Well this is the Elemental Ideas Forum so here's another one of my topics providing ideas for the game.
Every unit can have one or more tags which characterize the unit. These tags can be used to provide the units with benefits or disadvantages for the types of terrain, weather, weapons, spells, etc., :
1) Humans: Probably one of the more common unit types, can be found in almost any location on a map and the most likely to have established towns. One example would be a Crossbow Man.
2)Beasts: I recall reading the game has beast types already and these would more likely be found in jungles and forests yet can be almost anywhere. They are unpredictable yet probably have dangerous reactions to travelers. One example of a beast would be a giant squid.
3)Demons: Might be found in the deepest areas of a dungeon or cave yet sometimes have been summoned with powerful magic. They are a strong unholy force. One example would be a succubus.
4)Animals: These creatures are more likely to be found in areas of vegetation yet are unlikely to attack travelers. Many types of animals can be domesticated then trained to fight and some even made into mountable units. One example of an animal would be a horse.
5)Angelic: Might be found on the top of the highest of mountains or plateaus yet sometimes have been summoned with powerful magic. They are a strong holy force. One example of an angelic would be an Arch_Angel.
6)Undead: The undead are more likely to be found in caves, graveyards or dungeons yet sometimes have been summoned/created using Necromancy magic. One example of an undead would be a vampire.
7)Insects: Insects can be found anywhere on a map except for areas of where its cold. They will thrive in wet warm locations. One example of an insect would a giant spider.
8)Magical: A magical creature is one which has been created from magic or something which has been greatly changed because of magic. One example of a magical creature would be an Iron Golem.
9)Plant_Life: These are usually found near sources of water and thrive in wet warm locations. Plant_Life cannot move on its own and typically used in war for defensive reasons. Sometimes magic can teleport Plant_Life type units into battle and special mechanical moving devices have been used for moving Plant_Life units. One example of a Plant_Life unit would be a Giant Venus FlyTrap.
10)Mechanical: These are found being controlled by another unit type of high intelligence and are usually war machines which cannot move or strike on their own. Only through magic would it be possible for a mechanical unit to move and attack on its own. One example of a mechanical unit would be a catapult.
11)Reptilian: These are usually found in warm/hot locations on a map with a preference near water and stay away from cold locations. One example of a reptilian would be an alligator.
12)Alien: These creatures are rare and not from this realm. They might have come from the stars inside an asteroid or another dimension from a torn astral portal.
Ideally the custom modding of units would allow gamers to create their own special units thus if someone wanted to create a demon spirit they could give it the tag of being undead and a demon. Another unit someone might want to create would be a two-headed fire spitting lizardman which would have the tag of reptilian and magical.
It would be neat to have "god" dragons like the ones in Guild wars. There is one area whith a massive ice lake and if you look down through the surface there is a huge dragon frozen in the ice hibernating.
In another area you can view these "mountains" in the distance that are actually the scale ridges on the tail of a massive dragon.
I definitely agree with you. I love the concept of dragons being akin to forces of nature. I'm really excited to playing a game where the presence of a single unit makes me panic or despair - whether that unit is a dragon, or a channeler, or some other truly powerful creature or being.
That said, whether dragons or other sentient fantastical creatures are considered 'beasts' or to be in some other class of their own doesn't really matter to me. I don't really care what they're called, I care what they are in the game. Just because a Bear and a Dragon (let's say, though it appears dragons aren't) are both considered to be beasts doesn't mean there has to be a whole lot in common between them.
Humanoid - \ -- Human /Sentient -
Beast - \ -- Dragon /Sentient -
A Dragon can be a 'Beast' as well as a 'Sentient'.
Sammual
The point is valid but the diagrams are not. A sentient humanoid needn't necessarily be human (in Elemental 'sentient humanoid' would describe Fallen just as well as humans). But yes, that was my point - that Dragons could be beasts without losing any of what makes them special; although it looks like the devs have chosen to go another route and make Dragons a separate class entirely. Hopefully there will be other fantastical beings powerful enough to that a small group of them would be almost as frightening as a dragon, too.
The diagram was to show that Human inherited both Humanoid and Sentient and that Dragon inherited both Beast and Sentient (Should it have been Beast -> Reptile -> Dragon?).
With Tags or inheritance or 'whatever you want to call it' you can create a new Unit types by building on what has already been done and adding few or no new tags. The Tags or groups can be used in spells, random map generation, Tacticle AI, and other places to make this a better game.
I don't know if something that is a 'beast' can really be sentient by definition. One of the definitions of beast is 'an animal as distinguished from humans', another is 'a person who is brutish or vile', and lastly 'a lower animal'. Well, dragons are certainly not 'lower animals' and in many stories they are able to turn into humans. It makes the line between dragon and human very fuzzy. Its like calling sentient aliens, "beasts". it just doesn't seem right, even if they walk on all 4 limbs. (pardon the example, its the first that came to mind) in animorphs they would never call the <whatever the thing with the antenne are> beasts. I'm nitpicking a little with the name, but the reason is because I am fairly sure they are going to be their own catigory (and not mounts, as cool as that would be)
For some reason I can never call a dragon a reptile. I just can't imagine them to be cold blooded creatures. But I guess its the same reason I don't like calling them beasts, I think too highly of them to imagine them being so dependent on external heat.
