Ever wanted to have Mistresses that can shoot arrows while flying around and reflecting projectiles? Or Mistresses that can stunlock your opponents by combining Speed with Freeze, while breathing fire on your enemies? Well, now you can! Ranged or melee, single target or AoE, buffs or attack spells, you have a wide array of abilities to pick from to give them.
In this map, you can design your own creature. Your Mistresses in this realm start out without any abilities, and you need to explore to find shrines that will give them new abilities. Each shrine you find lets you pick from one of three abilities. There are up to 729 different combinations you could possibly build, so experiment and find your own unique build, and learn how to make use of their skillset as you go.
The map is quite long and combat focused, to give you many different setups to test your Mistresses against. How you approach it is up to you. You can rely mostly on your Mistresses, or explore and find other means to beat the level. If you want a challenge, try to beat the level without using any rooms that can grant you extra creatures and just use your Mistresses.
The difficulty starts out low but the finale can get quite explosive to really test your build. The difficulty heavily depends on what tools you use and how your Mistresses are kitted out. You will have to defeat a lot of heroes and a rival keeper to finish the level.
If you find any issues with the map let me know and I'll do my best to fix them.
v1.1 - Added a difficulty selection before the map starts. Made the previous incarnation of the map the "Easy Mode" and added a new "Normal Mode" which removes Prisons from the map.
That was great fun. Went with a Drain, Speed, Flight, Heal, Meteor Build with the Mistress so they could fly across the land and lay waste to all in their path.
I enjoy good fun like this instead of manic strategy. 😀
Fly is definitely not the strongest skill in the selection, but it looked so silly that I just had to make it available. Glad you enjoyed it!
Fun idea, but as mentioned, the prison and torture chamber make the mistress a bit of a background unit. In the end I went for a full on Knight and Ghost army and just murdered yellow, who just wasn't a challenge.
-A Bug (I think) the walls of the treasury near the Gems didn't go dirt ones it was claimed.
-I would remove "Dig" from the Mistress and add something else instead, it just doesn't add anything, they also don't use it.
Also I missed the Aqua Atmosphere a little in this map :O
I do wish there was just a way to give the prison/torture chamber an easy max creature cap of skeletons/conversions. It'd be nice to have some sort of intermediate number instead of it being all or nothing. Of course that can be scripted, but then that can be hard to convey to the player. I didn't want the player to run into the situation where you do end up being too weak to take on yellow, since he can go up to like 45 creatures with scavening.
Ultimately I could remove the prison but I want to leave it up to the player, it leaves it open to do a second challenge run with a different build and no prison.
The treasury bug I couldn't reproduce, it works fine on my end. Might be a version difference, I'm not sure.
Dig is purely just a little for fun thing, it does work in first person if someone wants to fight with their mistress in possession. Honestly there aren't many more spells that really add much anyway, but maybe someday I'll make an expanded version with custom spells or something.
And lastly in terms of atmosphere, I focused more on the gimmick with this one. It's easier to draft atmosphere into a map that's part of the campaign. Though how would you say it was lacking?
Hard to describe how the atmosphere was lacking.. I just didn't feel it in this map haha.
About the Prison/Torture, if it's possible maybe make it chance based? 75% chance to convert or skeleton for instance?
Yellow didn't really act as a keeper, I guess to make sure he doesn't start fooling around at the wrong time?
Also, You can destroy the white heart without killing the Knight/Priestess, the water/lava near the entrance makes it possible to open the way to the heart without entrance being open.
As I said in the other comment, I don't necessarily like messing with basic mechanics like that. I'll put out an update later this week with a mode that disables the prison and graveyard. And yes, yellow is "move creatures only" for balancing purposes. Good catch with the heart, I'll fix that oversight.
Are you aware you can reduce the effectiveness of the rooms as well? There is a script example for it.
I should've phrased that better, I do know how to do it script-wise, I've done it in my campaign. I'm just usually kind of hesitant to change fundamental mechanics like that, since to me that necessitates explaining it to the player. Otherwise I could imagine players wondering why their prisoners are suddenly dying and it would feel unintuitive to players not aware of it. It's probably mostly a personal hangup, I want as many of the base game rules as possible to feel the same and consistent.
What I think I'll do is update the level with an optional hard mode, that either prevents skeleton conversion and torturing entirely, or at least very heavily nerfs it, that way it's at least obvious up front that the limitation is there and it's up to the player to pick an easier or harder experience with the map.
