Playing with Races

[taekwondokid42]

Here I've made my own fantasy and re-engineered all of the races, just to explore the types of things that might be possible. There's aren't serious suggestions they are just freely flowing thoughts.

Under this new scheme, offense and defense also affect how much land you take and how much land you lose in attacks. High offense means you take more land each attack. High defense means you lose less land each attack. Low offense means you take less land. Low defense means you lose more land. Someone with high offense attacking someone with low defense will take lots of land.

Additionally, higher offense means higher troop casualties for both sides. Higher defense means lower troop casualties for the defender only.

Another issue is that right now the extremely loose market unlocks teamplay in ways I don't want to think about. So my version of things here assumes a market where you can only store half of what you own, and furthermore any money received from the market does is not immediately available to the seller (6 hr delay). These are purely to reduce the dramatic effects that the market has on coordinated teamwork, because my races are extremes, and with good teamwork the right combination of races would completely wipe the floor.

As for the merc bonus, a (+) for mercs indicates that troops can be sold for more and bought for less. A (-) indicates that troops are more expensive to buy and sell for less. The +/- here is meant to indicate that the race interacts well with the mercs and is able to deal with them effectively.

Finally, aid is changed so that someone can only send aid 5 times consecutively, and 1 more is gained every hour. Clanned individuals can send an additional 5 aids to clanned members or allies, for a total of 10 max, but only 5 can be within the clan.

Rat: Designed for indy, designed to take lots of land, both highest offense and lowest defense in the game. Huge amounts of troop production, and low troop costs. Highly susceptible to leader attacks, and very low cash/food production from the workers. Can get by with food, pretty much needs to sell troops to get money, and life is much better when there's someone to buy food from with the money gained from making troops. The rat is a race of extremes, just like the original indy was a strat of extremes: extreme expenses, extreme troop volume, extreme cash production.

Offense: +30% -> Take lots of land, easily break those who lock land
Defense: -30% -> Loses enormous amounts of land, very hard time defending it as well
Build: -20% -> Rat is designed to build 1 building: barracks. Camps may be useful at some point, maybe a smattering of huts and markets and foragers and tents, but really the rat is locked into a single-minded battle plan. With a -30% defense, towers are simply a waste of rat energy.
Training: +25% -> Designed to produce at high volumes
Workers: +25% -> Workers needed for training purposes
Mercs: +35% -> It's terribly extreme because right now merc prices are just plain miserable. This is to offset that as much as it is to give rats a strong incentive to use the mercs. You can only sell mercs once per run for each troop type, so the rat has to be careful about when it sells. Costs for a rat are so extreme that even having an entire other player to prop the rat up would fall short of enabling the rat to keep all of its troops. Rats would be a major drain on the economy without great merc prices to back them up. Camps will exacerbate this advantage even more, but rats take a long time to destroy and build, so camps would be a huge investment that would otherwise be spent gathering land and producing troops.
Income: -30% -> Rats should not be getting money from producing it directly. They have tons of workers, so it's not as fully extreme as a 30% disadvantage compared to neutral.
Costs: +25% -> produce a lot, but it's expensive to keep around
Foraging: -15% -> Rats have trouble feeding their armies. It's a point of difficulty, even with all of their workers
Food: +15% -> Not as extreme as costs because in-game economy means there's not really a lot of food to go around in the first place. There is however a lot of money.
Leadership: -25% -> This means poor buffs, vulnerable to attacks, and overall not much incentive to build huts. High worker rates and high training rates mean buffs are not needed for the rat to be competitive with other races. Even without buffs, the rat is the most productive race in my little ecosystem. Low leadership also means an inability to use leader spells against enemies, and a vulnerability to leader spells cast by enemies. Rats are like glass-cannons, they build fast and hit huge NWs very easily, but are very susceptible to attack. Even if they get slaughtered by a bitter attack, they'll recover fully in one or two runs.
Loyalty: -25% -> If low leadership rates weren't enough, it takes forever for a rat to get enough loyalty to cast a spell.
Scouting: -20% -> Rats are meant to attack, not be self sufficient. They have the worst scouting in the game because even in the early game they are intended to get their land from attacking.
Race Spell: Battlefield Healer -> Instead of healing troops, it heals you! When attacking for land, you lose 1% less health, meaning you can spend less turns recovering health after each attack, and spend more of your attacks at a higher health, and spend more turns attacking.

