Diablo II Style Summons - Necromancer Demo Map!

Yep it's the Diablo2 Necromancer in all his corpse humping glory. Well, not quite, but several of his key spells are here.

*Raise skeletal mage. (Raise 4 different types!)
*Amplify damage curse.
*Iron Golem - You gotta love this one. Make a golem from an item, how COOL is that :ggani:
*Fire Golem
*Summon Mastery - Increases summon stats.
*Unsummon - Because I can.

The summons in this map are unselectable and cannot be controlled, they follow you around and automatically aquire targets.

Screenshots cannot do anything justice, but heres one anyway. If you look carefully you'll notice the golem (at the bottom of the screen) has an orb on his fist, this is because it was created from an Orb of Corruption.

What an amazing idea man. Good work! :D

How did you get 6 skills on your guy? I thought only 5 were aloud.

5 of them are hero skills, one is a normal skill i'd guess, i use that combo all the time.

okej....

Well done, Grater! Of course, you'll want to change the spell texts on Raise Skeleton (it's currently the same as Carrion Beetle). Do you get more skellies per level in the skill?

While the skeletons and golems are appropriately unselectable, you may want to consider a multiboard using their command buttons and hit point bars, if you're up to it. I have no idea how one would go about doing a multiboard like that, but it would be nice to know how close your minions are to death.

Nice thing about giving them the aloc ability is that they're stupid just like the summons in D2 are. Just lazily hang out behind you while the brittle necromancer has to lead. I started to remember the sensation of "Why the hell did I even raise these bozos" all over again.

Looks good shame I wont be able to test it. (only got RoC)

Just wondering how did you get your minions to follow you and auto aquire targets? (would be nice if you wrote a tutorial on it, and the fact that it will get you points should be enough motivation).

IDISacredIDI

No tutorial needed, Sacred; that's automatic with the aloc ability; they follow you and attack anything that comes within range of you.

Get TFT, have more fun. 8))

yeah I just thought of that, still how do you make them follow you about?

As for getting The Frozen Throne, im saving for it (got £20) not sure how much it costs but shouldnt be more than £30. Just a quick question, when I do get TFT will all of the maps Ive made/currently making be no good?

IDISacredIDI
(sorry to spam your thread)

GREAT JOB!!

Like I said, that's automatic -- it's part of the aloc ablity. There's a TFT ability called Locust Swarm; the locusts that are created by the ability follow you around and bite any enemy unit near to you.

Ought to be OK. You can make ROC maps with the TFT WE, so everything should load up just fine. As I recall, ability texts may be messed up, so do expect to do some revamping, but the map should open just fine.

Well, I did a simple version, adding Chaos and Aloc to any summoned illusions, making mirror images into mindless drones. Only problem is, they had no collision size, couldn't be attacked, and didn't follow me. Obviously something's wrong with Chaos, and for some reason they won't follow after they learn Aloc. What's wrong?

Okay I'll quickly explain how it works. To make the units act unselectable but targetable and with collision you need to transform it with a chaos ability, that means making two versions of the unit, or 1 generic version and several "random" versions.

For example my Skelletal Mages requires one generic version (never seen in game) called "Skeletal Mage (Generic)", and four versions with a different orb attached called Skeletal Mage (Fire), Skeletal Mage (Ice) etc.

I then made four chaos abilities, with the new unit type set to each of the mage types respectively. Ie "Skeletal Mage Transform Fire", I also remove the "chaos" pre-req from the ability so the moment it's added to a unit, bam, it transforms.

Now when I detect a skeletal mage (generic) has been summoned (using the unit spawns a unit event) I add one of the four chaos abilities to the summoned unit. This transforms the unit into the new mage type. I also add the 'Aloc' ability to make it unselectable. Note the transformation part is critical, adding a "do nothing" chaos ability wont achieve anything!!!!.

At this point I have a skeletal mage with a random orb, but it will just stand there. The follow-hero behaivour of locusts is part of the Locust swarm spell, not a part of 'Aloc' ability. There are many reasons why you wouldn't want to use locust swarm, from the buzzing sound to it's very nature to the fact you can only have 1 ability based on it per hero.

So I wrote my own AI function, in effect this function is "Attached" to every summon/summoner pair and just continues to run (loop) endlessly while the summon is alive, every second or so it simply orders the summon to attack-move to a random point around it's master, by default a distance from 100 to 500 from the hero to avoid crowding the hero itself. It also contains an override at 1000 distance to force the summon to disengage and follow a fleeing hero.

It would in fact be possible to use this function in RoC if you have JASS skills, however the lack of 'Aloc' means you wont be able to make summons unselectable... but you CAN do what vex suggests and give the summons to a friendly AI player then use the function to give them AI
RoC Users: Look here for the function itself, TFT users just look at my map.

The following the hero behaivour (rather than escorting) is something I can probably change... playing my map I really liked not having to control the summons, I'm a horribly lazy microer and would rather the buggers just automatically do their job, if they do it badly they can just make them stronger to compensate. The current functions works great for the mages because they arent tanks so should hang back with the hero, I'll write a function that tries to predict where the hero is going and orders the golem there to make it more of an escort - the problem is human players are unpredictable as hell but I should be able to make the golems a bit less stupid.

*Whew* Long and not all that quickly explained but somewhat comprehensive I hope. Now because I'm not inclined to ever finish projects I dont mind at all if others use my work in their maps, in fact I encourage it. If you like my summons, but find the whole thing a bit daunting or confusing I'll be happy to help either in this thread, via PM, or MSN (PM me for MSN details).

Thanks and I'm not suprised some tooltip errors slipt thru :O altough I think the non-learning tooltips are all correct. I based it on carrion beetle exactly so I could limit the number raised at each level, a lot of spells have very useful stuff like that, which saves a lot of triggering work. (for example basing off feral spirit/summon misha means you can only have 1 at a time, use summon bear or water elemental for unlimited but timed life...)
Yeah I also thought about a multiboard and I've seen them made like you describe (ie with a bar for golem health). If someone wanted to make a fully featured Necromancer in an RPG or something then such a multiboard would be a good idea - but outside the scope of this demomap.
Ah memories :P Yeah as I said above the stupidity is the result of my function so I take full credit for it. 'Aloc' only makes them unselectable. And I'll try to write a function for golem/tank AI rather than ranged support AI.