mod Scary war elephants

[maroder]

Heavily inspired by the morale mod: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/37755-morale-system-for-0-ad

And this idea: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/38187-give-elephants-area-damage/

I want to explore a new mechanic for elephants. (Just for fun, so the effects may be unrealistic)

Original version, now outdated:

Historically elephants were especially effective against cavalry, because if the horses were not used to the presence of elephants, they would get very nervous and flee when they saw something that big walking towards them. This would disrupt the battle formation and cause disturbance in the enemy lines. I am basing this mostly on wikipedia quotes, so if some of the historians want to explain more if this is historically accurate or if these are just some anecdotes, feel free to do so

Therefore the Idea would be that elephants have an aura that changes the stance of enemy cavalry to passive and forces them to flee. It should only affect unhabituated / basic rank cavalry, as the horses loose their fear over time. So advanced /elite cavalry is not affected.

Current Version (V 3.0.0):

• Elephants have the aura "Fear" which affects a random percentage of all basic rank enemy Infantry and all of the basic rank enemy cavalry.
• The affected units get scared and will flee, but they try to attack again.
• Every time the elephants get hurt (under a certain threshold) there is the probability that they also get scared and fall into rage. So you have no longer control over them and they may attack your own units.

scary-elephants.zip

So let me hear what you think about it

Thanks to @wowgetoffyourcellphone and @azayrahmad for the tips.

Edited May 14, 2021 by maroder
update mod files

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Neat! Alpha 24 release or Alpha 25/SVN?

Edited April 13, 2021 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[maroder]

Alpha 24. I still haven't managed to upgrade to the development version, but maybe that would be a good idea by now

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

As for the aura problem you have, in DE I give the Gallic Carnys Player this aura:

{
	"type": "range",
	"radius": 20,
	"affectedPlayers": ["Enemy"],
	"affects": ["Unit"],
	"modifications": [
	    {"value": "Attack/Melee/RepeatTime", "multiply": 1.1},
	    {"value": "Attack/Ranged/RepeatTime", "multiply": 1.1},
	    {"value": "Attack/Capture/Capture", "multiply": 0.9 },
	    {"value": "UnitMotion/WalkSpeed", "multiply": 0.9}
	],
	"auraName": "Intimidation",
	"auraDescription": "The Carnyx Player reduces the enemy's attack and capture rates and movement speed -10%.",
	"overlayIcon": "art/textures/ui/session/auras/broken_sword.png",
	"rangeOverlay" : {
		"lineTexture": "outline_border.png",
		"lineTextureMask": "outline_border_mask.png",
		"lineThickness": 0.075
	}
}

See line 4: "affectedPlayers"  

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Just now, maroder said:

Alpha 24. I still haven't managed to upgrade to the development version, but maybe that would be a good idea by now

That's okay... I would wait for a couple months before you start developing for A25, so that your mod doesn't continually break because of code changes.  

[maroder]

nice, ok that should help

fixed now. Thanks again.

Edited April 13, 2021 by maroder

[Player of 0AD]

As long as it stays a mod: pretty interesting!

[Lopess]

Great job congratulations! I would love to see this adapted to 0a.d. Alpha 25 It would be a really unique mechanic (even if I don't expect it to become official: D)

[faction02]

I love the idea  but I (and I think a few other players, chrstgtr in the topic below) dislike the flee mechanics in general. I think the part we dislike about it might be a problem here too.

Having units running when they flee and other chasing them instead of fighting is problematic in battles. It is common to have a player setting his hero in passive to trigger the chasing mechanic in the enemy army. It can put you at a strong disadvantage.

To abuse this feature, I would send my melee cavalry to attack your elephants and therefore force your ranged infantry to chase my melee cavalry instead of killing my ranged infantry. I would suggest testing some large battle with it, I would expect the result to be chaotic (I tried to make a video while testing it to show you what I mean but I messed up the installation. I might try again when I have more time).

While this might looks like a real battle  from a gameplay perspective, it might become quite messy. It will be great to try it.

Keep up with the great job and the nice ideas ! 

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

45 minutes ago, faction02 said:

Having units running when they flee and other chasing them instead of fighting is problematic in battles. It is common to have a player setting his hero in passive to trigger the chasing mechanic in the enemy army. It can put you at a strong disadvantage.

I think to mitigate this effect it should be fixed.  

[maroder]

11 hours ago, faction02 said:

Having units running when they flee and other chasing them instead of fighting is problematic in battles. It is common to have a player setting his hero in passive to trigger the chasing mechanic in the enemy army. It can put you at a strong disadvantage.