At least in the context of this game I see 'beast' as any non-human[oid?] creature, including everything from squirrels to wolves to bears sea monsters to Ents to Dragons. Basically, just as a way to differentiate the playable factions from the creatures that roam the wilds.
Also, RE dragons being reptilian and thus cold-blooded... Being cold-blooded can be a major advantage in some cases; in the right environment it can be much more efficient than being warm-blooded, and large cold-blooded creatures actually have it even better - their large volume to surface area ratio makes retaining heat easier and thus makes cold-bloodedness even more efficient. And on top of that dragons, being magical, could use magic to warm themselves when their surroudings are too cold. This gives them the best of both worlds - better efficiency as well as the ability to function normally in less than ideal environments
Types.. Types.. Types..
I don't see it. You've got a man, you give him stuff, you train him to use it, what would a "type" have to do with it? It would just be some kind of sub-classification of this. There's more variety without limiting units like that. Any special feature of a certain kind of troop would then be some kind of attribute.
Without Tag Types... how would someone create a spell which heals all units except the undead? Do you expect someone to actually edit all the living units and provide each of them an attribute for one spell ?
no, we expect them to edit all undead so that they are not healed by that spell.
That could eventually be 100+ undead units... and three spells of this type would triple the effort. Much easier for assigning a single tag when a unit is created and then once the spell is created you only need to reference the tag as compared with editing 100+ undead units for each spell of this category.
Yeah, really. I'm on NTJedi's boat on this one. For one, editing every undead to not be healed or editing every living unit to be healed - either way it's an enormous amount of effort for a really small effect. Also, it would add so many opportunities for mods and other custom content to be completely incompatible with each other. Let's say you download a player-made spell meant to affect all undead units, and then you download a unit pack of new types of undead creatures. That spell wouldn't affect those new undead beings, at least not until you go in and edit each one of those undead units to be affected by that custom spell. It would be an absolute nightmare!
Tag system is definitely the way to go. It lets you achieve the exact same effects with a tiny fraction of the amount of effort. It doesn't limit your creativity at all as long as you can create and edit tags.
I'd expect that once we create an attribute that let it not be effected by the healing spell, the it wouldn't be any different from adding a 'tag'. you just pick it from the list to add to the unit.
The problem with 'tags' is what if you want to mix and match. like having an undead animal alien dragonoid with cybernetic enhancements? There would be no way to do it if there is a tag feature. I wouldn't be able to tell if it should be undead, dragon, alien, or mechinacial.
I think it would be different in the case of custom spells that might not exist (or which you might not have downloaded) at the time of creation of the unit.. because you can't haev a drop down saying "unaffected by this spell" for a spell that doesn't exist yet.. but you could give it a general tag, and then the custom spell maker can incorporate "does not affect creatures with this tag" when they create their spell.. that seems to me less likely to have holes in it.
Then why not allow the adding of multiple tags? There's no reason that they should be mutually exclusive (assuming someone wants to make such a bizarre creature ). You'd just need a clear set of decision rules for spell effects i.e. if a spell doesn't work for ANY of the given tags then it doesn't work on that creature.
More or less what Jonny said. But to elaborate, your system only works one way. If I want to make a Holy Light spell that heals everything but the undead, then I'd have to create an attribute "Not affected by Holy_Light," go and apply it to every undead creature. Then if I download new undead creatures, I'd have to go apply it to those ones as well.
Whereas if we use a tag system ala NTJedi's suggestion, anyone who creates an undead unit would give it the undead tag; and if I want to make a spell that doesn't affect the undead, all I'd have to do is go into the spell editor and where it says, "Does not affect ______", I'd choose "Undead" from the drop-down menu.
And what if I want a Holy Light spell that heals living units, hurts undead units, and doesn't affect inanimate or mechanical units? In NTJedi's way, you'd create a spell that essentially works like this:
If(type contains 'living') then healElse If(type contains 'undead') then damageElse do nothing
This can be achieved very easily with a good, simple UI. All the spell information and functionality is contained in the spell itself. Under your method, I don't even know how it would work. What would the base spell effect be? You could make the base spell effect be to heal, and then create an attribute to apply to all undead units that says "if affected by Holy Light, don't heal, but do damage" (and maybe you want the damage to be 1/2 of the magnitude of the healing power) and another trait to apply to all other non-living units that says "if affected by Holy Light, do nothing." There are two huge disadvantages to this: it means you can't mouse over a spell and easily figure out what it's going to do (because the spell effects wouldn't be contained in the spell, but on each individual unit), and it means that all units would end up with massive amounts of spell-related attributes (they would need one attribute for every spell that acts differently based on unit type - or terrain type or building type, etc).
