Idea: Clan of the Rat

[Fingeris]

No houses, multiple town hall upgrades instead.

Villagers have the same stats as Thralls (and similar appearance) + increased spawn rate.

Weak and reasonably cheap military units, swarm type (like kobolds).

Warchief is Healer type with a tile production boost active skill, can't cross borders.

Main focus on food and lore resources.

Receives immunity to negative effects + food production boost from "rat swarm event".

[:) m Ö r Ö n (:]

What if they do not have town hall, just cave on starting area? They need to upgrade that cave all over again - every time the player can choose different bonuses and bonus goes weaker after time and needs to upgrade again to get the full bonus.

The Rat Clan definitely do not trust Food Silos, they use underground cellars. They are very reliable on winter and even on summer. Cost of the first cellar is 40 wood and 40 lore and next 40 wood and 80 lore and third is 40 wood and 120 lore and so forth. One cellar takes 0,1 - 0,2 stone per year for building upkeep so player must have extra stores for little amount of stone :P

[Kairion]

I like the concept of a swarming clan. But i see some challenges.

First of all, thrall like villagers are a dangerous thing to have. While they collect only 50% of the resources a villager would, they only consume 33%. Especially when scavengeing for food, this is a massive upside for them.
If your entire clan has weaker units and no offset in terms of how many villagers can be assigned to a particular building, all foodbuildings loose their appeal completely. And this design spot for assigning more is already partly occupied by goats industrious and dragons blood sweat & tears.

Now partially this could be fixed by not giving them 33% consumption but ratter half. This however still leaves you with the problem that all structures are significantly worse for you due to the upkeep cost.

Being flat out immune to negative effects is in my oppinion a bad design choice, as it reduices the ammount of actions required in an already quite laid back game even more. Milder punishments & immunity to rat swarm could certainly be feasable. but it doesn't really make sense why blizzard or earthquakes should have no impact on them. after all they are humans, not the warhammer vermins.

Now lets come to the warchief. I like the idea of a healing warchief. It is something no clan has and could be a unique feature. But i don't see the sinergy with cheap throw away units. I would suggest giving him the role of inspiring the troops in battle with warcries instead. This lends itself way more towards the clans playstile.


Nor sure if this is the right approach, but i would make rats buildins cheaper in building cost & upkeep and give them boosts to how quickly they can expand. This way, they have to expand aggressively to facilitate a rapid growth, just like rodents do when unopposed.
This also would make them quite hard to exterminate. fitting even more with the theme.

Also i would definietly make their consumption rate 50% rather than 33%.

Lastly something to consider: Dragon will absolutely wipe out rat armies in seconds, once the lategame is reached. I am not sure if this matchup can be balanced.

But overall really cool theme, would love to see it in game, i just doubt it fits without some adjustments

[Fingeris]

Thanks for your contribution!

All ideas are good, let's just hope that Shiro will pay attention to it.

[linky]

I really like this idea!

but something that bothers me is the idea that the warchief cannot cross borders, I think that in a swarm style of play (like zergs in Starcraft for example) you would want a swarm and maybe a couple of big units behind that buff/heal the swarm as a whole.
- Allow the warchief to cross borders and give him 2 abilities first heal second buff, the buff will be chosen manually by the player in the UI of the warchief my suggestion is the choice between bonus DMG or bonus RESISTANCE to give the player the option to suicide rush on someone or if they dont have as much units buff their resistance. all of these buffs will affect the entire tile that the warchief stands on and he cannot attack while buffing
(maybe like a black witch or mutated rat witch for the model)