Redesigning Health and Mana.

[FallingStar]

Hmm, reading the replies and such, thought I'd toss out a more fleshed out idea I had, see if that stirs anything.

So going with the idea of tossing another leg into the system, crafting came to mind as well.  Idea goes something like this:

1) Character health/ mana works as a baseline, healed by drops, and guardian stones up to full baseline, keeping that part simple.

2) Going higher than baseline (like metroid health tanks) = suit crafting.  Gem dusts and items from stashes work together make upgrades to suits to add additional "tank" to health/ mana.  This also makes suits tiered and subject to same degradation as spells, so shouldn't feel too extra mechanic-y.  Suits are locked to the tier they are originally upgraded at, so no adding higher tier dusts to lower suit and drawing it out forever; like spellgems players will occasionally have to remake a suit from scratch and toss the old.

3) Can add multiple "tanks" to the suit like bosses having the bonus attribute rolls in several areas.  Theoretically, the number of upgrades could be unlimited, since a player farming dusts of a certain level will gain boss exp, and thus gradually outlevel their suit, making it worse than what the upgrades would add as a bonus.  Could also lock it to a limited number of upgrades.  Just depends on if the balance is inherent (and tougher to figure out the ##s) or added in as a hard cap.

4) Healing the extra tank/mana pool is done via crafting bench, using some of the same upgrade items, but to recharge.  Perhaps 2x recharge vs what you'd get if you added as an upgrade, so its more efficient to charge rather than add another "tank"

5) Rare full heal scroll to up everything to the top, like the warpout scrolls, just to have alternate way to heal up in a panic button mode.

6) Since mana degrades faster, perhaps a spell/scroll to steal mana could be added, 1-2 shots to refill.  That way its not "hide and regen" but its also helps a mana heavy suit not be a useless buffer.

So the overall thought is that it would retain the current AVWW mechanic of exploring for things to get more health/ mana capacity, but it would be tacked onto your bar rather than hidden in stacks of potions, and would have a max.  Would give some flexibility to playstyles - a suit heavy with  mana boosts, and go for heavy oneshots or shield spells, or even using lots of healing spells (I know some have been mentioned as ideas), or a tanky suit with a lot of buffer, or a "weaker" suit, but with enough mats that it could be kept topped off and at full efficiency.  Could even add in other improvements with other color dusts, bonuses to spelltypes or speeds or the like so its even more flexible, but just tossing the idea out.

I *think* it would avoid some of the metroid desire to be fully topped off all the time, since you would either have limited recharges, or diminish your returns by outleveling your suit when grabbing more mats.  Plus the system shouldn't add too many mechanics that already aren't in place already.

So, maybe there's stuff in there that works or sparks something productive.  In the end I'm not terribly distressed by the way the system works now, or any of the suggested alternatives, but finding a really elegant solution can really help game flow and balancing.  Good luck on finding it!

[x4000]

Some thoughts Keith emailed to me, before I respond again:

Am catching up on the "Redesigning Health and Mana" thread:

I _love_ Penumbra's idea of replacing mana with an "overheat" mechanic where using spells builds up "heat" (same numbers as the current mana system) and you can't use spells anymore unless you have "room" for that much more heat.  While you're not using spells heat goes down, but really quickly so you don't get any significant downtime or incentivized waiting.  Basically it would be a tactical resource only: every time you enter a fight you're almost certainly at zero heat.  We could keep the insta-mana-drops from monsters, they'd just reduce heat.  In other words, you don't really have finite mana, but if you just spam carelessly you may wind up having to "stand and take fire" from the enemy while you cool off.

Of course, one of the reasons I like it is that it fits much better with my concept of what you're doing: it's not like the Ilari have that limited a power base for you to draw on, it's just that you can only serve as a "conduit" for so much of it in a short period of time before you start to "burn out".

