I spy an opportunity to expand the diminsions of the game here! :) Although it may require changing some of the stats in the engine from ints to floats. When I worked on Glest, many players complained that the battles were too fast when compared to similar commercial games like Warcraft. Flare could be more interesting with longer battles.
This would provide greater usefulness to debuffs (slows and bleeds) and powers that make use of them (electric mage attacks). Ideally, I would say that the player of any game (mod) could either choose from built-ins as above (some mutually exclusive, others not) and possibly also a "custom" interface to set the parameters manually? Yeah, I'm not a GUI guy either. :)
An alternative approach would be adding mitigators/amplifiers to damage and mana usage.
Overall, this particular tweak could be complicated by hp/mp regen rates, which may need to be tweaked differently to get it ballanced.
One of the things I added to Glest many years ago was a robust mechanism for stat modifiers (EDIT: also damage/heals-over-time, buffs and debuffs). I didn't think of it then, but if I did it again now I would design it in a heirarchical fashion such that the same framework could apply modifiers globally, per-player, per group, or individual unit, etc.
Would spawn a particular monster if difficulty level is higher than two. I'm not intimately familiar with the engine -- I don't suppose [enemy] entries support random attribute mutations huh? :)
wait...does FLARE even have support for fog of war?
Well no, that was a question. Is this something engine development team is interested in?
Relating to your question, there was some discussion on the FLARE github a while back, asking for the option for monsters to not respawn if when you enter or exit the level. So if I am understanding correctly, then yes, such features would be very much appreciated :)
Well it's a little more interesting than just rather or not monsters respawn and I suppose a few different options (from the engine perspective) would be appropriate, such as having monsters permenently dead, respawn every time you leave and come back or respawn after a set amount of time (rather you're in that particular map or not). It also means serializing the state of each monster, all effects, currently in-flight projectiles and map-specific objects (doors, chests, levers, etc.)
So it would be a non-trivial patch set. Adding de/serialization is also a step towards implementing multiplayer (peer-to-peer or client/server) functionality.
I spy an opportunity to expand the diminsions of the game here! :) Although it may require changing some of the stats in the engine from ints to floats. When I worked on Glest, many players complained that the battles were too fast when compared to similar commercial games like Warcraft. Flare could be more interesting with longer battles.
[difficulty_level]?
id=slow
name=Longer Battles
stat_enemy=hp,2.5
stat_enemy=hp_regen,2.5
stat_enemy=mp,2.5
stat_enemy=mp_regen,2.5
stat_hero=hp,2.5
stat_hero=hp_regen,2.5
stat_hero=mp,2.5
stat_hero=mp_regen,2.5
This would provide greater usefulness to debuffs (slows and bleeds) and powers that make use of them (electric mage attacks). Ideally, I would say that the player of any game (mod) could either choose from built-ins as above (some mutually exclusive, others not) and possibly also a "custom" interface to set the parameters manually? Yeah, I'm not a GUI guy either. :)
An alternative approach would be adding mitigators/amplifiers to damage and mana usage.
[difficulty_level]?
id=slow
name=Longer Battles
stat_enemy=damage_taken,0.4
stat_enemy=mana_used,0.4
stat_hero=damage_taken,0.4
stat_hero=mana_used,0.4
Overall, this particular tweak could be complicated by hp/mp regen rates, which may need to be tweaked differently to get it ballanced.
One of the things I added to Glest many years ago was a robust mechanism for stat modifiers (EDIT: also damage/heals-over-time, buffs and debuffs). I didn't think of it then, but if I did it again now I would design it in a heirarchical fashion such that the same framework could apply modifiers globally, per-player, per group, or individual unit, etc.
Hrm. Difficulty should be an engine-level settings and then the game should be able to specify a difficulty level at which something is applicable.
Example:
[enemy]
type=enemy
location=7,21,1,1
category=forgotten_grave
number=1
difficulty=>2
Would spawn a particular monster if difficulty level is higher than two. I'm not intimately familiar with the engine -- I don't suppose [enemy] entries support random attribute mutations huh? :)
Well no, that was a question. Is this something engine development team is interested in?
Well it's a little more interesting than just rather or not monsters respawn and I suppose a few different options (from the engine perspective) would be appropriate, such as having monsters permenently dead, respawn every time you leave and come back or respawn after a set amount of time (rather you're in that particular map or not). It also means serializing the state of each monster, all effects, currently in-flight projectiles and map-specific objects (doors, chests, levers, etc.)
So it would be a non-trivial patch set. Adding de/serialization is also a step towards implementing multiplayer (peer-to-peer or client/server) functionality.