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Yesterday I was rushing off the story entries before I had to go out for the evening, and I couldn't seem to get it off my mind.  Anyways, when I fell asleep I actually dreamed I was playing a mirror match as the Balkurn faction.  When I woke up, I immediately began to piece together some of the incoherent parts of the dream and actually refined several of the game concepts in doing so (plus the map I was playing on was a very nice 1v1 map which I was sure to sketch out on a piece of paper, but I'm not going to talk further on that).

So, anyways, this may end up being Balkurn specific, but it's kinda cool.  It will sort of be told in narrative with the progress of my dream:


As with its original concept, Balkurn's base revolves around citadels.  They can't build anything - not even defensive or resource collecting structures) which isn't connected in series towards a citadel.  This forces them to keep their economy centralized to a few locations.  On the upside, their bases are nigh impervious to a rush.  Even a massive army won't stand a chance without siege weapons against even a moderate defending force.

Early game, the focus is on capturing resource nodes across the map.  Although Balkurn won't be able to use them until later on when they build new citadels, holding these locations is important for two reason: one, line of sight is LONG, particularly from high ground, so you can easily track enemy movements, and two so that when you do go to expand you don't get held up by having to fight an entrenched enemy.  Balkurn cannot build structures to defend their troops away from the citadels, but all Balkurn units will have the ability to entrench themselves in a position.  This can give a small defending force a sizeable advantage.  The tradeoff is that leaving the trenches (and returning to them...) takes a while, and left untended the defences will erode after only a few minutes, so all entrenched units lose any mobility at all.

The maximum size of the Balkurn army is determined by how many barracks they have.  Each barracks can support only so many squads of units.  The more barracks you have, the more units you can support, and the faster they can be produced.  However, there is a flip side: too many barracks and you can't have them all replacing units simultaneously.  A strong rushing tactic might be to build lots of barracks to amass a massive army, but this will sacrifice your resource output and mean you can't replace lost soldiers during battle very quickly (my opponent did this in my dream).  Other important buildings are the blacksmith (increases income from the local resource node of the citadel) and workshop (produces extra build materials).

For Balkurn, trees are an excellent early game boon.  They do not actively harvest trees, but when a structure is built overtop of them the resource cost is reduced.  The tradeoff, however, is that construction time increases because the trees have to be cleared.  In my dream, the battle for the map control points had finished and both my opponent and I were fortified by this point.  There were three 'neutral' resource nodes, one fairly close to each of our starting bases, and one in the middle.  He took the one in the middle, but I took a scouting vantage point that let me watch over troop movements.  There were three ways between the north and south side of the map, two thin mountain passes and one wide valley down the middle.  Just after I ordered my second citadel to be built on my secondary resource node, I saw a large army marching out of the thin pass I don't have sight over, and prepared for a battle.

At this point, I noticed a button in the corner of the screen that looked something like the power point button in BFME.  However, it was the hero point button.  By fighting the early skirmishes, I'd earned one hero point, and using it I targetted one of my squads, promoting a unit from it to my choice of hero variety.  I chose the commander, a leadership hero (he was called the "general", in my dream, but I think commander is a better class name now that I'm awake).  As I only spent one hero point, he was champion class, the lowest hero class.  I can plainly see my opponent has chosen a berserker hero, also a champion.

He heads directly for my resource node, anticipating my expansion (I instinctively knew that he doesn't have the capability to even think about attacking my main base, indicating that even a massive army shouldn't attack an established Balkurn base without siege weapons).  However, rather than micromanaging, I noticed that I just selected my entrenched units on the hill and set them to "defensive AI", and immediately my hero began using the appropriate special abilities to correspond with my order to be defensive.  There was no micromanagement, I was free to maneuver my reinforcements coming from my main base around to flank the enemy forces.

As the battle progressed, my citadel finished and I began constructing defenses around it to help my beleagered forces.  However, my opponent had earned some more hero points and had created an engineer hero which was building makeshift siege weapons on site.  To compensate, I use my two new hero points to upgrade my champion level commander hero to a captain level commander hero (as best I can figure it costs one point to create a hero, 2 points to upgrade him once, 3 points the second time, 4 points the third time, and 5 points for the final upgrade to a legendary hero) giving him even better combat abilities.  I send some berserkers up my enemy's flank and he makes a hasty retreat back to his base.

