Viking Funeral

[Shoggoth]

Ok everyone, due to popular demand, I've added a 'Viking Funeral' feature that allows you to discard dead units and their items, and gain renown in return.

You will find a button to activate this feature on the details page of the Heroes screen for the dead unit. The renown recovery rate is 5 x HERO RANK plus 5 x ITEM RANK.

Currently, you can both equip and unequip items from a dead hero via the Roster screen (the screen that shows all the hero icons). You cannot see or interact with the Item on the dead hero details screen, however. I don't like this inconsistency. Do you think that we should lock items onto dead units, or let you swap them around? If the latter, is the current mechanism ok, or should we bring back the item on the details screen as well?

Viking Funeral is in build 2.30.82 and beyond.

[Aleonymous]

More awesomeness

Comments on Renown recovery rates:

• Items: The rate seems fine. Actually, better than I expected!
  
• Dead heros: Rate is approximately half the Renown invested for high-rank heros. For example a r10 hero takes about 100R to make and returns 50R. Lower-rank dead heroes return more Renown, e.g. a r3 returns 15R and requires 5R to make (or 0 if recruited from the start). This does leave a small "hole" open to farm Renown by letting your crew die intentionally...

I guess it would be 'appropriate' to lock items to dead heroes. But, in this hard times we're living, maybe swapping them around is more gameplay-friendly :) I think that allowing to swap items in both Roster and Hero-Details screen is the way to do it, in any case.

Finally, please allow us to scroll back ('left') from the first (lowest-rank) to the last (highest-rank) item. In the last battles, you typically wanna check your highest-rank items, and starting from the first item takes like 30 clicks...

EDIT: Here's the accurate Renown recovery per-rank

Rank    Funeral   Promo-cost  Difference
 3        15           0          15 
 4        20           7          13 
 5        25          16           9 
 6        30          29           1 
 7        35          44          -9 
 8        40          61         -21 
 9        45          80         -35 
10        50         101         -51 

Note: +5 should be added (subtracted) from third (fourth) column, in case the hero was hired after the first six.

So, losing a high-rank hero is more Renown costly. Disposing of low-rank heroes, up to r5, is actually worth it!

[Troll]

Great addition .

I also found the inconsistency about items and dead heroes a bit disturbing but as long as we don't have a way to acquire desired items it might make the game even harder to lock out the dead heroes' items.

I also agree with Aleo that overviewing the items is currently quite painful. Once again having a way to recycle the unused ones (apart from a funeral) would change things here.

[Shoggoth]

Originally posted by Aleonymous:

So, losing a high-rank hero is more Renown costly. Disposing of low-rank heroes, up to r5, is actually worth it!

I think we should change it to (rank-2)*5. That would make the chart (including recruiting costs):

Rank   Promo   Promo+Recruit  Funeral     Difference
 3        0          5           5            0
 4        7         12          10           -2
 5       16         21          15           -6
 6       29         34          20          -14
 7       44         49          25          -24
 8       61         66          30          -36
 9       80         85          35          -50
10      101        106          40          -66

[Aleonymous]

Yup, these Renown-return rates make more sense. Typically, you use a Reload when a high-rank hero falls, so the large return "losses" for high-rank heroes won't be felt so much.

One other (small) thing: I wish you didn't entirely remove the heroes sent to Valhalla from the Roster. I suppose that in the future, you might wanna keep stats for each hero's performance (Kills, dmg dealth/taken etc).

[RMoniker]

Originally posted by Shoggoth:

Currently, you can both equip and unequip items from a dead hero via the Roster screen (the screen that shows all the hero icons). You cannot see or interact with the Item on the dead hero details screen, however. I don't like this inconsistency. Do you think that we should lock items onto dead units, or let you swap them around? If the latter, is the current mechanism ok, or should we bring back the item on the details screen as well?

Maybe it's just me, but I always thought it felt appropriate to lose access to the item the character was carrying when they died. We are getting buffs to renown gained with the new funeral system (and new 2nd wave battles), which will make leveling replacements characters easier. Something should be lost when a character goes down (plus, there is usually a deluge of items to contend with anyone).

It would prevent situations where you just remove the item the character was carrying and replace it with something you never use, as a backdoor way of just selling off items you never use.

Plus, the item sometimes makes the character (or at least affects the build). Once I've starting building a character with a certain item in mind, it kind of feels weird passing it off to another character, kind of like it wasn't theirs. (If I acquired two of that item, though, maybe that's a different story).

Also, what are we, barbarians? Looting spoils off the dead!? Bolverk maybe, but we're all civilized, right? (joking around, though)

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject. For the first several days, I was working under the assumption that you lost access to items when a character died. Maybe that way of handling it feels more correct, in a way, because that's how I was originally operating.

[Aleonymous]

I did some calculations on Viking Funerals with Items. It turns out you can earn a little Renown by "sacrificing" & funeral-izing low-rank heroes:

Rank	    Promo	+Recr	    Funeral	Diff.
3	    0	        5	    14	        +9
4	    7	        12	    22	        +10
5	    16	        21	    30	        +9
6	    29	        34	    38	        +4
7	    44	        49	    46	        -3
8	    61	        66	    54	        -12
9	    80	        85	    62	        -23
10	    101	        106	    70	        -36

Funeral Renown is:

Renown = (Hero_Rank-2)*5 + Item_Rank*3 = Rank * 8 - 10

The fourth column corresponds to item rank equal to dead hero rank.

The last column is the Renown "balance" if you burn a dead hero with item and then recruit and promote a fresh one to the same rank as the deceased one. Evidently, recruiting and promoting "expendable" heroes of ranks 3-4-5, only to Funeral-ize them with items is... OK