Doppleganger Unit...

[Boucman]

your cloud looks good, but it's too strong, I can barely see the unit under it, it hink the grey shade should be very light...

[Dacyn]

I've only ever heard of a doppelganger as meaning something like "thing-a-ma-jig" or "whatcha-ma-call-it". Even if it's a valid term for something that takes possession of other bodies, it may not be the best name if that's not a commonly understood usage.

well this is a myth I heard about...
a person's shadow is their life (or something of that nature)
and sometimes a 'doppelganger' steals the shadow of the person, and starts to look like them. When a person loses their shadow, they become weak and eventually die. When they die then the doppelganger can impersonate them completely.

so the way that a Wesnoth doppelganger would work:
starts out with very little health
has 'poisons'
whenever a unit loses health from the doppelganger's poison, the doppelganger drains that life.
when the unit dies, the doppelganger becomes that unit in a way similar to advancing- it regains all its health, and only modifications like traits are retained.
of course the doppelganger could only be used once, since it becomes the unit it uses its specialty on. This might not be a bad thing. Of course, they should probably only be in a special scenario.
I could almost code this into WML, but there is no 'name=hit' trigger for events...

[torangan]

I've only ever heard of a doppelganger as meaning something like "thing-a-ma-jig" or "whatcha-ma-call-it".

It's the german word for double, just missing the umlaut. Correct form would be Doppelgänger or Doppelgaenger.

[turin]

they reallly should have 'name=hit' in WML...it would be very useful. but, actually, you could do it. have it be 'name=stones', give the doppleganger stones, and remove the stones once the doppleganger hits. its a very annoying way of doing it, but it should work.

[Dacyn]

but then the battle would stop once the doppelganger hit.. this makes no sense.

[turin]

but then the battle would stop once the doppelganger hit.. this makes no sense.

thats the weak point- i said you could do it, i didn't say it would be done very well.

and you might actually want the battle to stop, same as it does for stoning. who knows?

[Darth Fool]

I've only ever heard of a doppelganger as meaning something like "thing-a-ma-jig" or "whatcha-ma-call-it". Even if it's a valid term for something that takes possession of other bodies, it may not be the best name if that's not a commonly understood usage. Therefore, here are some other possible names:
* Lost Soul
* Devourer
* Spirit Snatcher

I am certainly not tied to the doppelganger name, especially if there are names that fit what the unit actually ends up doing better. I like the idea of Spirit Devourer... but I hope to save the naming battles until the unit is closer to completion and after the draken/drakonian battle ends.

Something along those lines. I don't know. That's more to get ideas rolling than anything else. As far as the combining of images goes, how might that be done? Some units are really small or oddly shaped (like bats). Others, are quite big. I think it'd be tough to make an image that blended well with everything unless it looked somewhat like a dark cloud around them, perhaps. I've attached a quick sketch of what that might look like at the bottom:

my current idea is that you would have a new image_possesing tag which would be placed on top of the possesed images at some transparency level. Talking this over with a friend last night, he suggested that the transparency level be set by the fraction of hitpoints the possesed unit is at. I will have to wait until it is mostly implemented to see what it looks like and decide if that makes sense

A couple other logistical questions: When a unit is possessed as it is destroyed, does the doppelganger essentially "move into" that square to take possession (which would be different than other units).

That is an idea. It fits the general idea behind possessing the corpse. On the other hand that would be a second new feature in the same unit, and I generally think we should try to keep new features spread out more.

Also, when a doppelganger is "recalled" does it recall in whatever body it was in before? This may be a bit difficult. Seems like it might be better to just have it be recalled as the possessing spirit to avoid every scenario ending with the enemy leader being possessed by a doppleganger.

It definately would not be able to store bodies. If the body it is in dies, it goes back to being a spirit. I am not sure that it should even keep the possession attack when it is in a body, or just have to wait until it is a spirit again.

Additionally, it might be interesting for some units to be immune to being possessed. For instance, a priest type unit may have immunity to being possessed. Perhaps that could be generalized to any unit with a holy attack. Something like that.

This is a good idea, although it might be a little tricky to implement. Maybe with a possession resistance that would define the chance of possesion upon death?

Those are some more thoughts. Right now I'm in question generating mode. I'll enter into question answering mode when and if the idea of implementing this unit becomes more stable.

Darth Fool: Good point about the upgrade. I like this unit idea.

At first, I thought that units with special abilities were a bit inconsistent and annoying with the game. Now I love the idea of special abilities, but I think that it's important to try and reuse some of them so that they are not such huge annomalies. That's just a game philosophy thing, though.

From a coding perspective it is nice to not have every special ability need it'sown code.
From a game playing perspective, I think there is a balance. On the one hand you need enough abilities to be fairly common that people can get used to them and know how to use them. On the other hand, you want units to be as unique as possible so you don't have the "Yet another missle tosser with slightly different stats" problem that can make games boring.

One thought for reusing the ability would actually be to make a whole advancement tree for soul devourers. To balance it you would need to provide some restriction on possesing units of higher level. This could be done either by just forbidding it, or if the possession resistance gets implemented have the possession probability modified by the difference in level.

These graphics are just quick concept art. I think that if they were done much differently, simply using an alpha mask of a spiritish thing over just about any unit could look good.

This is kind of along the idea of what I had in mind, although I didn't have in mind filling most of the hex, and I think the spirit is a little too opaque. What transparency level did you use?