However, as I begin to build up my infrastructure, a huge army starts coming down the central valley.  It's easily four or five times larger than mine, but fortunately it still doesn't have siege weapons.  Since he's got his engineer, though, even my main base is somewhat vulnerable.  None-the-less, he's heading straight for my expansion, aiming to take it down right away.

I immediately start putting up new walls and defences, and start putting my new siege works at my main base to use.  The enemy army learns from their previous mistake, and leaves a large force using the fortify feature on a hill to prevent me from flanking them again from my main base.  Using my extra hero points, I create a second hero, a berserker.  I set him to defensive mode, and after a little while I get enough hero points to upgrade him to a captain level hero.  There's one thing I've noticed: heroes CANNOT gain experience from battles, only units gain veterency.  You can only promote heroes through hero points.

My enemies break through the gates, and suddenly my defensive AI berserker lunges forward and breaks up their charge with what I can best describe as a whirlwind attack, then he jumps back into the ranks before he's overwhelmed.  I immediately recognized this as a defensive AI berserker ability; pre-emptively breaking up a charging force's formation to soften it up for the defenders.  This was all done without any player commands.  At this point, I have a considerable army building up outside my main base (because I now have two resource nodes working for me I can put lots of barracks to work simultaneously), but the enemy has entrenched very well along the hill leading up to my expansion, so Instead I decide to march over to my enemy's base - along with my new catapults - since I presume it must be poorly defended.

Meanwhile my expansion is getting battered, so I convert my barracks to "support" mode.  Rather than replacing dead units, they help keep existing ones in the fight for longer.  As well, I call the militia at my citadel, disabling all resource gathering at my expansion to give me some extra fighting power.  I also create an engineer hero to speed up repairs.  He apparently had lots of passive skills, but was less combat oriented than the other heroes.  Unfortunately, my commander hero had died, and I needed his power in battle.  While I couldn't just get his hero points back and promote a new hero, his hero points had been added to an "unused" tally.  At cost from a citadel, I could create any hero up to the 3rd level using these hero points that had been lost from the death of my own hero.  Interestingly enough, the hero was completed immediately, with no build time, but the "summon hero" button was now greyed out.  Rather than a build time, heroes had a cooldown time, so even if you can afford them, you can't summon them repeatedly.  With that said, all other citadel functions were still operational.

At this point, my army was in the enemy territory, and he was frantically moving his units up to his local expansion location.  He was clearly using the commotion of his siege as cover to build his own expansion citadel.  I set a few units in that location as a feign while my slow moving catapults headed towards his main base.  He took the base and kept sending units to fortify up there.

Meanwhile, things were going badly at my expansion.  I was nearly beaten, but in a last ditch I set all my units to offensive mode to break through a perceived weakness in the enemy's lines.  Once at the outer walls, I click on something I hadn't noticed before: a postern gate.  By activating it, I had revealed it to the enemy and allowed anyone to use it (until it was demolished), but it was totally undetectable until I did so... even if the enemy had captured the citadel and its walls, I would remain the only one who could see or activate it.  With some tactical flanking, I managed to get all my heroes out and back to my main base.

While this was happening, I was blitzing through my enemy base.  It didn't have a lot of resource infrastructure, so its many barracks were going to waste.  However, I didn't spend my time trying to disable them, I was rushing to the citadel.  The entire dwarven base goes offline if it's captured, and that was my goal.  I quickly promoted an engineer and set him to level 2 in order to clear some rubble so my siege weapons could be moved quickly into position, and had some units take tactical positions on the wall.  Knowing I had things under control, the enemy instead set out to fortifying his newly conquered position.

Despite the fact that I had taken my opponent's main citadel while he had only taken (and heavily damaged in the process...) my expansion, I didn't feel like the game was over, just that I had a slight edge.  I only realized when I thought about it when I woke up: we both still had two resource points.  At this point, I began to convert his barracks to the resource producing workshop so I could build a third expansion. I then sent a large force to take the resource point in the middle of the map.  He retreated against my decisive advance back to his base.  I had one key advantage; although I couldn't as yet afford a new citadel, I controlled the center of the map and by it I had both of his bases seperated so they could not reinforce each other.

