Here are some items that I've noted when playing the game that I want to capture and open for discussion as I continue play testing Crossworlds and applying the first stage of the alpha development of my mod.
- Gizmo - AI doesn't work very well for selecting units. Often a unit that doesn't need healing is selected simply because it is nearby and powerful enemies aren't targeted. I'll revisit what I did with my HOMM3 Babies mod for The Legend, but I might implement slightly different logic. Since now Gizmo is a spell and can be cast every turn if you have the mana, I'm probably going to make the AI for Gizmo act like this:
- Compute ally and enemy power.
- Based on ratio of enemy to ally power, use as percent chance to act on enemy (i.e. if the ratio of enemy to ally power is 0.75, then there is a 75% chance that Gizmo will attack the enemy).
- Use heuristic, proximity-based, 2-tap filter to determine most dangerous enemy when selecting a target to attack. The idea here is to attack the most dangerous unit.
- Use heuristic, proximity-based algorithm to determine best candidate to heal. The idea here is to heal higher level units before lower level ones (i.e. it is much more important to heal level 5 units than others).
- I'm still debating on whether this should be a stage 1 or stage 2 change as it seems like the AI should be programmed better so that this is more of a fix than a new feature.
- New feature - add capability to resurrect units, etc. as I did in TL (this is a stage 2 effort).
- Ball of Lightning - The AI for the Ball of Lightning is okay, but it should always maximize damage each turn, so I may look into this as well. I'm thinking that this is probably more a stage 2 effort, but once again am a little on the fence about it.
- When a unit uses an ability to resurrect a corpse, it doesn't show you how many you will resurrect. This actually might be hard-coded to behave this way as I toyed with it a bit and don't know how to add a tip for it (the spell Resurrect displays the corpse tip no problem, but for the Orc Tracker, Rune Mage, etc. these units don't display a hint when used on a corpse (works fine for alive units)).
- I'm still not a big fan of the spell (or for that matter spirit ability) balance -what is your take on this? I'm finding that I'm once again using only a few spells and pretty much am always generating mana with the orb so that I can cast more spells. This is a stage 2 effort, but I'm going to make little-used spells much more enticing to use...
Okay, that's all I can think of right now...
/C\/C\