Heroes battle project

[Kristo]

Hey everyone, I wanted to share a project that I've been working on for a while now. I thought it would be interesting to create something where I could experiment with the battle mechanics from Heroes games. It's a chance to try new ideas and maybe combine things from several games at once. I've gotten the game engine to a state where it's playable, and recorded the first full-scale battle here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwuI4xIqpAM .

My inspirations for this were the Heroes games of course, but also the tiny battlefield from the Disciples games. Artwork is courtesy of Battle for Wesnoth. The source code and art assets are available on github, released under the GNU General Public License.

[Dalai]

Impressive!

[BoardGuest808888]

That looks good

[mr.hackcrag]

I really like how cute all the sprites look.

[Kristo]

I've updated the screenshot in the top post with the latest build of my project. The newest feature: heroes!

[Kalah]

Why hello there.
Looks good.

[Kristo]

My latest video is now online. Since the first video, I've added retaliation. Just like in the Heroes games, units may retaliate against a melee attack once per round.

Somewhere along the line, I've inadvertantly tipped the balance of power toward the blue side. Adding retaliation made it worse. There are a couple of things that come naturally to me as a Heroes 2 fan that I think might help. I want the wolves to attack twice and I want the Trolls to regenerate. Not because they are interesting specials but because I just expect them to happen and it bothers me that they don't.

Is there any feature or special ability you guys think I should work on next? I'm interested to hear what you think. Something non-traditional perhaps?

[Kristo]

I've been playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering lately (the old school mid-90's Shandalar adventure game) and it got me thinking about the magic system in the Heroes games. What if the magic system worked more like capital-M Magic? I threw some thoughts together under the umbrella of my battle project to see what that might look like. You can read about it here.

[Kristo]

Yep, still working on this. I've added quite a few things in the past couple of months. In the following videos, I'm controlling the blue team and the red team is controlled by the computer AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO2qukIEbEM
This was my first attempt at adding some special abilities. Pikemen have first-strike and Wolves and Paladins have double-strike.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4_xgKOuAAY
The AI plays against itself. The blue side gets a naive AI that would be suitable for an Easy difficulty level. It shows how beneficial a few turns of lookahead really is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weidhvs8SwA
This is a 1-on-1 fight showing the new regeneration ability for Trolls. The Paladins might otherwise have won this fight, but instead it turned into a very bad day for them.