Unfortunately, that was where I woke up.  Disappointed as I was, there were some very interesting features I was able to gather from the dream:

- no micromanagement: you tell units how to act and they do the rest, special abilities and all!
- hero promotion: use hero points to create and improve heroes on the spot.  If a hero dies, you can put his hero points to use to create new heroes from the citadel at cost.  I have a gut feeling that level 4 and 5 heroes can only be created by promotion (in otherwords, new hero points are required to replace a hero of that magnitude).
- structure conversion: one click and you can convert a structure type you don't like into one you do like... even works on captured enemy structures (in fact, that's it's primary use!  however, there's a cost associated)
- barracks: the Balkurn barracks, and possibly others, supports only so many troops, and replaces them automatically as they die.  As well, barracks will naturally "help out" each other.  Idle barracks will take some of the workload from those which have lost many units.
- fortification: a great power for the Balkurn armies to compensate for a loss of being able to establish a forward base, and really helps give them a great strength to counter-balance the lack of mobility
- no early or late game units; both my opponent and I were slinging exactly the same fodder from start to finish, it was heroes, special abilities, elite units and siege weapons that were improving.  Not to mention army size.
- strategy: I really got a feel for where I want the game to go.
- postern gates: one-use special structures that can really turn the tables on an enemy that captured your own settlements... I had a feeling my use of postern gates in the dream was not the last time they'd be seen in the game either in that base or others...
- pace of gameplay: I felt things were going very quickly.  No sooner had the rush for map control stopped was there an attempt to crack my defences while they were light... followed by what I'd call a heavy rush.  And still, I felt even at this point there was no threat of him killing me off.  At least for Balkurn, the main base is impervious to a rush.  You need siege weapons to take down something like that.

Anyways, when I fell asleep I actually dreamed I was playing a mirror match as the Balkurn faction.  When I woke up, I immediately began to piece together some of the incoherent parts of the dream and actually refined several of the game concepts in doing so (plus the map I was playing on was a very nice 1v1 map which I was sure to sketch out on a piece of paper, but I'm not going to talk further on that).

dude, maybe you're taking this thing a bit too seriously
j/k

no micromanagement: you tell units how to act and they do the rest, special abilities and all!

definitely. i hate micro, it takes away from the real strategy. it's also a pain in the ass to do when units are all over the screen
we do need to think about this for a bit. for example, you want to be able to override your units' AI decisions, but at what time should the AI kick back in?

hero promotion: use hero points to create and improve heroes on the spot.  If a hero dies, you can put his hero points to use to create new heroes from the citadel at cost.  I have a gut feeling that level 4 and 5 heroes can only be created by promotion (in otherwords, new hero points are required to replace a hero of that magnitude).

heroes from the citadel? but in the beginning of your post you said you have to promote a regular unit to a hero

structure conversion: one click and you can convert a structure type you don't like into one you do like... even works on captured enemy structures (in fact, that's it's primary use!  however, there's a cost associated)

good idea, although a farm that has been converted into a makeshift (?) barracks should be less efficient than a regular barracks

barracks: the Balkurn barracks, and possibly others, supports only so many troops, and replaces them automatically as they die.  As well, barracks will naturally "help out" each other.  Idle barracks will take some of the workload from those which have lost many units.

so again, less micromanagement

pace of gameplay: I felt things were going very quickly.  No sooner had the rush for map control stopped was there an attempt to crack my defences while they were light... followed by what I'd call a heavy rush.  And still, I felt even at this point there was no threat of him killing me off.  At least for Balkurn, the main base is impervious to a rush.  You need siege weapons to take down something like that.

about the speed, let's just build in a funcion like the old C&C's, where players who are uncomfortable with the standard game speed can make is faster/slower

If you think my dreams are freaky now, well... it's better if I not get into the discussion of my dreams after watching my brother's downloaded anime for eight hours straight.


Heroes are promoted on the spot, yes.  When you first use the hero points you earned in combat, you get a "freebee" hero promotion on the field.  Should that hero die, you don't lose the hero points.  However, you also cannot use those hero points to do a free promotion on the field, you must purchase a hero from the citadel in that case.

The idea is that you can replace fallen heroes at cost from the citadel, so you don't permeanently lose hero points through death.  However, hero points you earn from combat have an advantage of hero points that are being recycled in that manner: they alone can be used to create level 4 and level 5 heroes.  In that sense, level 4 and 5 heroes are not so easily replaced should they die.