That whole idea may not have much appeal to you, though.  Just thought I'd chime in


As for health, I'm basically in agreement with you.  My only concern is folks feeling like they _must_ have a completely full tank before going on any serious adventuring, which if nothing else changed would mean grinding trash mobs for health drops or stocking up from building insta-potion-stashes.  The latter is similar to the current situation of "must stock up a ton of healing potions from buildings" except it seems to be worse from a player-time perspective: you can't stock up beyond a certain point, so you wind up doing a lot more stocking up over time.

[x4000]

Regarding Mana:

So... there is some interest for me in Penumbra's idea of "heat," but that still doesn't really go for the feel that I ultimately would like to have.  I think that Baleyg really hits the nail on the head with saying that the whole idea of a central mana pool is just too flexible, for all the reasons he notes.

The idea of basically doing gun-style ammo for spells is hugely attractive to me, and I'm amazed this never occurred to me before.  Really it's a very flexible system for me as a designer, because it's a system that could have ammo that is specific to individual spells, whole groups of spells, or otherwise.  Really whatever makes the most sense for a given spell is something that works.  This is similar to a lot of FPS games in how you might have rockets that only work on rocket launchers, and bolts that only work with a crossbow, but 32mm bullets that work with several SMG variants or even a few handguns.

I think that sort of system is probably the way I'm leaning now.  Probably ammo should take up main inventory slots so that that's another thing you have to think about when choosing your loadout, but then again maybe that should be reserved for abilities you can actually directly trigger just to not be annoying.  Ammo could go in a new inventory so that it doesn't clutter up your commodities inventory, too.  Not that there would be all that many kinds of ammo for the most part, really.

Ammo types would be too plentiful to show on the HUD as separate bars or whatever, though, so we'd be losing the mana bar and then individual spells would just show the ammo counts for whatever their ammo type is.  I think that would actually be a great information condensing, while actually adding some interesting tactical options and more interesting stuff to collect.

The other thing that goes along with this is that I don't think there would then be a distinction for spell scrolls.  The whole concept of spell scrolls would then get removed, and the existing ones would become new spellgems that would use ammo of various sorts.  That in turn reduces the initial complexity for new players that don't have to learn the difference between the two kinds of spells and why they care: all spells would then be spellgems, and the difference comes in their ammo types, which I really like.

Then the question becomes if we should just remove gem dust entirely, or if that should be some optional way of crafting ammo.  But I think that crafting ammo gets to be annoying fast, it's more interesting to make that something that you're able to search for and predict where it is, rather than something you have to periodically craft... I think.  That would also save folks some commodity inventory space, as then you're just collecting the regular tier-less commodities, raw gems with tiers, and nothing else.  All ammo would be tier-less, too, although I'd make it so that lower-level regions simply would yield less (or eventually no) ammo for you to find.

There's also something to be said for making the ammo inventory not like any other inventory, but instead making it have literal slots for each type of ammo, and those slots never change and have finite caps.  So you can never have more than 300 basic charges, never more than 8 slots for some powerful ammo type, etc.  Really going whole hog with the FPS-inspired style of this, basically.  And certain enchants that you could apply to yourself could actually improve your maximum charges for various ammo types, letting you customize yourself even further.

Regarding Health:

It sounds like some form of the "health tanks" has a lot of traction with folks, but the details are by no means solidified yet.  There's still the question of how we make that attractive and not something that's an added stress on players where they feel like they must be at 100% on their tanks at all times to do any adventuring at all.

Personally I think that Hearteater has a lot of great points about the health tanks being temporary in that they can be destroyed, and that whole thing with the collecting pieces of health tanks that go up exponentially in cost.  I'd still max it out at something like 10 tanks just because visually there is a limit to how many tanks can be shown on screen and somebody would figure out to have 5000 tanks if there was no cap.

The concept of tiered "suits" that FallingStar mentioned also is kind of interesting.  I guess the idea of Enchants that we already were thinking for the game kind of overlaps with that a little, but the concept could be made to work for health buffs/tanks, too.  I think that having enchants be able to affect how much health is in each tank might be the most flexible thing, but there are limited enchant slots and if you're buffing health then you're not buffing something else.








I think that this is getting closer to something that we could experimentally implement next week, at any rate.  I don't want to make a change this drastic right before the Thanksgiving holiday gets in the way, heh.  Further thoughts?

