Collectible Card Game Headquarters

Anyone making any customs? Post 'em here.
Also, if more documentation would be helpful for making customs (other than what is under 'doc' and the existing .dxp files), let me know.

~telengard

Ambush is pretty much my favorite ability. While fleshless reaper is awesome, i love droning damselfly and zungar marauder (serrated dawn). In my opinion charge isn't quite as good because you can only hit one unit as opposed to ambush which allows the unit to hit everyone that comes into the cell. Ive been thinking how to make charge a better ability and i came up with this unit. If you guys can think of a better name or think its overpowered or underpowered feel free to put in your comments.

Name: Brighthammer lancer
Aspect(s): Valor/Passion
Lineage: Bloodcut
Cost: 6VP
Power: 2
Defense: 3
Hit points: 5
Ability: charge 4, (Blade) Skirmish self

This might be horribly overpowered for the price, and it may need to be raised to 7, so i eagerly await your comments. Im going to try making a few more especially if you guys like this one. Just a quick question is it ok to make abilities up? It seems as if you have coded the effects of each ability into the system and i have no idea how much effort that took you. I would try to stay away form any overly complex things and go for more basic ideas conceptually but i still feel that there is still a lot of room for creativeness that can be capitalized on.

BagelJester wrote:Ambush is pretty much my favorite ability. While fleshless reaper is awesome, i love droning damselfly and zungar marauder (serrated dawn). In my opinion charge isn't quite as good because you can only hit one unit as opposed to ambush which allows the unit to hit everyone that comes into the cell. Ive been thinking how to make charge a better ability and i came up with this unit. If you guys can think of a better name or think its overpowered or underpowered feel free to put in your comments.

Name: Brighthammer lancer
Aspect(s): Valor/Passion
Lineage: Bloodcut
Cost: 6VP
Power: 2
Defense: 3
Hit points: 5
Ability: charge 4, (Blade) Skirmish self

This might be horribly overpowered for the price, and it may need to be raised to 7, so i eagerly await your comments. Im going to try making a few more especially if you guys like this one. Just a quick question is it ok to make abilities up? It seems as if you have coded the effects of each ability into the system and i have no idea how much effort that took you. I would try to stay away form any overly complex things and go for more basic ideas conceptually but i still feel that there is still a lot of room for creativeness that can be capitalized on.

I like it, both stats and name! The Skirmish Self will allow him to get more Charges in, which is good.

I think it's costed OK. If you are worried about cost you can use this handy dandy formula to figure out an approximate base cost.

base_cost = -1.72 + ( 0.97 * power ) + ( 0.32 * defense ) + ( 0.26 * life )

From there you can decide how much you feel each ability is worth in terms of cost.

If you are worried about overpowering you can always lower his power or make the Skirmish Self need a double blade, or, since he is Passion and he should have a decent power give him a negative ability like Loner to offset his nice Charging stuff.

As for new abilities, yep I don't mind adding them at all but for performance of the AI they are "in code", no way to do them in XML as of yet. A lot of the abilities in the next release will support tailoring them more so maybe you can utilize that too. For instance Reinforce X. Before I had separate code pieces for each version of Reinforce. Now there is a target_piece_condition. So if you set it to be of a type that targets only Valor, that is easy to do. There are lots of conditions too, this is how Reinforce Battle works too. It uses a target_piece_condition of "engaged creature". So there is some form of a toolbox available for creating new abilities without code changes.

If you have ability ideas you can just use them in your minis and I'll add the abilities in a future release. Also, if you don't mind once you are happy with this custom I'd like to add it to the ones that come with the program as I love Ambush and Charge. Zungar Marauder is GREAT.

Thanks for sharing, good stuff!

~telengard

Thanks for the praise/advice. Ive been toying with another idea. Everyone should know nightfire giant, a massive creature with some massive attack. Its only drawback is blind fury, when it attacks it has to kill and cannot disrupt. This is a pretty cool ability but after thinking about it i thought that the opposite would be more interesting. This would go somewhere along the lines of you can only disrupt and cant kill. Once again the name could use some work, feel free to criticize/help.

Name: Knight of virtue
Aspect(s): Valor
Cost: 9VVV
Power: 4
Defense: 8
Hit Points: 12
Ability: Mercy (Local enemies cannot be destroyed) (0) Leadership 3 (A variation of the enrage ability found in Virtuous maiden) :Local allies have +3 power.

I felt like Brighthammer lancer was a pretty complete idea, but i can tell this one needs some more work, and especially testing. Leadership 3 might be overpowered, i just felt like that was necessary as virtuous maiden has enrage 1 which is a better version of leadership and she only costs 4VV. Criticism of all kinds accepted!