And before I forget: line of sight has more to do with terrain features than distance; you can see for quite a range if you hold the high ground.

so maybe we should give them 2 different names.
- combat points (for fighting)
- hero points (for fallen heroes)

It's all terminology.  Essentially, this is the life cycle of a hero point:

- earned through battle
- used to either create a new hero or improve an old one (this is spontaneous)
- hero eventually dies; hero points used to create and upgrade him are not lost, but cannot be used to create a new hero spontaneously.
- these old points can be used to summon a hero (or heroes) of any type (doesn't have to be the same as the old) within the first 3 ranks at the citadel.  There is no build time, but there is a cooldown before the citadel can summon a new hero to the field.
- if that hero dies again, the points are again recycled.

The idea is that the first time you use a specific hero point, it's spontaneous.  Reuses of it after the original hero has died cannot be used to promote existing heroes, and can only create a new hero at a citadel.  I think we can work the terminology out at a later point in time, what is important is the concept and that everything has it straight.


I'd also like you to notice some of the strategy involved.  It was mostly about troop placement and movement.  Instead of focussing on micromanaging the battle at my expansion, I instead focussed on assembling a secondary force to counter-attack the enemy base.  I still checked back regularly and had to give some orders (calling the militia, for instance), but the system allows for - and encourages - multiple battles across the map.

so basically when you create spontaneous heroes you lose combat points, which you earn back as replacement points when the hero dies

I'd also like you to notice some of the strategy involved.  It was mostly about troop placement and movement.  Instead of focussing on micromanaging the battle at my expansion, I instead focussed on assembling a secondary force to counter-attack the enemy base.  I still checked back regularly and had to give some orders (calling the militia, for instance), but the system allows for - and encourages - multiple battles across the map.

perhaps we could make "commander" units, which you can assign to a group of units and give some objectives, which it will then carry out on it's own

I do like the idea of assigning heroes to squads so they work as a team, but otherwise why not just allow squads to receive such orders on their own?

so basically when you create spontaneous heroes you lose combat points, which you earn back as replacement points when the hero dies

That's very much the way it works, except that such "recycled" points cannot be used spontaneously (and, to prevent newbie mistakes, fresh points cannot be used by the citadel, since it's pointless if you can just make a spontaneous promotion instead).  Heroes come in five ranks, as I have detailed before.  Level 1 heroes ("champions") cost only 1 hero point.  Creating a level 2 hero (a "captain") requires upgrading a level 1 hero with 2 more hero points.  The next level costs 3 additional points, the next 4, and the final level 5 more points.  As a result, the cost for each level is as follows:
level 1 -  1 pt
level 2 -  3 pts
level 3 -  6 pts
level 4 -  10 pts
level 5 -  15 pts
Level 3 is the highest hero level that can be summoned from the citadel; the higher levels require spontaneous promotion.  Since it requires a daunting 9 points of fresh hero points to take a level 3 to level 5 (you could spontaneously create three captains, or nine champions, for the same price!), taking out high level heroes is a priority for the enemy, since when you go to replace them you can only produce heroes up to level 3 with the recycled points, and must use fresh ones to promote them further.

I have a feeling that early on, lots of weaker heroes will be the preferable strategy.  I do think that three champions will be stronger than one captain.  The downside is that individually they're weaker, so you might lose some where otherwise fewer stronger heroes would have lost none.  However, they would have another strength: multiple heroes can split up, divide and conquer.  One hero can only be in one place at one time.  Unless there is a single decisive battle going on early game, it just doesn't make sense to keep one super-hero when several weaker heroes can give better coverage over all the skirmishes going on at once.

What I really like about this system is that you don't NEED to have a hero with your army to get experience.  It's a global thing, so you don't have to worry about losing out on it just because you don't have a hero nearby.  As well, the spontaneous system allows you to use saved up points to quickly reinforce a critical battle with a hero. 

I do like the idea of assigning heroes to squads so they work as a team, but otherwise why not just allow squads to receive such orders on their own?

I wasn't talking about heroes, but about commanders (or officers, captains, sergeants, whatever you want to call them). You can't give squads such order on their own, becuase in a real army there are commanders, squads don't command themselves trough democration or something

That's very much the way it works, except that such "recycled" points cannot be used spontaneously (and, to prevent newbie mistakes, fresh points cannot be used by the citadel, since it's pointless if you can just make a spontaneous promotion instead).

yes that's what I meant to say. "replacement points" can't be used for spontaneous promotions