This might be something better done with Mods perhaps, but I really like the idea of this and wanted to posit it in case it had some interest from Radiant.
I had this idea last night of some scanarios potentially leading into special one-off professions. Imagine a scenario not dissimilar to the Goblin King one - skeletons start turning up at your town occasionally and attacking. You fight them off, eventually muster up some troops and head out into the wilds, and finally find a Necromancer in an encampment who is making skeletons and sending them after you. You battle him and kill him.
When he does, he drops his spell book. This is a talisman just like a carpenters saw or hunters knife. You can use it to promote one of your hearthlings to become a necromancer. This consumes the book, so you can only do it once, and itâs random if it appears in your game at all, so itâs a fairly rare and cool thing.
Your necromancer can now create skeletons (perhaps using goblin trophies, assuming theyâre analogous to the goblinâs corpse. Alternately maybe bodies don;t vanish immediately when they die anymore?). Skeletons would be a little bit like hearthlings or the KS-promised golems. They act as workers and do not need to eat, but they move very slowly. Give them weapons and they can fight etc. But make really really sure your necromancer never gets killed, because if he dies, you lose control of all the undead he has created and they start attacking your town etc, so thereâs some danger to having them.
Thatâs just once example (but I really really like it). It would be easy enough to come up with a few other scenarios which could randomly occur and lead to a custom class being available in that game. Another example could be a goblin wolf-riding horde scenario that leads to you being able to train wolves for your footmen to ride (but lose the trainer and the wolves turn feral again and you have to kill them),
TL/DR: The idea is that there is a small set of special classes that arenât commonly available, but which may or may not become available in any given game you play. This would increase the excitement since you never know what other possibilities will become available, and will encourage replay value because you may have to play a ton of different towns/games before you see everything, whereas the built in classes are available in every game every time so youâll eventually have âbeen there, done thatâ sooner.
This sounds like a pretty cool ideaâitâd certainly make each playthrough more interesting. The one thing that might be troubling is the concept of âconsumingâ the talisman for the unique class. Does this mean that the unit in question can never switch to another class without forever losing the unique class, or that this unit would retain this class (and potentially be able to switch back and forth whenever it seems convenient)? Also, how would the classâs gear be handled (such as weapons and clothing)? Would this be something your regular Weaver/Tailor would be able to handle, or would it have to be something only acquired randomly by traders? (Personally, the latter seems better, but thereâd need to be some way to limit how much this clutters up trading with âclass-specificâ gear rather than general items and goods)
I wouldnât mind a good number of these if the concept was implemented to Stonehearth. Hopefully with a little more time and development, maybe we can start to see something along this line.
Thatâs a good point I hadnât considered. I just wanted to avoid the class becoming commonly available once you find it, but I guess thatâs already handled through the fact that nobody can craft the talisman (unlike the common profession talismans that can each be made by other professions). So I guess you could change classes and get the talisman back, but you would still only have the one, so the same Hearthling could change back to Necromancer/wolf-trainer/whatever, or another Hearthling could use it, but you wont ever have more than once at a time.
And donât change professions away from Necromancer while you have skeletons active, because then nobody is controlling themâŚ
I really do love the game and want so many classes but the idea of a Hearthling being âConsumedâ and turned into an Acolyte that spawns Skeletons, something has gone wrong here.
The game does indeed need unique classes and items to make each play through different and still enjoyable but spawning skeletons seems a bit too far out there.
Only my personal opinion here.
I didnât say the the hearthling is consumed, I said the book is (so you canât have more than one)
In a world where weâre going to have Magmasmiths and golems and other magics, I donât see how having a necromancer is so âout thereâ, but to each their own I guess
im thinking im gonna make the ingredients to make my unique classes only drop from Temple scenarios i will create later once goblin camps are released and i can look in the files, but after the bajillion other things i have to deal with with this mod xD
Honestly, I donât really see a problem with Necromancy, especially if itâd be a highly rare profession in accordance with the concept. Tom and the rest of the team said that their interpretation of magic in the game is going to be extremely rare and likely risky or dangerous to use, so to me it sounds quite fitting.
Granted, of course, itâd need to be done in a way that doesnât completely change the feel of the gameânecromancy is a bit of a dark subject. Since we donât actually have anything gameplay-wise for the skeletons (apart from their appearance in Candledark), their function in the gameâs still pretty undetermined. It could still easily be something for both enemies and a rare trait class, so long as itâs balanced and well-implemented.
I like the idea of unique classes and such. It really depends on where the devs want to go with the game, and to what extent they want the world to persist, but I am wholeheartedly behind the idea of unique classes for certain events and such, for two reasons.
First, it is something special and therefore makes the game more memorable. It is much cooler to talk about âthat time you got a book of necromancy and defended your town with undeadâ than just your generic âI built a cityâ. Making the game memorable is always a good thing, and if the world is persistent to any degree you could also have that as an identifying feature of your city. On top of that, it gives you a way to distinguish yourself from others in a multiplayer game.
Second, it gives you something unexpected to build around. If I get a gelumancer (icemage), I want to make him and everything to do with him stand out. Maybe he has his own workshop that needs built, maybe he needs his own resources. I know that I would want to build him a unique building in my town, to signify his importance. It gives me something to do in the game, beyond just normal city building stuff and really plays up the building aspect of Stonehearth.
The only downsides I can see with this is that people like to have access to everything all the time, or the ability to get it without it being a lucky break. I can sympathize. If I knew there were things I could do to get all of the unique characters in my game, I would do them. With the internet, the uniqueness of it wears off rapidly, because the methods to get them are known almost as soon as they are discovered. So yeah, it could be a tricky thing to implement.
I guess time will tell if the devs decide that something like that is an avenue they want to explore.