[FallingStar]

Sounds like good stuff, will certainly be interesting however the changes come in. 

Thinking about ammo/mana - I do agree player direct crafting is probably bad, since it would probably lead to the "need to be full up on ammo so gotta farm" mechanic once more if it was limited carrying capacity, or if unlimited I'd just make tons of "rockets" or nuke level spell charges up to the point that they were too annoying to build.

Indirect crafting might be interesting though, something through the strategic game, a building to take some sort of materials/ shards/ whatever and turn into a certain number and type of charge.  I know that side is mostly on hold for now as you churn on the multiplayer, but struck me as a tie in when I read the thoughts.

The only downside to an ammo system I see offhand is that overlord (and other tough) battles can be pretty long, and limited ammo of "good" types might lead to shooting the boss with your pistol class spell lots, which could feel like the player's spell library is instead a small choice pool in long battles.  I think this is a bit more compounded in AVWW since you don't just find/ craft a pistol once, you need to do it every 10 levels or so to keep it up to date, so it could be a lot more crafting than current just on the spells so that the player can have a variety both in power axis, but also across damage types/resistances.

Flipside you don't want to just farm 8x nuke spell ammo , drop them and win (unless they were super hard to find/ farm).   I know most side shooters counter this with boss patterns, times to nuke, times to shoot the eye with your pistol or whatever, but at least for short term I'd lobby for a pretty high cap on things until the big spells go in, so that overlords don't become a peashooter fest.

[eRe4s3r]

So I see nobody had yet the idea to link ammo for spells and its regeneration as well as "ammo" limitation to the cities... and specific MAGIC ELEMENT relative buildings that require specific MAGIC ELEMENT relative resources at a constant rate as well as a work force with a PRIEST (can be named anything) ability.

So basically

Spells have limited ammo, and regenerate at a set rate (maybe 1 casts every 2 seconds) up to a ceiling

To improve spells we have a lot of choices now, firstly building the temple for that spell category maybe gives a 25% boost to the ammo ceiling for the spell class.

Secondly, have people work in the temple as well as giving NPCS a specific trait (following the religion of that temple) every followeradds to the temples effect. (Increase damage by 2% per follower)

Thirdly, the chief priest when working and fully happy in a good house with food, and a decent home. Increases the Recharge rate (at full bonus it should be 50% so 1.5 casts every 2 seconds) and fully stacking for additional temples.

You could limit temples to 1 per settlement, the basic idea thus that every NPC is following a different overlord for magic and your priests convert them actively.

Lastly, this could be extended even more by building quest changes and resource demands into this like
1) Link the city to NODE #
2) Build stage3 home for the priest
3) Priest is possessed (kill, cure, work for the overlord directly)

etc.

Basically i am just throwing the idea in here, maybe someone likes something or anything, or nothing.

Temples should also apply different bonus things like health regend at values, protection agains elements etc, depending on what element they cater for and how many followers you have.

This in many ways, would create a gameplay on top of gameplay where you can have the goal to make everyone in the world follow your MAIN temple direction.

[Professor Paul1290]

I kind of like the idea of buildings where NPCs produce materials used to fuel spells. It would add another way for settlements to affect the game.

On the other hand, I suppose you do want something for the player to collect. Perhaps you could bring back ammo to be refined, and the buildings determine how much you can carry at a time. You could explain it by saying better equipment allows you to "compress" the material better so you can carry more with you.


This might sound a bit crazy and going a bit far, but perhaps you could combine both that and the "overheat" idea.

The player would collect ammo materials to process back at the settlement and they would upgrade the structures to improve how much they can carry at a time so they can make longer trips. The ammo would provide would provide the more "strategic" side of things, an incentive to collect things and an incentive to build better settlement structures to make longer and longer trips away from home.

The "overheat" mechanic would provide the more immediate "tactical" resource as described earlier. This would prevent the player's ever increasing payload from diminishing the need to decide whether to use a strong/expensive or weak/cheap spell.


