I’ve also been thinking about how, if you have a good start, it can sometimes be very easy to cut the legs out from underneath the zombies before they really get a chance to grow, making the rest of the game very easy.
On your side, you are growing your gold and mana economy by expanding and capturing towns, and on the zombie side they are expanding and blighting towns and leaving graves full of undead.
I think the problem is that it’s very easy for you to just walk over and burn the zombies graves.
Here is a radical idea, how would the game change if there was no such thing as burning graves and instead, when a town fell, everybody is a zombie instantly. They would not start moving around right away, instead they would send out little groups in exactly the same way as they do now, but in order to “burn the grave” you would need to fight all 500 of the zombies!
Maybe stage it a bit more? So you have say 24 hours to get to the grave before the whole thing rises up, but the zombie army doesn’t mobilise all at once. It shoots off randomly sized armies to move off every X hours.
I think removing graves entirely removes an interesting strategic element, but perhaps speed should be more of a factor. This could also be difficulty based - 24 hours for Nightmare, 36 hours for Hard, 24 hours for Normal.
Seems like an interesting idea. I like that there’s grave burning though and makes units like Shaman Priestess and Cyclops Priest way more interesting.
How would this affect units that fall in combat? Would they also instantly zombie up?
24 hours to get to a grave before it rises up sounds pretty great, as it gives you a real sense of urgency to get to a grave before it turns into a zombie group.
Another option would be that burning bodies would actually take time. So if you want to burn ALL the bodies in a blighted settlement. You’ve got to hang out a few hours til they’re all gone. Maybe even the rate at which bodies burn is proportional to the # of troops in your unit?
It’s an interesting idea… I would say be very careful. Basically it would be removing a mechanic of the game; and I don’t think Blight has a lot in terms of mechanics to spare.
I agree with the under lying thought though, it’s far to easy to cut the zombies off early and spare yourself a lot of headache. In my ideal world, grave clearing would remain a mechanic; even if for right now no better reason than giving the players some illusion of control.
I’ll add more to the other thread regarding hidden necromancers but basically you may want to see how that plays out first.
Well a big part of it is that the initial power of the zombies is very dependant on what the player does to nip them in the bud early on in the game. A map of pure hell and frustration could be a painless breeze if I manage to get a couple of trogs over to eat the two masses of undead before they infest more towns.
What if the horde wasn’t necesarilly coming from the map, so no matter what you are going to have some predefined amount of zeds. For single player, that could be something like “The horde is approaching from the east, our scouts have reported in that they cleared out the nearby elven settlement and a large group of lumbering immortal Ents was seen as well! You have 3 days to prepare!”
Like Eshal and Starry_Wisdom, I would be very careful dropping game mechanics that create interesting decisions for the player.
I like the variety that makes grave burning key on Normal and almost irrelevant on Nightmare - they rise so fast you better have Plan B!
You could expand this variety further, to give two dimensional difficulty settings:
a) Number of days head start and
b) Zombie rising settings. Including a beyond Nightmare option when every zombie instantly rises.