While the first two minis i posted here are valor or passion don't let that confuse you. I mainly play fear. Currently i play two fear warbands, one hiveling, the other a very bizarre strategy involving throwing all the units in your reserve into your graveyard as fast as possible using abilities such as corpse built from equitar in order to power up carrion spiker and grave spiker. One problem i had with hiveling was there just wasn't too good a variety. So my third mini is going to be a hiveling Yay! Well this little guy was designed to be a hive grunt just running around and somewhat recyclable.

Name: Recalcitrant Roach
Aspect: Fear
Lineage: Hiveling
Cost: 7F
Power: 3
Defense: 5
Hit points: 6
Ability: Re-spawn 5
Flavor text: No matter how many times they die they always seem to come back...

Its not as creative as the other ones i made, but i feel this one fills the role of shock trooper in the hiveling forces, one i think is much needed. Im not sure if i want to lower the defense and hit points and have it slightly cheaper. Any suggestions are welcome.

BagelJester wrote:Thanks for the praise/advice. Ive been toying with another idea. Everyone should know nightfire giant, a massive creature with some massive attack. Its only drawback is blind fury, when it attacks it has to kill and cannot disrupt. This is a pretty cool ability but after thinking about it i thought that the opposite would be more interesting. This would go somewhere along the lines of you can only disrupt and cant kill. Once again the name could use some work, feel free to criticize/help.

Name: Knight of virtue
Aspect(s): Valor
Cost: 9VVV
Power: 4
Defense: 8
Hit Points: 12
Ability: Mercy (Local enemies cannot be destroyed) (0) Leadership 3 (A variation of the enrage ability found in Virtuous maiden) :Local allies have +3 power.

I felt like Brighthammer lancer was a pretty complete idea, but i can tell this one needs some more work, and especially testing. Leadership 3 might be overpowered, i just felt like that was necessary as virtuous maiden has enrage 1 which is a better version of leadership and she only costs 4VV. Criticism of all kinds accepted!

I really like the Mercy ability. I will add that to the program. I like Leadership too, just applying to local allies for a lower cost.

BagelJester wrote:While the first two minis i posted here are valor or passion don't let that confuse you. I mainly play fear. Currently i play two fear warbands, one hiveling, the other a very bizarre strategy involving throwing all the units in your reserve into your graveyard as fast as possible using abilities such as corpse built from equitar in order to power up carrion spiker and grave spiker. One problem i had with hiveling was there just wasn't too good a variety. So my third mini is going to be a hiveling Yay! Well this little guy was designed to be a hive grunt just running around and somewhat recyclable.

Name: Recalcitrant Roach
Aspect: Fear
Lineage: Hiveling
Cost: 7F
Power: 3
Defense: 5
Hit points: 6
Ability: Re-spawn 5
Flavor text: No matter how many times they die they always seem to come back...

Its not as creative as the other ones i made, but i feel this one fills the role of shock trooper in the hiveling forces, one i think is much needed. Im not sure if i want to lower the defense and hit points and have it slightly cheaper. Any suggestions are welcome.

I've never been able to get a good thing going w/ the Thantomancy etc, I'd be curious to see that warband.

Also, I forgot to post this thread over on the wizards forum, it's about making customs and is quite long and has some really good ideas in there.

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75870/19511702/The_Dreamblade_Design_Game

~telengard

My Spiker warband is pretty good in my opinion. My friends have yet to defeat it, and generally lose 1 or 2 to 6. Well here is the list.

2 Equitar
1 The Sweeper
3 Grave spiker
2 Carrion spiker
3 Omen locust
3 Cannibal pariah
2 Zombie enforcer
2 Acolyte of pain

This is the complete list of how i want it to be, but The Sweeper is really optional. The grave crit ability is completly beast in this deck as it allows you to deal an extra 5-10 damage per blade, but it really is a matter of taste. Its perfectly ok to switch him out with a Carrion Hulk which is equally good in this band as it has corpsebuilt and gravecrit.