[turin]

I've only ever heard of a doppelganger as meaning something like "thing-a-ma-jig" or "whatcha-ma-call-it". Even if it's a valid term for something that takes possession of other bodies, it may not be the best name if that's not a commonly understood usage. Therefore, here are some other possible names:
* Lost Soul
* Devourer
* Spirit Snatcher

I am certainly not tied to the doppelganger name, especially if there are names that fit what the unit actually ends up doing better. I like the idea of Spirit Devourer... but I hope to save the naming battles until the unit is closer to completion and after the draken/drakonian battle ends.

There is, AFAIK, no draken/drakonian battle. There is, however, a drake/drakonian battle.

But yeah, naming it should go after we conclude that battle.


I think that when you kill the unit, it should create a copy of that unit on your team where the unit stood and destroy the doppleganger unit. The only problem with this is you could never get the doppleganger unit back. The plus is you could do it completely using WML.

[Darth Fool]

I think that when you kill the unit, it should create a copy of that unit on your team where the unit stood and destroy the doppleganger unit. The only problem with this is you could never get the doppleganger unit back. The plus is you could do it completely using WML.

In that case, the doppleganger unit would act just like the dark-archon in star-craft (without the cool extra spells) or the watcha-ma-call-its in warcraft 3. If only the AI ever used these units, that would be OK, but as a player, I am not much in favor of disposable units. If they weren't disposable (ie, you kept them from scenerio to scenario) it would do weird things for campaign balancing. if you let the newly possesed unit stay in the army, the scenrio designers would have to consider that you might have units from any of the enemies in previous battles. Plus, I kind of like the idea of them burning out the corpse as they use it (ie losing hit points) and having to find a new body when the old one finally gave out.

I realized that another possible way to take advantage of this ability once implemented as a special attack would be to have a weapon in some scenario that could be picked up and give a unit a possesion attack. Imagine the sword of soul-stealing or some such. Of course, you'd have to limit it so only certain types of units could pick it up ... you wouldn't want your paladins running around with a sword of soul-stealing, now would you?

[Dacyn]

Imagine the sword of soul-stealing or some such. Of course, you'd have to limit it so only certain types of units could pick it up ... you wouldn't want your paladins running around with a sword of soul-stealing, now would you?

well you might want to let the paladins pick it up, as long as there is a warning at the beginning of the scenario. IMO the way that objects work now is too complicated. Has anyone actually seen an undead try to pick up holy water?

anyway the reason I don't like the original idea is that the unit would still need to be part soul-stealer even after it stole someone's soul. This seems too complicated. Anyway the ability would probably be a weapon specialty[1]; how would you decide which weapon(s) to apply it to?

[1]IMO it makes most sense as a weapon specialty, since it triggers something every time an attack kills something.

[turin]

Actually, i've found out how to do it: you give the unit the doppleganger kills a description. When that unit dies, a doppleganger unit is created over it. And if, at the end of the scenario, a unit with the description specified exists, than it is killed and a doppleganger unit is created.

The main problem i find with this is, the doppleganger's XP is not stored. However, i'm sure it is possible, using the new method of finding out information about units, to completely do this using WML. I think i'lll work on making this specialty, and test it out...

[Darth Fool]

It certainly would be cool if this could be done all in WML without being too complex. In any case, I am posting below an alternate version of how I imagine the possesion might look, using the shadow graphics (with red eyes and shifted up to the left) as a base. I chose some large and small units to see how it looked. The three yetis have different transparency levels on the shadow-possesion: 70% 30% and 50% from top to bottom. One possibility would be to use different transparency depending on the condition of the possesing spirit as a way of knowing wether or not it if you kill the corpse, a nearly dead or mostly healthy spirit will appear. I'm still looking at the code to decide how best to implement the mixed graphics...

[quartex]

I like the spirit possesing graphics. You have some good ideas Darth Fool, I just want to remind you to keep the doopleganger as simple as possible, sometimes when people offer all kinds of suggestions, a unit gets so complex that it never gets implemented, or is too comfusing. As long as it is simple to learn and use, and is rasonably balanced, I think we have the chance for a really cool unit.

And I dislike disposable units, if it is to be this powerful it should be level 3, and thus it should also be able to posess many times.

[mbabuskov]

How about making doppelganger like this:

Doppelganger's player turn:
If it succesfully hits some unit during attack, it turns into it.

Opponent turn:
If someone successfully hits the doppelganger, he returns to normal shape.
- or -
doppelganger turns into that unit



Attack can be 4-2 melee.

When it changes shape
it gets: attack & terrain defense by that unit
it doesn't get: hitpoints/special abilities/movement points

[Dacyn]

How about making doppelganger like this:

Call it soul-stealer, or shapeshifter (Or propose a new name).

Doppelganger's player turn:
If it succesfully hits some unit during attack, it turns into it.

Linguistic point: if it actually became the unit, it would no longer be a shape-shifter. It only takes on certain properties of the unit, so you shouldn't say it "turns into" the unit.

Opponent turn:
If someone successfully hits the doppelganger, he returns to normal shape.

wait, why is this turn-based? The simplest way to do this is to make it happen all the time, but that would make your second suggestion make more sense:

- or -
doppelganger turns into that unit

this wouldn't make much sense, as it makes a powerful unit not want to hit the shapeshifter.

When it changes shape
it gets: attack & terrain defense by that unit
it doesn't get: hitpoints/special abilities/movement points

does it get attack specials? It gets attacks, but not specials...

It seems that it would be hard for the shapeshifter to attack with a stolen shape; it needs to go a round without being hit at all. But it might be interesting...