Improve forge functionality

[Metagross31]

Hello everyone,

one thing I love about this game is, that you don't wait on some boring main menu screen between your matches, but indeed you are in the forge - a huge playground to play around with your cards and test out interactions. There are a few things, that bother me about it though, which is why I want to give some suggestions on improving this cool part of the game. They might hard, if not even impossible, to implement - especially with the release just around the corner - but maybe they can be kept in mind as some long-term goals to implement in the future.

1. The selection of NPC units you can spawn in the forge is very limited. It would be nice, if we had access to a wider variety of enemies to test out interactions or develop strategies for PvE.
My suggestion here would be to simply add more units to each faction (and to even include Lost Souls as a faction in the first place).
One could go even further and allow the player to spawn PvE bosses in the forge. An idea to avoid spoilers would be to make the unlockable by beating the map they appear in first (Maybe even on expert only, to give an incentive to beat all expert maps). This unlocking could also be considered for some regular units too, e.g. strong ones such as the Twilight Dragon, Stonekin Grinder, Bandit Tortugun etc.

2. There are no Momuments and Wells in the forge. It would be nice to have monuments and wells to simulate some PvP interactions, e.g. how fast can unit X destroy a well. Right now one can use buildings with 2k/3k health to improvise, but since wells have a different behaviour when getting repaired and monuments shoot, this is not a 100% accurate correspondence.
My suggestion to this would be to add a monument and a few wells to the forge, maybe in the bottom corners behind the walls, so players can play around with them.

3. The concept of ground presence and well/orb proximity does not exist. This means you can play out any card at any time anywhere. This clearly has its advantages, but limits the amount of scenarios you can test out/pratice, e.g. dazed Thugs vs. undazed Forsaken.
My suggestion here would be to add a button, which toggles the "realistic" mode on or off, where the realistic mode would include dazed units, ground presence needed etc. (maybe even the global cooldown), and the "unrealistic" mode would be the forge as it is right now.

4. There is no "fight recap" tool. I know, this is getting quite involved now and is probably impossible to implement atm, but I just like the idea. The idea is to have a small window, which keeps tracks some statistics of what happened, after you last pressed the "reset forge" button. Such statistics would include things like units/spells/buildings used, power spent, units/buildings killed/lost, void power gained, damage done to units/buildings/orbs/wells etc. This would make it possible to simulate more complicated pvp scenarios (e.g. shadow army of a few units, one might get nastied and another motivated, vs. fire army of a few units, a few mortar shots and an eruption) and easily estimate, which side has gained an advantage without having to do the math.
 

Spoiler

I got the idea from the Super Smash Bros. training mode:

Well, those are just a few ideas. Feel free to share your opinion about it. Maybe some of them might make it into the game at some point in the future

[LEBOVIN]

Most of your suggestions can be tested in custom made community maps as of now. Seach for Community Smithy in the Community Maps window.

[Chibiterasu]

I agree with most points. Especially with the ground presence. The lack of that feature in combination with the fact that there are spells with wrong classifications (arcane and spells) leads to some wrong assumptions when testing.

The only idea I don't like is the unlockable point. The forge is a place where you test interactions. For it almost has some kind of scientific flavor to it. Even though I also think we need more unlockable stuff in the game overall, I don't think the forge should be one of those things. If you buy a calculator, you also don't want to unlock the multiplication first.

You got that idea from smash bros? Did you ever play other fighting games because smash bros is probably the worst example when you want to show lots of features in training modes

[Metagross31]

1 hour ago, Chibiterasu said:

I agree with most points. Especially with the ground presence. The lack of that feature in combination with the fact that there are spells with wrong classifications (arcane and spells) leads to some wrong assumptions when testing.

The only idea I don't like is the unlockable point. The forge is a place where you test interactions. For it almost has some kind of scientific flavor to it. Even though I also think we need more unlockable stuff in the game overall, I don't think the forge should be one of those things. If you buy a calculator, you also don't want to unlock the multiplication first.

You got that idea from smash bros? Did you ever play other fighting games because smash bros is probably the worst example when you want to show lots of features in training modes

I get your point with the unlocking part. But that would make for a very hilariius calculator though 

Tbh, Smash Bros. Is the only fighting game I really played more than just occasionally.

23 hours ago, LEBOVIN said:

Most of your suggestions can be tested in custom made community maps as of now. Seach for Community Smithy in the Community Maps window.

That's a nice map, thanks for providing it!
The point is however, that you would have to explicitly go to the map and therefore no longer be in the "main menu" and thus unable to go to the market or join other games. This also makes it impossible to test cards, which you don't own in this map. My idea was to add it to the forge, because I like how easily accessible it is.

[LEBOVIN]

Well that u can test unowned cards in the forge is a feature newer than the community map^^