Yeah, good point. I tried to simulate a large battle, but its hard to control two player at once. From what I saw it is not that big of a problem, as the elephants chase the cavalry easily out of the range of the ranged infantry. But yes it is very chaotic and the cavalry is more or less useless in this case. You would have to send them raiding, while you use your infantry to counter the eles. Or research the not yet implemented tech.

Also I think it is not that problematic with the cav, because they are not such tanks as the heroes. Otherwise you could use the strategy you described also without this mod just set the cav to passive, order them to attack and then send your infantry. At least I haven't seen someone use this until now.

But yes, maybe something has to be changed in the chasing mechanic. It might be better to preferably attack non-fleeing/non-passive units and only target them when there are no other targets left or you specifically order to attack them.

[azayrahmad]

17 hours ago, maroder said:

I have found no example where a technology is used to revert the effect of an aura

Great adaptation, @maroder! Perhaps create a new class e.g. Habituated. Or add Basic class to the aura so advance /elite units are not affected.

As to @faction02's concern, I think it could be mitigated by tweaking the aura range, i.e. should be within elephant's attack range so fleeing enemies can still be killed.

[Sturm]

In order to make the game more balanced and even more credible, the elephant or group of elephants could scare only a percentage of the enemies, something like 20-30%. 

[maroder]

1 hour ago, azayrahmad said:

Perhaps create a new class e.g. Habituated. Or add Basic class to the aura so advance /elite units are not affected.

Thanks very much for the tip is fixed now. The mod is now functioning as I intended. The only thing left to do is indeed to tweak the strength/ range of the aura.

[maroder]

43 minutes ago, Sturm said:

In order to make the game more balanced and even more credible, the elephant or group of elephants could scare only a percentage of the enemies, something like 20-30%. 

This is a nice idea, I am not sure how easy it is to implement this. You could of course use a random subset of the affected units, but the aura gets updated all the time, so you will likely hit every unit with it.

[Player of 0AD]

Gameplay-wise this is not so good because ranged cavalry is one of the few weaknesses of elephants. It would not improve the game, it would just change it.

[maroder]

1 hour ago, Player of 0AD said:

It would not improve the game, it would just change it.

It would improve the realism But yes gameplay wise it is a buff for elephants. What would be your idea to balance that?

I think it could be interesting to have a hard counter of the cavalry vs the elephants. Similar to the counter of spearman vs cavalry. So if you manage to keep your cavalry alive and let them reach a higher rank, you have an effective weapon against the elephants.

[Lion.Kanzen]

as the temporary effect by an ability, would be good.

We need abilities.

[maroder]

2 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

as the temporary effect by an ability, would be good.

if you want, you can extend that thought more. While I agree with you, i'm not sure what you mean.

[Lion.Kanzen]

12 minutes ago, maroder said:

if you want, you can extend that thought more. While I agree with you, i'm not sure what you mean.

Right, you forgot that this suggestion was made years ago.

 

In blizzard games like StarCraft and Warcraft, which give you have abilities in which you can perform certain actions that modify the use or attack of the unit for a certain or certain time.

 

There are actions that are passive and other active.

 

The one with the elephant and other units would create fear for a relative time if you or first press the  ability button (active) while playing, but it would be for a short period mostly to make a psychological impact, As more or less would happen in real life because if not as they said above it would be very op the elephant unit.

[Player of 0AD]

29 minutes ago, maroder said:

It would improve the realism But yes gameplay wise it is a buff for elephants. What would be your idea to balance that?

As I would not like to see the change in the game I'm not thinking about an idea to balance it ; )

[Lopess]

26 minutes ago, Player of 0AD said:

As I would not like to see the change in the game I'm not thinking about an idea to balance it ; )

lncredible...

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

I'm honestly unsure about this feature as well, but it would be interesting to make it so that advanced, elite soldiers, and champion have resistance to this.

[alre]

I think it's a big overstatement to call this mod realistic. This makes some famous anectods - actually marginal to the history of war elephants - into a very important feature, that can change the balance of the game in a forced way. Just give elephants a bonus against cavalry (and maybe spash damage?), that's more than enough. Elephants were used against heavy infantry most of the time. Hannibal at Zama didn't use elephants to protect his infantry from Scipio's cavalry.

[maroder]

10 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

Right, you forgot that this suggestion was made years ago.

Hard to forget something you have never known

I like the idea, but I think it would would makes more sense the other way round. The elephants are scary all the time, but you have the ability to push thorough that for a limited amount of time.