I'm toying with the idea of building a small campaign based on the movie "Starship Troopers". Yes, it's been done to death I know. But I think it would be interesting to map out John Rico's career as a soldier from beginning to end.
That's right, the focal point of this campaign will be John Rico's development as a military officer. However, I want to steer away from the usual "level up by getting a new character" affair since I've come to realize in any professional looking map, aesthetics count. Also, I want to avoid the "super hero" syndrome and still require the player play a competent commander.
Here are some ideas I might run with
- defeat does not come getting your hero killed, it comes from not finishing a certain objective by a certain time or simply just losing all your buildings or a certain key building.
- auras: I want to have a kind of aura effect that the hero can bring to the troops in the immediate area. Unfortunately, StarEdit doesn't allow you to alter unit tech or unit stats directly through trigger manipulation, or at least it's effect are very limited. For those values that you can modify, you can't simply add or subtract 20 health or some such. Instead it just sets the health to a certain level. Because of this, I now have a very crude trigger where at 60 second intervals, all GI units within the hero's healing area will get full health back. (kinda cheap I know) This is the only one I can come up with that I was decently happy with. The rest of the ideas I had with this concept lacked the precision i liked (I have come to hate spawning things randomly in areas since you never know what's gonna be in it's way) and are often far to glitchy to be reliable.
- In the beginning Rico will not command any soldiers. He will simply fight along side another squadron of soldiers (Commanded by an allied comp) until he's proven he's mettle in battle. Then he will be awarded with some foot soldiers, and eventually the aura ability mentioned above. The rest of this will be pretty standard fare.
that's what I have so far but I would like some feedback on if you guys think these will work out. The ultimate end goal is that I want to have something a little bit like warcraft 3 where the player will actually lead their hero into the fray with their foot soldiers as opposed to where the players are terrified to use their hero because their whole defeated rests on his shoulders.
It can quite work out. Yes as you mentioned, staredit has limits, so there won't be much of different auras hero can have.