Suggestion for the devs: A third sprite for downed units

[Nunda]

I was going to wait for a wishlist thread like in the Dom5 forum, but I guess this will do.

My suggestion is a downed/unconscious sprite. A soldier on their knees, weapon fallen on the ground. An elephant or a dragon toppled down, unable to fight back. Or something creative, like a guru having lost their meditative pose.

For those who don't know, every unit in the game has two models. One is them idle and moving, the other is attacking/spellcasting/repelling. Because this game has a LOT of units, adding a third model/sprite would be a lot of work.

But it is worth it for these reasons:


1. Visual clarity
When units hit 100 fatigue, they stop and fall unconscious. Currently, the best way to notice that is by having the squares turned on and looking for the blue dots under the units, but this is hard to do in a big fight.

If units were to "fall down" (there wouldn't really be much of an animation other than them changing between the sprites), you could more clearly see when a battle has gone on long or if a mighty warrior was struck by an elf shot that fatigued them out.

This downed sprite could be used for other effects too, like sleeping and stunned.


2. Battlefield epicness
Yes, yes, we don't play this game because it has magnificent graphics. We play it for other reasons. But that does not mean we should ignore ways to make the game look better.

If every unit went through a "downed" phase before they died, it would look a whole lot better than them simply disappearing after their enemy swung a sword. We get more of a reaction to the attack, and it could be very satisfying when a monster kills multiple fighters with one swing.

I was partly inspired to write this because of the new "disintegration" that happens when mindless units are left without leaders. Nice job on that, makes battles against death mages more satisfying!


3. Shortcuts to make this easier
Many units in the game have similar baselines in their sprites. You wouldn't have to make a unique death sprite for every heavy infantry. Just one pose that gets copied and tweaked to have their colour and armour match the unit would fit fine for human infantry. If you have their weapon lying on the ground, making these sprites will be even easier than making attack sprites because you don't have to worry about the weapons matching their hands!


Will this be quick and simple to add? No.
Would the game be more satisfying to play if you did this for even just the human infantry (skipping all the monsters and weirdness that would be hard to draw falling over)? Yes, it would be.
...Although maybe it would become jarring when some have a third sprite and others don't. But I'm pretty sure there's still units in this game that don't have even a second sprite, so...

[Nunda]

Nguyên văn bởi Mormacil:

You can read that already in the log, see the damage numbers on the sprite etc. It does not add something new mechanically.

And I disagree, mechanics is what makes a thing a game. Even game level composition serves a mechanical need of directing the player down a level. So you use things like composition lines to implore the player to walk down certain directions. So while it can look pretty, it's done with a mechanical purpose.

I'm not inherently against extra sprite slots, I've asked for those on several occassions. I do however disagree with the proposed arguments.

You didn't answer my question.

Also, what do you think is the mechanical purpose of music in Dominions? And why does that music change to a different track when you enter a battle? Dominions 5 didn't have that, but I'm glad it was brought back like it was in earlier titles.
If battle music is just the game telling you "hey btw, you're in a battle", we might as well just have a little *ding* sound and nothing else.

[Mormacil]

Oh right, yes I think that would be sufficient if aesthetically unpleasing. But glowing eyes is a common lazy route I take to give big sprites an attack pose. So yeah acceptable.

Also you seem to confuse something having a mechanical purpose and something being devoid and aesthetic contribution. While both a ding and battle music serve the same mechanical purpose they're obviously not the same.

[MadAsgardian]

It's a small team and a niche game -- upping the sprite requirements by one third (on 3000+ units) doesn't really seem like a wise investment of resources. The time and money spent on this is time and money not spent elsewhere.

Especially when, as you say, there's already a fatigue indicator available if you switch views.

[Miguel V-DF]

This would be nice. While it would indeed add a cost to modding, as Sombre himself pointed, if we hadn't the attack sprite right now and it was suggested, modders would feel the cost as well.
This simple addition would improve readability of the battle at a glance.

[Mormacil]

Nguyên văn bởi MadAsgardian:

It's a small team and a niche game -- upping the sprite requirements by one third (on 3000+ units) doesn't really seem like a wise investment of resources. The time and money spent on this is time and money not spent elsewhere.

Especially when, as you say, there's already a fatigue indicator available if you switch views.

I mean if we want death sprites we can just make a size based gore/corpse sprite with some additional ones for the weirder species. But every size 7 or 8 giant can just use the same corpse sprite that way. Now I feel that will significantly impact readability but it would be a cool way to represent the present corpses to use in magic. And you'd be done with two dozen or so new sprites.

It will also minimally impact modding as every human unit will share the same corpse sprite. I think that's an acceptable burden.

[JETFADIL]

I don't get why everyone is trying to gank on this topic, just throw 2-3 death sprites for each size and you're done, yeah bandar and giants might need more work or pretenders, but come on, all humans will basically use same.

[amuys]

Honestly it'd be pretty simple imho to just implement a universal 'corpse' sprite like a lot of games do

[Kamiyama]

If they do this I would suggest not having a unique colored sprite for every single unit in the game, but rather a generic "bones" sprite for every size and type of unit.

Size 1 to 10 humanoid bones for humanoid units
Size 1 to 10 monster bones for monster units and animals
Size 1 to 10 dust piles for ethereal units and maybe demons? (do they burst into flames?)

It would save a lot of work. 30 sprites versus like thousands

[AN]

If you had a handful of generic sprites wouldn't that makes things less readable instead of more, especially in the common occurrence of two humansized nations fighting a big battle?

[Kamiyama]

Nguyên văn bởi AN:

If you had a handful of generic sprites wouldn't that makes things less readable instead of more, especially in the common occurrence of two humansized nations fighting a big battle?

But they are all the same thing. A corpse is a corpse. They all raise into the same type of undead skeleton.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Genericized corpses are a lot more practical than the original suggestion, but i'm uncertain of the mechanical benefit. It would pretty much just be 'soulless rise where they died' and thats it. Longdead don't depend on corpses.

I guess it would be amusing if certain corpses emitted clouds or something, but that would be basically weaponizing the lack of pathfinding.

[BNRON]

I think rotation or a colour fade could potentially work. For rotation, you would want to restrict it to non-mount non-rider units though.

Btw, for mounted units, doesn't the commander fall off their mount once they get 100 fatigue? Maybe I imagined that...

I do think visually showing exhaustion would be a nice feature! But potentially a lot of work!

Personally, I'd like more details in the battle log, and other quality of life improvements before this change though.

[Ashiver]

I will say I don't like having to click on guys in battles every so often to see if they are unconscious or not. It is pretty annoying and it is bad readability. As to how much work this is or whether it's worth it I won't claim to know, but I do think it would be very cool and helpful.

[anaris]

fatigue pips already exist on the icons, would your problem be better solved by making them larger than an entirely new sprite ?