turn-based strategy, but stay away from the restrictions like one build a turn for every town and giving set creatures every week. I also think that some buildings should take longer to build than others. And that a town should be able to build more than one thing at a time. As much as I like this game, I've always disliked the one build a turn thing.
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Go Red Sox!
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Magus
Hired Hero
Warper of Time-Space
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posted July 21, 2003 05:47 PM |
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An idea just occured to me:
How bout you can hire creatures normally, but you can train them at a lesser cost, but it would take time. So if you needed troops now, then you would hire the veterans and the mercenaries. But if you were just raising an army, you would pay less to hire average joe [insert creature type], and train him to be a functional part of your army.
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So was the land riven by Chaos and Destruction, and so it was cleansed from existence. I did this, the Magus of Ly'kail, Magus of the Sylvan Kingdoms.
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RedSoxFan3
Admirable
Legendary Hero
Fan of Red Sox
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posted July 21, 2003 11:03 PM |
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I already said that you could hire creatures normally, but to build a bigger army you would need to train units. It would just be a smaller amount than previously like without castle or citadel.
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Go Red Sox!
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B0rsuk
Promising
Famous Hero
DooM prophet
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posted August 14, 2003 09:44 AM |
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Edited By: B0rsuk on 14 Aug 2003
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Here's why I don't like i
While not bad idea itself, it would require PERFECT CREATURE COST BALANCE.
Heroes4 isn't known for good creature and cost balance. Vampires ? Ok, Venom Spawns are worthy replacement, but it's not the point.
Genies or Nagas ?
Medusas or Minotaurs ?
Cyclops or Ogre Magi ?
MOreover, it WOULD NOT WORK in a game like Homm without drastic changes. You see, it works fine in most RTS games, because you can't make your army out of one creature type. That's because different units have different purposes, strenghts and weaknesseses (sp??). Rocket soldiers massacre tanks, flamethrowers - infantry, tanks - other vehicles etc.
In Homm, there are creatures like that:
poor
average
good
very good
...
There are usually no reasons to pick lower level creatures instead of higher. This is especially true for Homm4, where differences between creature levels are more significant.
In Homm3, Mighty Gorgons or Dendroid Soldiers are deffinitely worth their cost, and dangerous for level7 creatures.
Features like "pikemen are good against cavalry" won't work in Homm. Ok, they negate first strike ability but they're no match.
Creatures in Homm are waay too different to be put in categories like infantry-cavalry-ranged... Is Scorpicore cavalry ? What about Efreeti ?
Most Fortress players would (if Dragonflies are unavailable) mass Mighty Gorgons and nothing else.
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Dingo
Responsible
Legendary Hero
God of Dark SPAM
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posted August 15, 2003 05:44 AM |
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Its sounds alot like Warcraft... I like how HOMM is a very individual game. I think that less needs to be changed and more needs to be improved on.
Moderator's note:This topic has been closed, as it refers to an older version of the game. To discuss Heroes 3, please go to Library Of Enlightenment, to discuss Heroes 4, please go to War Room Of Axeoth, to discuss Heroes 5, go to Temple Of Ashan.
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The Above Post/Thread/Idea Is CopyRighted by, The Dingo Corp.
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