Temporary Upgrades?

I'm curious if there's a way to unlearn upgrades. Or at least, the route I'm trying to take for my map leads me to think that I need such an option. Here's what I'm trying to do:

The player clicks a toggleable ability on a building - when the ability is toggled on, certain units and buildings all gain a *negative* buff (drop hitpoints by 50% in this case), and then the ability either has a duration, or is toggled off by triggers.

Basically I'm having trouble figuring out how to apply this negative buff in conjunction with a toggleable ability. I'm thinking upgrades, as I can easily have a player learn the negative buff upgrade when they toggle on the ability - but I see no way to unlearn the upgrade when it's toggled off.

No, you can't unupgrade.

A work around would be to have them all have an ability that adds the amount that you want to take away, and then take away the ability when you want. Re-add it when the effect is finished.

Cnat you set the upgrade to like level 1,2,3 but then couldnt you just set it back to 0 or 1?

Say have level 2 actually do the effects, and levle 1 does nothing.

The way I do things like this is first add a passive ability to all the units you want affected by whatever. Have it require the construction of a dummy unit. Then using the spellbook method, hide the ability. Then whenever you want it to be active, simply create the dummy unit somewhere. When you want to deactivate it, remove the dummy unit. This method gives you less customization but at the sametime, less trigger work in case you're worried about that.

No.

You can only set an upgrades lvl forward, like 2 -> 3 and 5 -> 12, but not 9 -> 8.

Another thing you could do is use the "Player - Set Handicap" that way you could cut off xx% of all units that a player own. But that might interfere if you use it to something else, and also if you don't want all the units to be afftected.

If you really want to use upgrade you could create an upgrade with let's say, 100 levels. Then on all of the even levels, create the penalty and on all of the odd levels you set the penalty to 0. That way each time you want to change it just set the upgrade level to one more.

If you got any questions, please ask :)

- Soultaker

Unfortunetly, too many of those and the loadtime will be forever considering all that object editor data.

It's actually not very bad, but yes.. it should be taken into consideration.

- Soultaker

Thanks for all the prompt replies! I've been busy, lately, and haven't had much time to put into my map.


With my prelim fiddling with the ideas you guys throw around here - I think I'm probably going to settle for setting the handicap for now.

I tried putting a unit requirement on the upgrade, but the upgrade doesn't appear to toggle off when I remove the unit from the map. I can post the triggers I used, if this *does* normally work.

Are upgrades cumulative or absolute?

You could have every x levels be a 0 bonus. Skip those levels when upgrading, or jump to the next one to 'undo' upgrades.

Example

Level 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 all grant increasing bonuses. level 5 has 0 bonuses.
Level 6, 7, 8, 9 are just repeats of level 1-4. etc

Hmm, yeah, that forces me to put some sort of limit on the number of times the player can use the ability - will have to work in the balance of that if I go that route, hmm...

Perhaps it could work!

(Upgrades aren't cumulative)

But like harshateja mentions, I don't want to go hog-wild with that method, or I'm just going to end up bloating the map with senseless upgrade crap :P

For unlearnable upgrades, I suggest you use abilities with multiple levels, and give it to al unit-types that are to be affected by the upgrade. Whenever the upgrade is learned, pick all units of the player with the ability and level it up. When the upgrade is unlearned, pick all units of the player with the ability and level it down. Very simple triggers.