Your idea would be passable if we weren't going to be able to share custom content (it would still suffer from the above two major disadvantages though), but it totally falls apart the moment you enable sharable custom content. A tag system lets you download units and spells and other content from lots of other players, and as long as they use intelligent naming conventions the content should be compatible without any extra work. And if you do download content with conflicting tags (maybe someone misspelled undead), it would require less work to resolve the conflict.
And its this sort of Big Little Thing that makes me very much want a Stardock-managed Platinum Standard for published custom content.
It might also be a driving factor behind how online cohorts form--starting to add from a group with one 'standard' will tend to make you stick with them so you can create things using that vocabulary subset and bring in new things without too much concern about parameter names.
Is it a crazy thing to half-want custom schemas to be something that you can publish and download apart from units, spells, quests, etc.?
That is the power of this kind of system. All you have to do is define 'undead', 'animal', 'alien', 'dragonoid', and 'cybernetic' once and then you can use the Terms or Tags in as many different creatures / spells / whatever as you want. Nothing is stopping you from having a create that is undead, dragon, alien, AND mechinacial OR none of the above.
Here are some quick examples of Tags and tag useage.
<Sentient> <Add_Attribute>Experence</Add_Attribute></Sentient>
<Humaniod> <inherit>Sentient</inherit> <Add_Equipment_Slot>Helm</Add_Equipment_Slot> <Add_Equipment_Slot>Armour</Add_Equipment_Slot> <Add_Equipment_Slot>Main_Hand</Add_Equipment_Slot> <Add_Equipment_Slot>Off_Hand</Add_Equipment_Slot> <Add_Equipment_Slot>Mount</Add_Equipment_Slot></Humaniod>
<Human> <inherit>Humaniod</inherit> <size>Medium</size></Human>
<Halfling> <inherit>Humaniod</inherit> <size>Small</size></Halfling>
<Giant> <inherit>Humaniod</inherit> <size>Large</size></Giant>
<Undead></Undead>
<Alien> <Immune>Mind_Control</Immune></Alien>
<Dragon> <inherit>Sentient</inherit> <inherit>Channeler</inherit></Dragon> <Spell Name="Holy Light"> <Help> <Target>Good</Target> <Effect> <Healing>([Spell_Power]*2)+10</Healing> </Effect> </Help> <Harm> <Target>Undead</Target> <Immune>Good</Immune> <Effect> <Dammage>([Spell_Power]*2)+10</Dammage> </Effect> </Harm></Spell>
<Spell Name="Web"> <Harm> <Target>Area</Target> <Immune>Size GT Medium</Immune> <Effect> <Add_Status Name"Webbed">10</Add_Status> </Effect> </Harm></Spell>
<Status Name"Webbed"> <Effect> <Max_Movement>0</Max_Movement> </Effect></Status>
I don't see how its different from an attribute then. There is no point for a 2nd system, which was the point I was trying to make. it just allows you to check what attributes a unit has by the name of the attribute. You would have an attribute called "undead" or "dragon" and then spells would check for it. I'm down for having simple attributes that help define the creature as belonging to a catigory for spells or something, but there shouldn't be a 'tag' for everything we make as described in the original post.
We are talking about the same thing. You can call it a class, a tag, an attribute, a type, or anything else you want. The idea is to have a system where you can create, change, and inherit other 'thingies' quickly and easily as well as reference them from other sub systems.
How would that work with downloadable content? If one person tags something as a "Demon" and another person tags something as a "Daemon", both of which are essentially the same, but one person has a "Destroy Demon" spell, which will not effect the "Daemon" units even though they are just slightly different tags.
Well, if someone is designing a spell that is meant to affect a specific type[s] of unit, if the type has several common spellings the person could include them all in the spell. In your example, they might make a "Destroy Demon" spell that affects units with the tags Demon and Daemon. Alternatively if someone downloads content that don't quite work with each other, the editor should be easy enough that they could resolve the issue themselves with little effort.
But ultimately, there is no way to completely do away with this problem without strictly limiting player creativity and options. I'd rather suffer the occasional conflict between custom content than have Stardock significantly limit us.
yeah, I saw how you did it. I really like how you did the mock-up scripting for the record. My post was basically just a defence to my own side not being sure exactly what you intended by posting it. you gave me a perfect example, but I saw it as support for my side and recognised that it could also be support for a seperate system, in fact making it worse since it could add unnessisary complexity on UI side when the scripting side was identical between the two. I had to add re-enforcement in non-psudo code form.
All someone would have to do is add.
<Daemon> <inherit>Demon</inherit></Daemon>
Problem solved.
I hope the the content will be moderated. Otherwise it will turn to the chaos.
I'm sure the community will be communicating and reading the forums to minimize conflicts for new creations. The most popular creations will naturally evolve to be the most user friendly for implementation and compatibility due to communications amongst the community.
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