This would add quite a bit of complexity of course, but the player would not have to worry about all of it at the same time.
In combat the player would focus on how much heat would be generated by a strong spell vs. a weak spell.
Out of combat the player would focus on how much ammo they have left whether to keep going or head back home to reload.

This way you can involve both the "strategic" and the "tactical" sides of the game in the process while at the same time keeping them separate enough so it's clear when the player should focus on one or the other.

[zebramatt]

I see no problem making ammo something you can find and something you can make from dust. In fact, maybe dust could be the ammunition and, rather than tiers, you just get more where you'd previously have gotten a higher tier; and less where you'd have gotten lower.

[MooN]

I really like the ammo part since i feel like this could be really thrilling thing. One could venture to search for ammunition or choose to spend a turn on sending his followers out to explore the map while bringing back ammunition they find(which obviously doesnt need to be all there is, which would not be too helpful for the sake of exploring) maybe a set amount based on how skilled they are in treasure hunting or something similar.

 About health i feel like the suits should provide you with another health bar like in the old sidescrolling beat em ups( where bosses had like a green hp bar then a orange one  and so on), if ur armor "breaks" (meaning your life bar is back to its original colour) one could be able to repair them with a scroll (craftet through the gems which would no longer be needed in ammo or heating system). That scroll could be acquired through a blacksmith that u let work at your settlement, which would make perfect sense since the settlement should have impact on the game as much as possible (in my humble opinion of course^^) just like the followers u invite into your settlement so it would really make a difference on who u invite and what he could add to your settlement.

Just some thoughts i had after reading the posts

[goodgimp]

I like both the Ammo idea and the Heat idea - why not use both?

For instance, if firetouch is analogous to a FPS "crowbar", that still leaves room for things like a pistol. It would be nice if some, perhaps more limited spells, didn't require a consumable resource but still would allow you some flexibility beyond a melee attack. If Ammo is going to be tactically important, I think there needs to be a mechanism in place for the player to choose not only when and where to expend that ammunition, but also in what quantities. It could make some interesting choices in terms of resource usage.

Shield spells maybe could be a good candidate for non-ammo usage.  Say you have a Shield that is a "channeled" ability, i.e. either you hold down the button as long as you want it to go, or a toggle. While the shield is helpful in making you more durable, you can't keep it running non-stop or it's going to overheat. Once you overheat the ability(ies) is disabled for a short period before starting to recharge.  Maybe shots absorbed/deflected by the shield could contribution additional "Heat" points.

Anyway, just an idea. I love the concept of ammo and I love the concept of Heat, I don't see why they both can't be used for different tools!

[Gallant Dragon]

You've got another supporter here for the heat concept.  Currently, mana isn't really a consideration at all after one has stocked up enough potions.  However, with an overheating mechanic spell timing and usage becomes much more important to watch.

Personally, I get the feeling that ammo of any sort could become problematic.  There would definitely be players who'd go out and try to hoard as much as they could and then complain about grindyness.  also, what would happen to gem dust?

[Hearteater]

I also really like the ammo idea, and agree with others it shouldn't be crafted for the most part.  I like the idea of setting up settlements to farm ammo for you over time, so you might have one settlement that farms fire ammo so when you want an easy way to fill up with that you can head there.  As long as no settlement can farm too many types at once and they don't farm it too fast I think it would give a really good feel to returning to a settlement to recover and rearm.

A separate ammo inventory is a good idea as well.  I think setting that up so we can customize it in a settlement, but not in the field, may be worthwhile.  As a simple example, say you had 10 slots each which held 200 ammo.  You could set half to fire and half to earth ammo, but then you couldn't pick up any other types of ammo.  You'd have a ton of fire and earth spell capacity though.  Realistically it would probably make sense to make it something like 10 slots: two hold 500 ammo, two hold 250 ammo, two hold 150 ammo, and four hold 50 ammo.  That forces the player to specialize at least somewhat.  It depends on the number of ammo types obviously.

