[Wesnoth-dev] 4 Things or Another of my Meta Mails

[James Spencer]

1) On the topic of Terrain:
- Lava & it's transitions have been in CVS for longer than I've been
here. How about Lava as on alias of Canyon? What letter should be
used? This also fits in with the idea of other underground terrains.

- Freshwater spring. This would be an 'Oasis' for deciduous climes.
Since we have the healing only Oasis for the desert maybe o Northern
contemporary for it would be nice? A good Tile for this would be the
pretty forest pond with the stones around it that freim drew some time
ago. Letter? (I'm iffy on this, I just though it would be 'neat')

- Magic wand the grass off the canyons and draw them as an overly?
This would forever end the grass dependency for canyons, and would
make them portable to underground environments.

2) I mentioned this before, and nobody objected, but I never got
around to it: I was hoping I could move the UNIT and PUT_IMG macros
from trow-macros.cfg to utils.cfg. I would like to rename PUT_IMG to
PLACE_IMAGE (it puts a png on a tile) and I'd like to add the new
'loyal' trait to the UNIT Macro. UNIT is implemented as a Macro in
many campaigns and I intend to move HttT over to it. This macro
handles the most common case of placing a unit on a tile. I also
intend to use PLACE_IMAGE in HttT to spruce some things up a bit...
Since my schedule will be getting better soon I thought I'd mention
this before I did it...

3) The evil, evil, evil bane of inconsistently priced upgrades. This
is a BIG problem when it comes to building consistent difficulty
schemes in Campaigns and is also a problem in any MP era that has
units that are recrutable & that aren't at the beginning of an
advancement line.

At this moment in time out 'Beginning of advancement line" costs are
pretty good. They get reviewed a lot. 'Pretty good' goes off the cliff
when a unit levels... The cost goes up according to factors that
nobody knows... and that vary widely... EP plugged our units into some
formula and came up with this in his most recent version:

http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=64166#64166

EP (love him or hate him):
a) Knows Units
b) At least has a consistent, if not perfect, system

Right now some of these values seem a bit low on level 2 but this
looks promising. I've never been an advocate of surrendering the job
of making unit costs to an automated process (any system like this
will likely just reflect the bias of its author, and it's hard to
built a system that takes 'feel' into account, or the desire to make a
unit more scarce / common by meddling with price) but this looks
promising... assuming he gets this straightened out I'd like to use
this pricing scheme for units that aren't at the beginning of an
advancement line.

Assuming the next version brings the cost up on some of the lv. 2
units I'd like to implement this scheme... With prior review of
course.

4) At my request EP PMed me a list of perceived imbalances in our
units. This is a long list of things (That's why it's at the end of
this mail). The Overcosted upgrades is addressed by #3 above.

I AM NOT SUGGESTING WE ADOPT THIS WHOLESALE, but I am appending it for
our consideration as there are some valid things in there.

Elvish Pillager Wrote:
"
Here's a list of units that could use some fixing. It's probably not
completely complete, but it contains pretty much everything that I've
noticed is wrong with the units, with the exception of things that I
think are wrong but a majority of other people already didn't.
 
Weak upgrades: 
-Soulless: Increase melee to 7-2, HP to 28, decrease cost to 11. 
-Elvish Rider: Increase melee to 6-4, ranged to 7-3. 
-Elvish Outrider: Increase melee to 9-4, ranged to 7-4, HP to 54. 
-Gryphon Master: increase melee to 13-3. [1] 
-Direwolf Rider: increase claws to 7-3. [2] 
-Draug: Increase melee to 12-4, or decrease Revenant's melee to 7-4. 
-Dwarvish Stalwart: increase HP to 42, increase ranged to 9-1.
Increase Sentinel's HP to 50. [3]
-Necrophage: Increase melee to 8-3. 
 
Overpowered units: 
-Orcish Assassin: Increase cost to 18. 
-Troll Whelp: Increase cost to 13. 
-Wraith: Decrease melee to 5-4. Increase ranged to 5-3 to compensate. 
-Spectre: Decrease melee to 7-4. Increase ranged to 6-4 to compensate. 
-Shadow: Decrease melee to 7-3. 
 
Units that get worse when levelling: 
-Knight: Give Paladin an 8-4 blade. 
-Ghost: Make Wraiths' and Spectres' melee do cold damage and set
Wraiths', Spectres', and Ghosts' resistance to 50%.
-Necromancer: New unit to upgrade to, "Necromaster" perhaps [4], with
smallfoot + cold resist & these stats or similar: 15-2 magic, 78
HP[5], 7-3 melee.
 
Obviously overcosted level 2 units: [6] 
Elvish Marksman: Reduce cost to 42, increase Ranger cost to 42. [7] 
Elvish Druid: Reduce cost to 48. 
Elvish Sorceress: Reduce cost to 48. 
Outlaw: Reduce cost to 28. 
White Mage: Reduce cost to 54. 
Red Mage: Reduce cost to 50. 
 
Incongruity: 
-Chocobone: Give skeletal resistance. 
-Death Knight: Give skeletal resistance, or armoredfoot, or some
unholy combination like: armoredfoot defense, undead movement, 50% vs.
blade, 50% vs. pierce, 0% vs. impact, -100% vs. holy, -20% vs. fire,
30% vs. cold. Probably just skeletal resistances though.
-Dark Spirit: Possibly reduce melee to 7-4 and increase ranged to 8-3
to match Spectre changes.
 
Other stuff: 
-Necrophage: Reduce xp-to-level equal to 32; as it is, no-one is going
to want to waste that much XP on making it level up into itself. You
could almost have a Draug with that much.
-Troll Rocklobber: Add to Age of Heroes Northerner recruit list.
(didn't make this on the forum, but it's too obvious)
 
[1] Yes, trained gryphons can do more damage than wild ones. 
[2] At 5-2, it's not even likely enough to hit to ever be effective.
An increase to the primary attack would also be reasonable, but not at
all necessary.
[3] 50 is the lowest HP the Sentinel can have for which no Guardsman
can have as much HP as any Sentinel.
[4] Don't leave it unimplemented just because nobody's come up with a
cool ability that everyone can agree on. That's not even particularly
likely to ever happen. The nice thing is, we already do have a nice
set of graphics.
[5] It's a reasonable amount of HP when you look at the Necromancer's.
Possibly the Necromancer's HP could be reduced and its magic improved?
Not necessarially a good idea, since it would throw off the balance of
a lot of scenarios.
[6] (a response to your(Shade's) PM) Once I can get this dang thing
working, I have an effective formula plugged into a program which will
go through the units and generate reasonably accurate costs for their
advancements, but until then, no sense in leaving things way out of
whack when it's easy to make them at least a little better.
[7] No sense having the Ranger cost less when it's probably better and
most people prefer it anyway."