Era of War: Spirits - a new kind of AoS

In times long past, six great heroes arose to rid the world of war and suffering. Though they ultimately failed, their great deeds gave birth to countless spirits to further their will in the dark age that followed. Sadly, these sacred spirits are now pulled into the very turmoils of war that the heroes sought to prevent.

Two warlords battle for control of a mountain pass. Utilizing arcane runestones, they have bound free spirits to do their bidding. The spirits can wield potent magical spells and are granted a limited power of leadership over their master's troops. By enspiriting any one of the many friendly warriors, rangers and war priests on the battlefield, a spirit gains the power to guide them as well as the ability to cast new spells through them.

The forces of the two warlords are evenly matched. It is up to the spirits to turn the tides and decide this conflict.

welcome to

Era of War: Spirits

EoW:S is a new kind of an AoS; it departs from the conventions of the genre in many places.

The greatest change from a 'traditional' AoS comes in the way players interact with the game. Instead of controling heroes as we know them in Warcraft III, each player controls an ethereal spirit. Spirits cannot attack or be attacked by physical units; they are essentialy invulnerable. They can, however, cast various spells which can affect the outcome of the physical battles being fought by the warlords' troops, or affect the ability of other spirits to do so. A spirit may also take control of a single friendly unit, this allows it to cast new spells and participate in battles, but it also presents a risk since a spirit looses some mana if the unit it controls dies.

Spirits have no use for physical items, so there is no gold to buy them, no bounty to obtain gold. Spirits also do not collect experience of any kind. Thus, any kind of long term self enforcing advantages have been removed from the game; there is no snowball effect. If the enemy dominates you in the early game, this in no way makes it harder for you to recover in the late game.

Spells are designed to be complex, yet not complicated. There are no boring direct damage abilities. Instead, many spells are buff spells (fully utilizing my aBuff system), called enchantments. Some merely boost a unit's attack or defense, but most have more interesting conditional effects that only work if the unit they are on is used correctly, or are a double edged sword and offer both benefits and restrictions, some can even be cast equaly on friendly and enemy targets. Thus, spells must be used wisely, not spammed mindlessly. Each player will have a total of seven spells available, which allows for much more interesting combinations to take place.

The map layout is considerably smaller than that of most AoS maps out there, it is a two-lane setup on a 128x64 map. This, along with considerably weaker towers than we are used to, should lead to shorter games, I am aiming for an average length of 30 minutes. Should the game stall for some reason, I intend to implement a "sudden death" type mechanic at the 45 minute mark when the two warlords grow tired of waiting and leave their outposts, joining the battle themselves. There will be only 4 players in each team, since I consider that enough for a map this small. This should also allow hosts to more easily get a full game going.

The map will use custom models for the spirits, as well as many spell effects and doodads; the later two will mostly use ingame textures to keep the filesize down - my aim is for the map to take up less than 1MB of disk space.

The spirits:

Each spirit has seven abilities at it's disposal. Two are available always, two more only while not enspiriting a unit. Three more abilities may be used when enspiriting a unit, one at a time depending what unit the spirit controls: a warrior, a ranger or a war priest.

For now, I have prepared a presentation of the first three of the six spirits:

Spirit of Malvestir

Spirit of Aterna

Spirit of Alvanis

This is not revolutionary new. BTW: Good concept.

Sounds very interesting.

Eager to see how the Spirits will work out as well as what kind of spells we'll c with your buff system.

You know, I actually had a friend who made an AoS extremely similar to the one you propose here. It was very fun and relatively quick in playing. Good times, I trust this one can be just as good if not better.

'Grats on the highlight.

It doesn't seem like there is going to be much "hero killing" per se... which is one of the most engrossing parts of an AoS.

We'll see how it turns out...

when will there be screenies? =)

too passive... btw lame concept the most fun things were simple cutted from the map =\ Hoowii cool =\ but well it's your ideas etc. so gl.

You've made a lot of really starnge decitions on this one ani. Basically you're a ghost helping the automated troops?

...

And occasionally taking over one of the troops to get a sort of temporary hero.

Yeah, i think you've gone too far in the opposite direction. Rather than removing parts of the standard AoS genre which are not conducive to gameplay, you've removed parts of the standard AoS genre because they are parts of the standard AoS genre. You're making a map which is different for the sake of being different, not for the sake of improving the gameplay.

Which is what you basically said your doing, which is fine. But i doubt you'll get much support, i've always frowned upon doing things for the sake of doing things.

The map my friend made that worked slightly like this still had a sort of hero development. It was awesome stuff and kept it really fun and AoS-like.

Basically, when you take over a creep, everytime your creep killed something or was near something that died or whatever it gained some "experience" (Much like how a hero would) and after a certain number of kills it would learn special abilities unique to its unit type. He had like 12 unit types per team and special ways to spawn extras, which made it really diverse and fun to play as. I could upload it if you'd want to check it out, though it wasn't as developed as I trust you could make it, Ani.

Yeah, basicaly...
...if you're silly enough to play the map in single player.

Opposite to what? AoS maps are not going in any direction.
I removed parts of the standard AoS genre because they were causing gameplay problems. There might be other ways to fix those problems but to me, most of them seemed like counterintuitive hacks rather than sensible design decisions. Sure, I wanted to do something different. That doesn't change the fact that I made it different in order to adress certain issues.

I'd like to point out basically all of the stuff said about it being bad is based on preconceptions. I've played the alpha, and the concept is sound. It was quite fun, even 1v1 on a very unfinished map with an unfinished support spirit.

I'm curious, and i'll definetly play it no doubts there. I'm just a verry big fan of the classic hero gameplay and the pvp combat that comes with it, i guess.

This:
As long as enchanted unit is spirited, it regenerates
1 mana per second for each enchantment on it. As
long as there is a friendly spirit within a bowshot
range of enchanted unit, all spell damage dealt to
enchanted unit is prevented.


Scares the shit out of me though. Its the kind of trivial multi-effecting i'd expect from AoM. In escence, the spell does absolutely nothing. But when x happens then y effect happens, but also when A happens an additional B happens. It scares me, theres so much going on in there. If it where an unconditioned mana regeneration with a conditioned spell protection (or the other way around) i'd be able to roll with it, but this just seems a little too circumstantional for it to be a really effective spell.

Except that both basically build towards you buffing one unit massively, which is likely to be a very viable tactic ('til someone pacifies it).

I'm with you there one-hundred percent.

I still think some sort of "unit development" should be added. It doesn't have to be heroes, it doesn't have to snowball, it doesn't have to have any of those things you wanted to eliminate, but you need to reward people for sticking with a single unit for awhile. Even if it's small, like a 1% damage bonus for each kill the unit makes or something or is around X range of to a cap of like 50%.. It just needs something.

My opinion, of course.