What if you would have a special “profession”, kind of a field medic… but there would be a catch. He would have a good side and a bad one.
The good one… would heal your soldiers if they are wounded, just like you expect him to do.
The bad one… well. Sometimes, his darker ego would gain the upper hand. He might be indicating that he will change his behavior and you might be able to prevent him to do so (small hits on the head?). However, if you do not, he still will turn towards your injured and weak soldiers, but maybe not focus too much on healing… “Oh, what a beautiful head you have!”. The result would be, that Dr. Frank Stein adds another body part to his collection.
As an alternative, he might not be a field medic, but more of an undertaker and simply collect body parts from fallen soldiers.
One or the other way, the result would be a collection of parts. In the sense of the actual recycling movement, well… a small workshop somewhere, maybe in a tower. The lightning strikes. A table located in the center of the room. The flash moves along some wires and hits the flesh. The rest is history…
This is cool and I love the models, in particular his alter ego. However, from a gameplay point of view, the player builds all his workshops. What is the incentive to actually build this workshop?
Good point @Smokestacks. I could imagine that there might be 2 incentives:
If “Dr. Frank Stein” would be a field medic, he could heal your troops and therefore increase the strength of your army. As long as you pay attention and prevent him from turning “dark”, you will have a clear incentive.
The creature he is “creating” could be handled like a standard worker. So you would gain another settler out of your dead fellows.
That’s the two ideas I had so far… but for sure there might be more, like a special unit or an alternative way to get a “Golem”?
i absolutely love the idea of a unit that has potential downsides (more player choice!)… i would love to see the doctor splicing a units head onto the body of an animal, or other humanoid models…
Very interesting idea of a “breeder” @SteveAdamo. It could even work well if you allow breeding within one race. As soon as you cross them, you will run into issues with animations .
This one here would be a pure recycler of human body parts. Maybe it would be possible to attach some attributes to single body parts and once you combine them, the attributes are combined. This way you could search for the best “arm” in game and create the most powerful creature.
An alternate golem idea sounds interesting. Make sure you consider steam powered zombies as an option, like some kind of doctor/engineer hybrid as harnessing lightning is possibly a bit too high a tech level to fit completely.
An alternative idea to the random evil moods is do something similar to strange moods from DF, they’ll regularly ask for various materials (primarily body parts) and if you don’t give them to him he’ll go get them himself. “What’s this? You want to know why I took his lungs? Well I did say I wanted some.” Just an idea of a potential way of doing it that doesn’t involve figuring out what would change his mood and having to build a system around it.
Flesh golems are interesting as well, particularly if you allow merging pretty much anything into them. Eagle Gorilla Kraken Dwarf Zombie Bunny Orc Cyborg anyone? Could result in a very complex system though if you let it out of control.
Maybe we could add this system to other classes for instance you could ask the weaver to make you some clothes but instead he makes you a yellow dress that DOES’NT GO WITH YOUR HAIR!!!
Maybe his first level could be a type of soldier or scavenger that would collect useful things from bodies (gear, weapons, etc) . And after so many times he could take something a little extra, and when he takes all the pieces he needs to make a full body he could upgrade to Dr.Stein. And that is the time that if you don’t pay more attention to your people you might just find a de-buff on someone along the lines of- Pained: This unit appears to be missing a kidney.
What I never got about frankenstein is the fact that they take a different piece from a load of different bodies why not just take the whole body and save yourself a ton of stitching!?
Because if the person is dead the body had to have been imperfect, Dr.Stein will only take the best body parts from the imperfect bodies of the dead.
Signed-
Half crazy, and a bit sadistic.
The detail on that model is awesome Right down to the ‘broken wineglass’ on the crate.
Graveyards - will they be in the game normally? I wondered about them the other day. It could be a place to remember your fallen Stonehearthians. If graveyards were in the game, the good Doctor could perhaps sneak out at night…? Or better yet, model up Igor You could avoid the issue of having to get specific parts from soldiers this way, just have Igor go “harvest” a “limb” from the “graveyard farm” once every week or something, then after X number of weeks the “laboratory factory” can produce 1 unit of monster. I’m just brainstorming a way to re-purpose existing game code assuming it makes for an easier mod task.
I like the idea of the undertaker well-intentioned man of science - I’m used to my gnomes in Gnomoria losing various limbs (and heads…) and having them just lay around after a battle.
well, we know that zombies will be in the game, and that we can potentially raise units from the dead:
Can we raise the dead? “Yes …it has to make it in, we don’t know how, but it has to make it in. There will be some way, you might not
like it. Maybe this is how the zombie apocalypse starts … maybe the
penalty for losing someone is that you have to ‘res’ them, and
‘ressing’ them too often could turn them into a zombie … zombie
apocalypse should be a way to lose the game”
so the idea of a graveyard isnt entirely out of the realm of possibility…
.
Right down to the ‘broken wineglass’ on the crate.