My hope is that just most mapmakers implement these rules on their maps so that players get used to it :p
Fair point. That would be the ideal. Personally though, I think I'd actually rather change the knockout/stun chance. It feels worse when you defeat an enemy, bring them to prison, torture them for a while... and then they die. I think setting the stun chance to something like 50% would be easier. I might try that for future maps.
script to limit skeletons:
script to limit conversions:
See my reply to Loobinex, since it's pretty much the same topic. But thanks for the example.
Another great level by aqualakitu. The concept is great, and a good excuse to play the map multiple times.
I found the mid game the hardest since I'm a slow player. Gold starvation became a thing faster than I thought, and the wizards guarding the path to the gems were a problem until I figured out how to approach them.
I think I shouldn't have abused the prison, it made the mistresses not as essential. But that's on me, next run I'll be sure to try a full mistress run. I went with a caster build since I didn't expect that taking gas bomb/fart would make the mistresses immune to gas. Also, since I know arrows are based on strength, I just had to pick it. And since mistresses prefer ranged combat, I had to pick other ranged attacks.
Easy 5/5
Glad you liked it!
Yeah, the pacing is always tricky for me to figure out as the designer. I feel like often I end up placing too little gold since I don't use a ton of magic during testing, but I also like not placing too much as an incentive to move towards the gems in a level.
And yeah, I wasn't entirely sure about the prison but figured I'd leave it in, incase someone loses a lot of mistresses, or ends up with a wonky build. Personally, I'd recommend playing the level without prison, graveyard, etc and just using the mistresses. Likewise contemplated nerfing arrows damage a little but I wanted to keep as much of it "authentic" as possible, even if that means the balancing is a bit out of whack. It's fun at least to see how something like that turns out, and enemies with Rebound to become a significant problem when you have arrows.
About the gold, that's a me problem. Once I realized I couldn't keep playing passive, I sold the training room and pushed forward. The main problem was anything with rebound, and between the dwarves, thieves and wizards they were plenty. Even ghosts. Orcs and hounds are a solution, but I focused too much on my mistresses and they were completly powerless against these heroes.
I don't think balancing is necessary. The whole idea is to make the mistresses kind of OP, or weird and different. Arrows are very powerful indeed, but so are lightning, rebound, speed or fart. I say leave it like that, it's more fun, but that's your decision to make! The fact that you have to make choices prevents out of control mistresses with arrow, speed, lightning, drain, rebound, meteor and heal. Though that would be fun to use!
Edit: Also, I wish imps didn't have "Dying" as their primary job. At least when you have a temple that's manageable, but oh well! It eventually is available anyway.
Definitely, I tried to keep each set of 3 skills on some form of similar utility and powerlevel. It would've been a bit pointless for example to just hand out lightning and speed in different shrines because that would've been mostly everyone's go-to.
And yeah, ultimately that's why there's 3 wooden doors at the start. It's not much, but I like giving those out at least to give some sort of early measure to keep them from running off and dying.
I didn't even see I had wooden doors until I took the workshop in the middle. Oh well, that was a fun experience anyway and I'll play it again with a melee focused build this time to see how it goes.
Alright, good luck! If you want an extra challenge, there is now also the slightly updated 1.1 version where you can choose to not have the prison available.
I'll update it, thanks. But people shouldn't complain (not saying they are here, but it happened elsewhere) about the option to abuse the prison when it's up to them to use it or not. Same goes with guard posts/temples.
I like that you still give the option to the player, I was worried you'd get rid of it completely.
For sure, I can see both sides. For me personally, it's all about incentive. Labelling one "easy mode" makes people less likely to want to pick it at least but leaves the option open. Initially I assumed people might just skip the prison, but it's always tempting to use when it's available.
I used it because of "explosive finale" in the description. I figured since I had only like 11 mistresses it was going to be too tight. Now that I know that there is a temple to claim, I'll be sure to keep the spiders and beetles to make more.
Great level. Ive enjoed very much. Its pretty easy but interesting. I made 21 mistress throught the temple and gave them special ablilities i never seen before. Thanks to the author!
Thanks, glad you liked it! I figured a level like this was inherently impossible to balance, so I kept it pretty open and straightforward. There's definitely some space for challenge runs with different abilities and less mistresses. What did your build end up looking like?
I gave them: classic attack, healing, health drain, speed, flight, word of power. 21 mistress 10 leveled with that abilities kills any party in a seconds. Even a hornies and avatar with his friends.