Unit's that "Level Up"

Blight
1

A thought about how things curve, and how things need to change/remain dynamic throughout all stages of the games.

I would think that this would apply to both the immortals as well as mortal units.

Essentially after surviving x rounds of combat (or maybe in the immortals case, blighting x settlements) a unit essentially turns into another more powerful unit similar to flip cards in MTG.

Maybe even conditions for flipping a unit are dependent on different factors (a mage might require the player spend x amount of mana, or activate their ability x times)

Maybe flipping a unit would also cost something, similar to deploying a unit, but valor and mana could also be involved in the cost.

Let’s take Mighty General as an example, and all of these numbers are made up with very little consideration for whether or not they’d be game breaking… when I offer suggestions, I try not to push too hard for my exact idea, just the general (hehe) idea.

So currently he’s 200 str and gives +5 to all humans in his army.

After surviving 5 combats you can spend 10 valor to “level up” Mighty General into “Champion of the People”

Champion of the people:

300 strength gives +5 to all humans in his party and has an activated ability:

Battle cry:
12 mana gives ALL units in his army an additional +5 strength for 12 hours. Restores in 24 hours.

This is probably too complicated, but what would be even cooler is if each unit had multiple choice for leveling up.

So after 5 battles a unit could becomes “Champion of the People” OR

“Grim Victor”

500 strength gives +3 strength to all units in his army and has activated ability

“Lone wolf”

12 mana. Launch a 1500 strength attack at an immortal unit within 1 league, Grim victor must make a saving throw as if he were in melee combat. If Grim Victor’s chance of survival would be less than 40%, it is 40%. Restores in 24 hours.

1 Like
2

I like the idea. My question would be how it fits into the overall prioritization of features to add and what it does to the overall complexity of the game. I think one of the good things about this game is that it is able to derive a lot of complexity and strategy from very simple mechanics. I think this would be cool but wonder if it adds a little too much complexity particularly if you also have the righteous / corrupted cards (so you have three versions of each card plus two upgrades for each version).

Is another way to frame the powers you proposed as suggestions for those righteous / corrupted versions (again with power needing to be tweaked since you could deploy them immediately).

Even if we don’t go down the full blown power route I think it would be interesting to think a bit about experience bonuses for different units. Right now units with a lot of population like Orcish Swords benefit ton from experience, heros or smaller units benefit very little, and support units like mages hardly benefit at all. This definitely creates some interesting dynamics but could be interesting to have some other benefits even if they aren’t as dramatic as you suggest. This could be something like a percentage power increase for heros, maybe ranged attacks for archers getting slightly more powerful with experience, or a buff from a Mage lasting an additional hour. Not sure if this makes sense but just an idea.

3

I would imagine this would be relatively low priority.

I’d rather be able to queue orders, or have simpler mechanics (like you said) that add more depth to the game.

I’ve already mentioned a lot of those other places (Fog of War, Mulligans, etc.) it was just something that came to mind, so I thought I’d throw it out there.