Charged Spells

Some items have charges, such as Wand of the Wind or certain potions. What I'm wondering is if there is a way to make spells have charges without them being items.

Artificially, it can be done (storing number of charges in gamecache on a per unit basis and reducing each time it is cast etc), but the number of charges remaining can't be displayed on the icon.

Unless he makes one icon for each charge

Okay. Well, not really. You could have seperate icons for each one... but more work than its worth.

So I can store them in a gamecache eh...

Well, I'll ask another question if noone minds:

Is there a way to make a spell require lumber to cast? I mean, such as putting the yellow text in that says Requirements - 1 Lumber or something? I suppose I could just make a building called that and place it somewhere... Hmm...

Okay, real question is can you make level requ... I guess I can do that too...

Well, in any event... thanks.

EDIT: Sorry for rambling and brainstorming... and Thunder Eye beat me to the icon thing...

Iirc, there is a 'charge gold and lumber' ability, but the effects would need to be triggered. Otherwise, you could detect when a unit starts casting the ability, and if the player doesn't have enough lumber, stop the unit and display an error message.

Or just use a unit as a requirement and then dynamically create/remove it, as already said.

As for the charges, multiple levels with the number of charges shown by that is the best you can realistically do without importing loads of icons.

I think I'm too tired to understand this.


Wait, theres a charge gold and lumber ability? If there is, then why would the effects need to be triggered? And I dont understand how that leads up to the rest of your post...

Is there a way to change the icon for each level then?

Hmmm... well let me explain what I'm attempting here:

Okay, I'm thinking of a way to use a Spellbook as an ability screen for heros in a map I'm making. This would, in theory, allow more spells to be used. What I was wanting is a way to limit it so that you cant get (for example) Warstomp twice in a row, and so you can only get one spell each level. This is where the lumber thing comes in, but it may ultimatly be not needed.

What I'm now thinking is that it may be easier to use upgrades and each upgrade represent a spell level. This would mean I would have to make a move that switches from the hero to a dummy unit that has the upgrades on it. That wouldnt be that difficult.

The charges thing was me thinking about max level, and if so, for an ability, it would be nice if it had the level in charges on it or rather the levels left that are available. Again, upgrades wouldnt really solve this, but it would be a way to put max level there.

So now, my quesiton has revised to would upgrades be a plausible system for this?

Multiple abilities.

Upgrades can't really be put on a hero, so no. If you want to stop them learning it, just disable the dummy ability for the player after they learn it once, or have mutliple levels for the spell book (using binary system you could have 8 abilities with any combination of on/off.

if its a unit with only 1 spell that is charced you can try to make it unable to gain mana and then make him have 10 mana and the spell costs 1 mana (for 10 charges for exsample) what will make a good way to see the charges too...

Ah, but I was thinking more abilities than one. Oh well, I resolved it and settled for somethign else because I scrapped this idea anyway...