As mentioned by goodgimp, you might also want to consider keeping mana in the form of "heat" to help regulate casting of spells.  Without it you only have the spell's own cooldown to control its use.  But with heat, you could have a low cooldown super-spell that added a lot of heat.  This would mean the player could burst it once or twice, but would have a period they couldn't cast anything afterwards.  Compare to the same strength spell, but with a longer cooldown and much less heat usage.  Now the player can put out less burst, but more constant damage and keep other spells available.

I think this is important to allow spells with different ammo to affect each other the way using a common mana pool does.  Otherwise your fire-ammo spells have no effect on your earth-ammo spells.

I will be really happy to see scrolls go away.  Any chance of getting warp potions changed to warp scrolls?  I just find it odd that I drink a potion to teleport.  That feels more like a scroll's power, and with normal spell scrolls going away it wouldn't be confusing.  I'd support Warp Stones too.

[Penumbra]

 

This might sound a bit crazy and going a bit far, but perhaps you could combine both that and the "overheat" idea.
....
This way you can involve both the "strategic" and the "tactical" sides of the game in the process while at the same time keeping them separate enough so it's clear when the player should focus on one or the other.

This I really like. The heat allows you to make tactical decisions on a per encounter basis, while the ammo determines how often the player can make that choice. It also balances the difference between a player that has only 4 rockets and the one who farmed 1000 without enforcing limiting ammo caps.

That way, a player could farm extra all at once without throwing off the difficulty. If ammo goes the way everything else does in the game and becomes outdated every 10 levels, I don't see a need for any ammo caps. Even if a player finds ammo at a rate faster than they use it, it won't throw off the balance in the long run.

Edit:
Here are some crazier ideas that, at the moment, seem hard to show to the player. What if the heat was not just overall mana, but based on the school of the spells. Then, you could allow the player to use some large "rocket" spells while still being able to do other things. Because of elemental weaknesses and strengths, it would be an interesting decision as to how to use your spells, while still being quick.

This could also help with the combo system. Say casting an Ice spell would increase your Ice "heat" by 10, it could also lower your Fire "heat" by 5.

You could even have the amount of "heat" make certain spells more powerful, while maybe applying a weakness to the player. This has the benefits of putting the combo system on the player rather than the monsters for multiplayer, and linking the two systems together.

[KDR_11k]

In Metroid 1 the health system was really damn unforgiving: You only reset to 30 health after you respawn and enemy health drops are like 5-10 health. However every time you grab one of the limited energy tanks your health goes up to full. That turned you into a total juggernaut until you finally use up all that health because the damage balance was pretty much based around the low health numbers you had most of the time.

The problem is that you could also grind up and that's zero fun.

Health tanks could be handled by having the number of tanks you hold degrade as you level up (and you have a maximum you can hold) but every time you pick a tank up you get full over-health. Over-healing would not happen from mob drops or the illari stones, only grabbing another health tank would be able to do that.

I'm not sure about making ammo depend on the strategic part, on one hand it's of course a good use for the strategic system but on the other hand the strategic system runs on a separate timeline so e.g. stategic upgrade buildings could be built by the dozen as soon as you unlock them (if that's expensive just farm consciousness shards) or ammo could be stockpiled by the thousand between your journeys.

[Dizzard]

Thinking about Mana.....

What if Mana was split into the six elements? Then you would need to sort of harvest certain items to convert them into these mana types.

Air Mana = Eagle Feather
Fire Mana = Auburn Ash
Earth Mana = Dust Particle
Water Mana = Morning Dew
Light Mana = Bountiful Beacon
Entropy Mana = Dim Space

So you would need X Auburn Ash to cast fire spells. The item names are just quick thoughts but you get the idea. Then you could have a sort of combining system for making more complex mana catalysts for your spells. It sounds like something a real witch or wizard would do.

Maybe if you look at mana as a catalyst rather than just another health bar then it might be interesting to try something experimental and sciencey. (is that a word? ) Make "mana" more important than just a bar that can be filled....but still make it something that can be easily prepared and worked on.

