Doppleganger Unit...

[Darth Fool]

I don't know how difficult this would be to code up, but how about a dopplegagner unit type? I envisage a fairly weak melee unit with a "mimic" ability. Whenever a doppleganger kills a unit, it acquires that units attacks, losing any current attacks, as well as the graphics associated with the dead unit. (maybe as an alpha blend with the base doppleganger graphic.) To some extent the unit would be auto-balancing in that if you use it to kill a really powerful unit and then use it against weak units, it will end up becoming weak. Just a thought...

[Dave]

It's an idea that has merit and worth considering, although I don't think it will be that auto-correcting. Someone will kill a medium-power unit with it, and then use the medium-power skills to kill a high-power unit. Then, they will use the high power unit to weaken enemy units, for others to do the killing.

It could also create alot of paradoxical situations where you don't want your unit to kill an enemy unit.

Perhaps a way to balance it would be to make it automatically revert to being a doppleganger after a certain amount of time.

David

[Sangel]

That's a thought. I think it would have to auto-revert in time, as Dave suggests - perhaps four turns if it doesn't kill again?

I'm guessing this would be Undead. Perhaps an upgraded Ghoul?

[Darth Fool]

It's an idea that has merit and worth considering, although I don't think it will be that auto-correcting. Someone will kill a medium-power unit with it, and then use the medium-power skills to kill a high-power unit. Then, they will use the high power unit to weaken enemy units, for others to do the killing.

It could also create alot of paradoxical situations where you don't want your unit to kill an enemy unit.

Yes, it would, although if you are micro managing unit experience, you already have that problem.

Perhaps a way to balance it would be to make it automatically revert to being a doppleganger after a certain amount of time.

David

I think to some extent it is still balanced by the fact that the HP wouldn't change, (partly because I think figuring out exactly the right Algorithm to do that would be a pain), so it could still quite vulnerable. Are there mechanisms for count-downs with a unit's status? (oh no, I'm getting all sorts of bad ideas for things to do with them...)

An alternate mechanism would be to have it so the doppleganger gets the base HP for the unit it killed, but loses HP every round ala poison, until it took over another body, so it would need to keep killing to survive...

[Eponymous-Archon]

It could also create alot of paradoxical situations where you don't want your unit to kill an enemy unit.

Yes, it would, although if you are micro managing unit experience, you already have that problem.

Oh, this happens all the time in the Princess' Revenge. There you just wish some units would stop killing the walking corpses. They just keep coming, doing a couple of points of damage, dying, and leaving room for the next one. This has been mentioned in another thread.

(Ironically, the way to use this to your advantage is to put some melee-weak units up front (like white mages) and let them take a tiny amount of damage and then be unable to kill the corpse. That leaves a layer of protection between your units and the more powerful other units that can creep up behind the corpses. White mages have the advantage of curing each other too, so they can put up with this sort of thing for quite a while.)

[Dave]

I am fully aware that there are already situations where you don't want units to kill enemy units. Although we aren't necessarily going to hunt down every such situation, we would prefer not to add more of them.

David

[Darth Fool]

Ok, For my next adventure in Wesnothian coding, I am thinking of trying my hand at writing the necessary infrastructure for the dopple-ganger unit, hopefully creating functions that will be usefull for non-doppleganger activity. Before I dive in too far, however, I'd like to get a sense of what people think of various ideas so I don't write too much code that I end up abandoning half way through it because it doesn't fit revised versions of how people think the doppleganger should work. (And some people say I'm a pessimist!). So here is my current idea about how the doppleganger would fit into Wesnoth:

0) The doppleganger would work via a special attack: possesion, which would cause the doppleganger to possess the corpse of the unit it killed with this attack. In its base mode, it would have only the possesion attack and this would be a short range attack.

1) It would be a level three undead unit, maybe an alternate upgrade to the shadow, maybe an upgrade to whatever the soulless eventually upgrades into. The idea here is that as a level three unit, it is not really unbalancing if it mimics another high level unit.

2) When it first possesses a corpse, it gets the maximum hitpoints of that unit.

3) While it remains in possession of a corpse, it will lose hit points each turn proportional to the level of the possesed unit. Thus a possessed level 0 unit wouldn't lose hit points, but a possessed level 3 unit would lose a significant quantity of HP per turn.

