My Take on Squad Diversity

AlienTreeAlienTree Member
in General Discussion

So I haven't finished watching the AMA yet, but I have an idea regarding diversity within a single squad so I paused and tabbed over. This idea came to me as I was waiting for my stats final to start yesterday, and I still think there's some refining that needs to be had, but I at least just thought of a good analogy for my idea.

What if when you pick a squad, instead of choosing a composition of a hero and three units you are instead choosing a hero and three unit archetypes. Using Ryme as a simple example, since I've played him the most, instead of Glacial Rangers, Frostcallers, and Giant Ice Frogs, you have a small plump ranger, a tall gangly spellcaster, and a frog who are all about Tier 1 in strength. When the game begins, you can build any of these three units as you see fit. Then, as the game progresses, you pick one of your three units to upgrade to Tier 2. This individual unit becomes significantly stronger, gaining upgrades to its abilities, damage, and health, but your other two unit archetypes remain Tier 1 in strength. Finally, in the end game you are allowed to select one of your other two units that you DIDN'T upgrade to Tier 2 and bring it to Tier 3, gaining even more of a boost than the Tier 2 upgrade. This allows for six different compositions per squad, and even allows the opponent to read into what composition you might be going for once you select a Tier 2 upgrade in the mid game, bringing in some more counterplay depth.

The analogy I came up with a few minutes ago, while watching Day9 talk about having too many units being impossible to parse, was to Pokémon. Essentially, at the beginning of the game, you are given Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur. Your first tech upgrade is to evolve one of them once, and your second tech upgrade is to evolve another one twice. In this case, these decisions are very impactful, as Charizard/Ivysaur/Squirtle has very different strengths and weaknesses than Venusaur/Wartortle/Charmander. But the thing is, as they evolve they still maintain their readability and personality, and continue to hold the same function within the team. This kind of system could bring variety into squads without hurting squad individuality or readability.

Now, I have no idea how hard this would be to implement and balance, and it would kinda mean designing another 48 units just to work on the current 8 squads but... I really like it, and wanted to share to hear everyone else's thoughts on the idea.

Comments

  • AneesAnees Member

    I think that would lead to less diversity, actually. Why wouldn't I just make 18 of the same guy and then upgrade them all to tier 3 to maximize the benefit of that upgrade?

  • AlienTreeAlienTree Member

    That's actually a great point. I think a part of this would be that upgrading a type of unit will require recalling all of them to your base, and then x number of your old unit becomes y of the higher tier unit, with the cost to build and unit cap reflecting that change. So, for example, you have your 18 wisps and upgrade to tier 3 and you only get 6 Super Wisps out in return, but god damn do those 6 super wisps fuck shit up. So, still an upgrade, but still requires you to build your other two units to get to a max sized army at the same time. That gets a little more in depth with costs changing and efficiency of buying before or after upgrading and weird things like that, so maybe that would cause problems. Thanks for bringing that up!

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