An idea I had for many hero abilities per hero

Okay, first off, obviously it's faking many abilities. With that out of the way, lets start.

The idea is to have different 'tiers' of hero abilities, and the player can choose 3 out of 5 abilities per tier.

Once a hero masters a tier, it is replaced with a NEW hero unit with 5 new hero abilities (presumably more powerful than the tier below), the previously chosen hero abilities are added to the new hero as unit abilities.

I've attached a demomap with an "ubermage", to make the unit abilities I did a dirty little hack, simply turned all the hero abilities into lvl4 abilities, copied the attributes for each level up 1 (lvl1 to lvl2, lvl3 to lvl4) and then made the lvl1 the same as lvl4, when the hero learns a skill, the trigger skips over lvl1. I also adjusted the tooltips. It looks messed up when learning the skills, but otherwise works fine.

The triggers are all GUI triggers, but with heaps of custom script actions thrown in (some parts simply cant be done in GUI). Arrays are used to keep track of learned skills and levels, remarkly few triggers are required, and the (trigger modification) work to add a new hero class is actually remarkably minimal.

The demo hero is a Generic Mage, you choose 3 of 5 lvl1 skills, then another 3 out of 5 lvl10 skills, for a total of 6 hero skills. If my statistics isn't overly rusty, thats 100 possible skill combinations. This could easily be extended, altough skill slots are limited to 6 (normal) + 1 Ultimate (takes the learn skill slot) or a total of 8 by removing patrol. You could have something like 3/5 lvl1 skills, 3/5 lvl10 skills, 2/5 lvl19 Ultimates.

Bear in mind this demo is unrefined and has absolutely minimal checking for "user doing something dumb", the tooltips are possibly innacurate and icon placement pretty random. All it does is serve as a demonstration and prehaps inspiration.

I hope to make a much better version using custom upgrades, but it may be so cool that I'll selfishly refuse to share it. We'll see, really depends if I have the time and motivation to design heros with 10+ abilities...

edit: Forums appear to be a bit broken, I'll upload the map when they recover.

Okay here is the map. Go right for more tomes after you've consumed the first bunch and chosen first 3 skills.

Another possible use for this system is for when you want to have a "class tree" which starts with generalized skills and then specializes, create the specialized heros, and inherit the earlier skill choices as unit abilities.