4) When the possessed corpse dies again, the doppleganger would reemerge in whatever condition it was in at the time of possesion.

5) When it possesses a unit, it would at the minimum get that units attacks and some blend of the doppleganger and possesed images. Other possibilities (for which feed back would be good) would be for it to also gain the units movement and movement/type, gain any abilities of the unit (although possessing a troll with regeneration might be unbalancing, so that might have to either be excepted or maybe the possesed should not be able to be healed), etc...

clearly such a unit would be pretty powerful. You wouldn't want to go hunting it and have one of your hunting units possessed. On the other hand, since it only has in its base mode a short range attack, swarming it with archers or mages should be pretty effective.

Thoughts?

[Boucman]

you might code that directly in WML, with unit modification and on the fly changing the image attributes.

[Darth Fool]

The big code change that is needed would be the merging of possesed unit and doppleganger images, which I don't think can be done on the fly with WML, but which I think is really a necessity. Without it, it makes it harder to glance at the screen and know which unit is possessed, etc. The rest probably could be done in WML, I'd have to see whether it is more natural to do so or not.

[Boucman]

an interesting variation would be a dopleganger that would "copy" attacks that it takes...

you could copy the whole attack from the attacker, including the attackers animation frame

[turin]

an interesting variation would be a dopleganger that would "copy" attacks that it takes...

you could copy the whole attack from the attacker, including the attackers animation frame

if you copy the attacker's animation frame, it might look pretty wierd... unless you copy the standing still image also. and if you do, it means you are becoming the unit, right? so its completely different?

[Combatjuan]

So if my doppleganger possesses, say, an Elven Champion and the Elven Champion (that it controls) is killed, then it reverts back into a doppleganger instead of dying, right? The only way to kill a doppleganger is to kill the body it possesses and THEN kill it? Am I understanding this correctly? I think that'd be the coolest way to do it. But this raises some questions:

What if the doppleganger has possessed a unit, say an Elf Fighter. The Fighter is down at like 5 hp and is attacked by a powerful unit *say with attack 6-4) on the first blow. Does the battle end there or do the attacks carry over to the actual doppleganger?

If the doppleganger is an upgrade to ths Shadow (which is a fairly strong unit), and in the heat of battle a Shadow levels up (but in the process loses a great deal of its strength), isn't that going to spell out death for the unit almost as soon as it upgrades?

I like the idea. Especially the idea of merging the graphics. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out.

-Charles

[Darth Fool]

So if my doppleganger possesses, say, an Elven Champion and the Elven Champion (that it controls) is killed, then it reverts back into a doppleganger instead of dying, right? The only way to kill a doppleganger is to kill the body it possesses and THEN kill it? Am I understanding this correctly? I think that'd be the coolest way to do it. But this raises some questions:

This is what I had in mind (at least in this most recent iteration)

What if the doppleganger has possessed a unit, say an Elf Fighter. The Fighter is down at like 5 hp and is attacked by a powerful unit *say with attack 6-4) on the first blow. Does the battle end there or do the attacks carry over to the actual doppleganger?

a very good question. Exactly the sort of feed-back I was hoping for, although I don't have an answer for you now.

If the doppleganger is an upgrade to ths Shadow (which is a fairly strong unit), and in the heat of battle a Shadow levels up (but in the process loses a great deal of its strength), isn't that going to spell out death for the unit almost as soon as it upgrades?

not necessarily. One possibility would be to make it's attack identical to the shadow (not really a weak unit, but only a level 2 attack for a level 3 unit) but with the possess special

Even if the attack is weakened, the player could always choose to upgrade the unit to a night-gaunt instead if he was afraid that the doppleganger would be in a vulnerable position....

I like the idea. Especially the idea of merging the graphics. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out.

-Charles

I am glad you like the idea and I hope the graphics merging works out well. I must admit I was partially inspired by some of the mock ups done for the proposed illusionist unit. If done right, the functionality necessary to do one might be reusable for the other. Fortunately, the illusionist is a whole different thread...

[Eponymous-Archon]

This is a very interesting idea. I'd like to see some version of it.

(Perhaps another name? "Doppelganger" (note spelling) should be the name of the undead thing that appears as the killed unit, not the unit that creates that double. Doppelganger don't usuall "possess" dead bodies, they imitate live ones, no?)

[Combatjuan]

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

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:

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). 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.

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.

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.

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.