This warband is particularly deadly in my opinion as it starts out a swarm going for a tactical victory, but thats really just a front to get your opponent to conform with your plan. You generally want to start out by spamming cannibal pariah or zombie enforcers and acolyte of pain. These guys spread across the map real quickly and if you try to avoid the enemies and go straight for scoring cells they can pose a major threat to your opponent. I like to spread mine out so there is generally only 1 of them in a cell. Your opponent will likely feel the pressure and come and whack on them. Perfect, the result is them killing your unit and putting it in the grave yard, something you want, and also giving you an extra 2 spawn points next phase. For something like a 2 or 3 cost such as my cannibal, acolyte, or zombie getting 2 points back is a very good deal! I try to get a few equitars out early using the extra spawn. since they are corpsebuilt 2 that means 2 guys from your reserves instantly go into your grave yard. Once again pure awesome for you as well as equitar being no joke by itself. Easily quite powerful the Equitar is one guy your opponent doesn't want to mess with, only costing 9 is a added bonus! Omen locust isn't meant to be summoned in this deck. Since it has triplicate it means the second and third copies dont count towards your warband limit so they are just sacrifices to get out your corpsebuilt monsters. Carrion spiker is nice, but Grave spiker is really what makes this warband shine. With power, toughness, and health = to the amount of guys you have in your graveyard, its gets easily powered up in this setting. typically within 5-7 turns i can get 8-10 units in my graveyard giving this baby the power of any 12 cost titan. With a cost of only 4 and appease to kill another guy coming in you cant go wrong! It seems like getting the combo out can take a while but its actually much faster than you would think. My friend Kyle plays a Passion/Valor attack stack using high hitters guarded by the bodygaurd affects of valor. I beat him 6-1 using this warband. it was over way too fast. He killed 3 of mine, i killed none of his, but in the end he had concentrated his best units into one cell which was composed of a nightfire giant, and some equally nasty creatures. On the other hand mine i still had 3 wimpies spread out and my attack stack had 2 equitars, and 2 grave spikers. the equitars had the standard 6 attack apiece while the gravespikers were powered up to 8 dice each. If i remember correctly Kyle's stack had a total of 20 attack dice in it, not shaby at all but pitiful compared to my 28. Since mine were fear they had alot more defence and hitpoints as well. I was somewhat saddened that the game ended so quickly but i think it showcased just some of the crazy ability of this warband. I think you should try it out sometime.

*EDIT*

I just realized that entire post was about my warband and was not relavant to the topic so here is another custom. not the best but a good excuse.

Abyss of despair
Location
Cost: 3FFF
Panic 2: local enemies have 2 less defense
Aura of fear: Adjacent enemies have 1 less defense

No problem, I like hearing about what goes on w/ warband creation etc. I think I'm going to create another sticky to chat about warbands since there are some included with the program, but I'd like to include more.

I've made a sticky for talking about warbands:

http://www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=1871

~telengard

Psychotic Doctor
Madness
4MM
Power=1
Defense: 2
Hp: 6
Ability: Multi blade. Essence transfer 1. target non local ally may activate a ability as if a blade had been assigned to it.

BagelJester wrote:Psychotic Doctor
Madness
4MM
Power=1
Defense: 2
Hp: 6
Ability: Multi blade. Essence transfer 1. target non local ally may activate a ability as if a blade had been assigned to it.

If I'm understanding the Essence Transfer ability, since it is multiblade you can pretty much transfer all blades? I like it. I imagine the rulings for Gent would apply here? No combat only blade abilities?

I went poking around too and recalled Phantom which seems to be similar to Blind Fury. It does need the owning piece to be attacking though (i.e. triggered ability) whereas the Mercy ability seems to be a static ability, so it would apply even if the piece isn't attacking.

~telengard

Just wanted to let those of you making customs know that the next release will have the ability (pun not intended haha) to make your own abilities (to some degree). I've broken down a lot of the abilities into their core function and having small conditions tweak them rather than having multiple versions of an ability with the conditions hard-coded in.

For example, Carrion Spiker's Thantomancy looked like this:

Code: Select all

   
    <static_abilities>
        <static_ability>
            <type>ABILITY_TYPE_THANTOMANCY</type>
        </static_ability>
    </static_abilities>


And there was a C++ class that mapped to that static ability.

It now looks like this:

Code: Select all

    <static_abilities>
        <static_ability>
            <type>ABILITY_TYPE_POWER_X</type>
            <ability_category_type>ABILITY_TYPE_THANTOMANCY</ability_category_type>
            <desc>Thantomancy</desc>
            <desc_long>This creature's power is equal to the number of creatures in your graveyard.</desc_long>
            <piece_conditions>
                <condition>
                    <id>CONDITION_TYPE_PIECE_IS_CREATURE</id>
                </condition>
                <condition>
                    <id>CONDITION_TYPE_PIECE_IN_GRAVEYARD</id>
                </condition>
                <condition>
                    <id>CONDITION_TYPE_PIECE_CONTROLLER_IS_ABILITY_PIECE_CONTROLLER</id>
                </condition>
            </piece_conditions>
        </static_ability>
    </static_abilities>


This makes it easier for me to maintain and debug (and speeds up compiles since I've removed 50+ abilities so far) and also means players can make their own abilities. It may have a very small performance penalty since now some of the abilities have to "walk" every piece and have a wee bit more function call overhead. I'll know more once I get everything in place. No such thing as a free lunch though.

Abilities like Swarm, Swarmstorm, Rejoinder, etc also do the same thing (have a replacement for power that does a calculation) so it made sense to make it generic. I did this with a lot of the other abilities and am happy with how it is working out.

I hope to have this done soon!

~telengard