[Professor Paul1290]

I'm not sure about making ammo depend on the strategic part, on one hand it's of course a good use for the strategic system but on the other hand the strategic system runs on a separate timeline so e.g. stategic upgrade buildings could be built by the dozen as soon as you unlock them (if that's expensive just farm consciousness shards) or ammo could be stockpiled by the thousand between your journeys.

I don't think you can really keep spamming next turn that much because there are threats that move forward on that timeline, mainly groups of monsters that come to your settlements on the overworld map if you do nothing.

Also, this problem wouldn't be unique to the ammo system. For example, you could keep going through turns to do scouting. It's probably going to affect anything where the strategic game has an impact on the tactical game, so addressing that problem by adding events the player has to pay attention to that progress with turns (in addition to the current roaming mobs) is probably going to have to happen at some point anyway.

This might sound a bit crazy and going a bit far, but perhaps you could combine both that and the "overheat" idea.
....
This way you can involve both the "strategic" and the "tactical" sides of the game in the process while at the same time keeping them separate enough so it's clear when the player should focus on one or the other.

This I really like. The heat allows you to make tactical decisions on a per encounter basis, while the ammo determines how often the player can make that choice. It also balances the difference between a player that has only 4 rockets and the one who farmed 1000 without enforcing limiting ammo caps.

That way, a player could farm extra all at once without throwing off the difficulty. If ammo goes the way everything else does in the game and becomes outdated every 10 levels, I don't see a need for any ammo caps. Even if a player finds ammo at a rate faster than they use it, it won't throw off the balance in the long run.

Edit:
Here are some crazier ideas that, at the moment, seem hard to show to the player. What if the heat was not just overall mana, but based on the school of the spells. Then, you could allow the player to use some large "rocket" spells while still being able to do other things. Because of elemental weaknesses and strengths, it would be an interesting decision as to how to use your spells, while still being quick.

This could also help with the combo system. Say casting an Ice spell would increase your Ice "heat" by 10, it could also lower your Fire "heat" by 5.

You could even have the amount of "heat" make certain spells more powerful, while maybe applying a weakness to the player. This has the benefits of putting the combo system on the player rather than the monsters for multiplayer, and linking the two systems together.

That does bring up an interesting point. Such a system would open up some additional opportunities for variations of spells and ways for them to interact.

In addition to hot/strong vs. weak/cook, you can also have cool/inefficient vs. hot/efficient. You could have the cool/inefficient spells that provide more immediate firepower but use more ammo for situations where you need to dish out damage immediately and hot/efficient spells for when you want to make a longer trip.

Of course, the problem with that would be having infinitely increasing ammo capacity due to building upgrades would increasingly favor ammo hungry spells.


Come to think of it, I see another opportunity to help provide a mild incentive for something else that seems to need one: building up additional settlements.

Perhaps the ammo refining building in a settlement can only be upgraded up to a certain maximum.
(This would kind of work better for the explanation that they improve capacity by compressing the ammo material better, you can't exactly keep going until you're carrying a black hole.  )

This would create an ammo cap of sorts. However, instead of infinitely upgrading the facilities in one settlement, the player would have a incentive to build up other settlements to support additional facilities elsewhere, for the added convenience of not having to go all the way back to their first and largest settlement to reload.
This would be a rather mild incentive of course because there's nothing really preventing the player from warping back to reload, but I think it's enough to provide yet another lightweight goal that the player may pursue if they wish to.

This would add a bit more complexity to the process, but again it would not be the kind the player would have to think about all at once.
There would be the tactical goals of managing heat in combat, and deciding whether to use strong/hot vs. weak/cool and hot/efficient vs. cool/inefficient.
There would be the short-term strategic goals of occasionally going out to collecting materials and building up the facilities you use to refine them to improve your endurance so you can spend more time away from home without having to reload.
Then there would be mild long-term strategic goal of building up facilities in additional settlements for added convenience when travelling.

That's probably going pretty far and really really stretching things at this point, but it does have the benefit of adding a lot of depth without adding too much to the player's immediate concerns or slowing down the action of combat.
Much of the complexity goes into the more macro and strategic side of the game where it is easier to manage instead of the tactical side of things where you need ease of use and speed.