One thing about the rat is that the huge mercs bonus makes the rat a natural choice for a team that is trying to make an end game move. This is balanced by the fact that $$ is worth less NW, and during the end game everybody is going to be doing their best to trade all the in-game money for NW. The high offense means the rat is a natural choice for breaking someone, but the high costs means that the rat will also need a lot of resources to make use of the offense - and therefore may not actually be the best choice for breaking an opponent. The massive amount of troops they make is what is unbalanced for team play, and it's why I gimped the markets for this theoretical scenario. In this theoretical scenario, aid is also held in check so that while a rat will be the best producer of troops for a team, it must still deal with the costs of keeping its army around.

Painted One: Meant to be noobie friendly. Has a lot of things that it's decently good at, meant to make the game easy to play and explore around. Has gimped workers so it's not great in high level play, but really it doesn't fit any strategy particularly well. It can do any

Offense: +10% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race. Offense is slightly higher to encourage newbies to attack.
Defense: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Build: +50% -> Painted one is a good race to explore around with. Try lots of different building setups. Build lots of towers. Change your mind. Switch strategies mid run. There is intentionally little penalty for doing this on this race.
Training: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Workers: -15% -> Not a huge disadvantage, but enough that it offsets all the small boosts. This is really only here to discourage high level players from taking advantage of the two silly-strong buffs.
Mercs: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Income: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Costs: -5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Foraging: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Food: -5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Leadership: +5% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Loyalty: +10% -> Small boost. Really just want there to be lots of green for this race.
Scouting: +35% -> Higher level play rarely involves scouting. Lower level play can rely on lots of scouting. Just like the massive buff to building, this is to enable quick recovery in the event that a player has no idea how to acquire their own land.
Race Spell: Frenzy -> An additional 5% to offense, 5% to defense, 10% to build times, 10% to scouting

Magpie: Designed as a money race. Not very good with troops, not very good with food, this race is meant to produce more cash by far than any other race, and have the means to protect it. In redwall, there are not many ways to protect a large amount of cash, if your leaders get compromised and you are sitting on a lot of money, you will lose most of that money. For that reason, Magpies also have a lot of leadership. This leadership can also be applied to buffs, which are only truly useful to the magpie in terms of generating money.

Offense: +0% -> A land and offense neutral race.
Defense: +5% -> Small boost to help the magpie protect its land, and not lose so much when getting attacked.
Build: +15% -> Designed to give magpies lots of mobility to switch between camps, markets, tents, and huts.
Training: -30% -> Magpies have lots of workers to get them lots of money, to compensate we have to hit them hard here. Magpies aren't supposed to be producing their own troops, their money is supposed to go towards the game economy. If they don't want to participate in the game economy, they should be able to meet their needs through the mercs.
Workers: +20% -> High workers so that there is lots of money.
Mercs: +15% -> Magpies should be able to buy and sell fair volumes of troops on the mercs, in case they have political reasons for avoiding the market. It's not a huge buff.
Income: +25% -> The big advantage for the race.
Costs: +25% -> Only meant to discourage magpies from keeping troops around
Foraging: -10% -> Not a huge disadvantage, but the focus is money
Food: +15% -> Meant to discourage Magpies from keeping troops around
Leadership: +15% -> Strong leadership to make defending the cash pile easier, as cash piles are vulnerable. Magpie is a longer-term race and dependent on defending itself. If it loses all of its money, it's not going to recover in a run or two like the rat. High leadership also means large buffs from General's Hut.
Loyalty: -15% -> Not great. The idea for the magpie would be to build up a bunch of huts at the end of the run instead of the beginning, and then hold onto the loyalty for use next run. The act of getting attacked will put the magpie at/above ratio and cut loyalty costs down to size. By building huts at the end, the magpie can use more land to gather loyalty.
Scouting: +10% -> Right out of the gate, magpies want lots of workers. The scouting bonus helps a bit, but it's nothing serious.
Race Spell: Un/Bury Wealth -> 1% of on-hand cash gets stored in a special bank with no interest. Unbury retrieves 5% of all buried wealth. Both spells cost lots of loyalty, about 10x what it would cost to use a cash buff for 1 turn.


That's all of the time that I have for now. I have some more ideas though:

1 race clearly meant to stockpile food, in a unique manner to managing cash.
1 race with a clear leadership advantage, but with high costs and few workers.
1 race clearly built around defense, with very low offense but high defense. Low costs, slow building, low training.

And then some mix-and-match races, not meant to be used for standard play but instead meant to throw some curveballs. Races with greater flexibility but lower overall effectiveness, and race spells that give them unique situations where they are highly effective.

[Tedosiamay]

I'm looking forward to it.