Raiders

Raiders Idea

There are two cities. Between these cities there is a trade route, along which travel caravans loaded with gold. One team is responsible for ensuring the safety of these caravans, while the other team consists of various brigands and monsters trying to rob them.

Each player on the raiding team controls a hero, and rather than gaining experience by killing, they gain experience proportional to the amount of gold they can somehow steal, whether they kill the owners and guards or not. I'm not sure whether they can do anything with the gold other than benefit from the experience, although it might be interesting for some raiders to have disguises or alternate forms that let them sneak into the cities and so shopping and/or reconnaissance. I don't think the defending team should have heroes at all, because I see no reasonable way for them go gain experience.

The gold carried by each caravan can be stored in its custom value, or the custom value can reference an array that stores it. If the caravan dies, the carried gold drops to the ground and can be picked up by anyone. Some raiders may have abilities for stealing gold without killing the caravans. If the caravan reaches its destination safely, the defenders receive a fraction of the remaining gold carried by the caravan as a tax.

Caravans should travel along the trade route in both directions. Preferably, there should be clusters of units that compose a caravan, so that it's possible to kill part of a caravan without killing the whole thing.

Defenders do NOT have shared vision or shared control with the caravans, but can try to safeguard the caravans in a variety of ways. They can construct scout towers and guard towers along the trade route (towers should be biased towards heavy armor and weak attacks, encouraging the raiders to avoid being near them a long time rather than to tear them all down). They can hire guards and rangers to patrol the trade route (which should be capable of moving faster than the caravans). They can also construct way houses along the trade route where caravans and guards can seek shelter and quickly regain their strength. Each way house can specify a "next waypoint" destination for caravans traveling in each direction, allowing the defenders to direct the caravans along more protected routes and away from dangerous or frequently-raided areas.

Some type of guard the defenders can get might have a mass-teleport-like ability in order to help move groups of guards around the trade route quickly, but if so, it should not be possible to teleport directly to the caravans, only to other guards or defensive structures.

Raiders can choose their skills to trade off between different advantages. Some might help kill caravans and small groups of guards, others might aid stealth, others fast travel, and some abilities may allow raiders to rob caravans without killing them. Raiders should generally be able to move faster than guards, but should not be able to successfully fight a concerted attack from a large group of guards. Raiders should need to spend a lot of time and effort in order to kill towers or way houses; they should generally only fall if there are no guards anywhere near that can come to the rescue. It should be either effectively or absolutely impossible for the raiders to destroy or seize control of a city.

Raiders should be given advantages and disadvantages to encourage the general strategy of finding a weakly-defended caravan in an unwatched area, slowing it down, making some money, and zipping out before the main force of guards can notice and react.

Depending on how much speed pressure you want to put on the raiders and whether or not you want to give them skills designed to slow caravans, you might force caravans to stop any time a raider is near. This could be implemented by order them to attack-move, rather than attack, and giving them a ranged attack with no art dealing no damage, and an acquisition range equal to their attack range.

Unfortunately, I haven't come up with a really compelling final goal for either side; an accumulation of gold might be suitable. I'm also not sure how severe the penalty to the raiders should be for dying; whether that means they're out of the game (in which case the defenders might win by killing all the raiders) or whether they can return after a certain time.

It might be possible to drive the defending team entirely with AIs, but that seems like it would make the raiders' job too easy.

The map should be mostly wilderness, possibly with fountains of health and mana scattered around to provide the raiders and guards fixed resources they can control. It might be possible to place some trees, rocks, and/or fountains randomly on map initialization to provide variance in the terrain between games.

Thoughts on Guards

Defenders should rely on groups of guards rather than individual guards, but shouldn't need to assemble massive armies. It should not be feasible to send enough guards with every caravan to fend off attacks; it might be possible (at great expense) to send a weak scout with every (or nearly every) caravan to alert the defenders in the event of an attack.

Some guards should be fast, with abilities that can cripple raiders (slow their movement, silence them to block abilities, reveal them when invisible, etc.); the guards which pose a fatal threat to the raiders should be fast compared to the caravans but still slow enough that they will have a difficult time catching the raiders. Support guards might provide healing, buffs to damage, armor, or movement speed, or benefits to detection or travel.

Thoughts on Raiders

Scouting should be important, so that raiders can find undefended caravans and avoid guards and towers.

Raiders should be encouraged to split up and attack many places at once, so that guards have difficulty reacting, and should only need to gang up together if the guards are well-organized and diffuse so that they can react quickly to attacks anywhere; then the raiders can work together to take on a group of guards and force them to start bunching up more so that the raiders can split up again.

Thoughts on Towers

Scout Tower simply grants sight of an area; upgrades to grant invisibility detection at varying distances.

Guard Towers are durable and discourage raiders from lingering in the area

Cannon Towers are easier to kill but do more damage, providing a greater chance of killing a raider when used in conjunction with guards or guard towers, but are vulnerable by themselves; useful in strongholds.

Arcane Towers do little damage but can damage the raiders' mana, helping to disable them.

All concepts and ideas on this page may be freely used by another in implementing any WarCraft III map. If you implement this map closely following the description above, please email me so that I can take a look.