RTS Design in Hypercoven

Hypercoven came out last week on Steam, to no fanfare and almost no players, because unfortunately it looks like garbage. I believe I pretty much reached my game design and game-play goals, however, and want to use this post to review them. Reaching those goals is also directly the cause of the visual problem: I was loathe to cut important units just to improve visual coherence.
There are 55 unique units in the game now, a lot of them with some very special behaviour about them; the rest is the Vanilla needed to make the Chocolate and Peach stand out.

The Witch King and his Coven

There are no fixed races in HyperCoven.
The Witch King is the central piece commanded by the player, and the only loss condition. If the Witch King dies, it is game over.
The Witch King may capture Coven that are found on the map. Works similar to capture-points in Company of Heroes.
Coven produce units that are aligned with the Witch King. The production is automatic and gratis.

However, and this is the central twist of the game, every Coven can only produce 2 different units. There may be 12 Coven on a given map, making for 24 different available units overall. The strategic challenge then is to capture a selection of Coven such that a sensible army composition can be attained of them. – Also respecting the territory covered by these Coven, not to be stretched too thin.

There are 26 different Coven in the game so far. It is the maker of a map who selects and places them. Randomization is available; and one could imagine a draft-type approach where players pick Coven in some fashion.
But as Coven are never truly "yours," but may be captured by others, the design goal has never been to "balance" them in whatever way (against each other?)
Rather, the goal for any given Coven is that there should be some interesting angle to playing with it. Individually, but also in conjunction with other Coven.

So the two units paired up in a Coven will sometimes synergize with each other, sometimes contrast each other: In any case the Coven will have strengths and it will have weaknesses. Naturally no single Coven should be strictly better than another one.

Deployables

This was the most significant goal to me, and the hardest to achieve in terms of visuals.
All the RTS that are prominent to this day, I think, have their gameplay depth to pin on this type of unit, which needs to be set up or "deployed" in a specific spot and then cannot move until it undeploys. Some such units, like the Castles in AoE2, are even completely immobile. But mostly this is about semi-mobile units like the Siege Tank, the Trebuchet, the team weapons in CoH.

Hypercoven’s "Rocket Bot" is pretty much a Siege Tank when deployed, hitting big splash damage shots from potentially long range. To balance this out, a lot of the range and damage only come with upgrades to its Perception and Reactor attributes. So some time needs to be invested into its development before it really takes over.
In undeployed mode, the Rocket Bot has a simple melee attack. This was not planned, it just arose from the sprite I found for the bot, really the only sprite I could find to model this type of unit.
The Rocket Bot is slow-moving, but it comes paired with a Dropship unit.

The Mushroom is one of the most fun units to me, and visually, considered in isolation, also an extremely cool looking sprite.
It vomits up these little Shroomies, which have a basic melee attack, but also, they explode on death, poisoning nearby units. They are actually poisoned themselves, and will die when this poison runs out. The initial poison duration on them scales with the Lore attribute of the mother Mushroom. So, indirectly, Lore scales the range of this "attack." There is an interesting angle to this range: It’s not low, but the Mushrooms will only attack visible targets, there is no "ground attack" button. So once a stream of Shroomies is going, it may continue for a long while, as frontward Shroomies are what keeps giving vision of the enemy.

Since these Mushrooms can be very oppressive, I wanted to pair them with a unit that does not exactly make them even stronger.
It’s the Golem, a formidable unit by itself, dealing good melee splash damage while being heavily armored. That is the interesting thing, however: Poison acts as a natural counter to armor, as armor does not reduce poison damage whatsoever. When employing Mushrooms and Golems together, it will be tricky for the player to avoid their own Golems getting poisoned.

Spell Casting

I had one central idea for spells. Where deployable units are naturally better for defending positions, spells should be the crucial counterpart that can help break even heavily fortified defenses. Hence, every single spell should be better for attackers, or at least neutral: This naturally eliminates all lame effects like blocking off passways or slowing down units.

The basic "deal damage in an area of effect" spell can be seen as neutral, but the defender side tends to be cluttered up more, so it might suffer more against such effects. Deployed defenders also cannot dodge as well as a mobile attacker side.

This fog is perhaps my take on the Dark Swarm ability. While designing this spell, I got the feeling that Dark Swarm was originally planned to work like this, but got changed out of implemetation or clarity concerns. The idea is, that the fog hiding them helps attackers cover that crucial distance to the first line of defenders, without eating enemy fire.
Units shooting out of the fog are still revealed, though (as any attacking units are revealed through fog of war), so this spell would not be very useful spell to cast for the defense. (It may yet befuddle the attacker.)

"Potion of Ultraviolence" - an ability I came up with based on this "Alchimist" type sprite. The effect maximizes the Violence attribute on all affected units. Violence increases melee damage dealt. It also *reduces* deadzone of units that have one, like the Rocket Bot. That means those units may now shoot directly adjacent units, in practice damaging themselves in the process.
While this ability helps the attacker, if the she is employing fast, melee units, it interestingly can also help armies without many ranged units to better fortify positions, by keeping Alchimists around to throw Ultraviolence Flasks when an attack happens.

The final ability I want to highlight is maybe the ultimate siege breaker. It is basically just an AoE damage effect, but with potentially a very long range. The Hologhost disappears, becoming completely invisible and untargetable, in order to reappear at the target position with a gruesome area attack, during which it still cannot be targeted. When it is finally targetable again, it will do its usual thing of counter-attacking every unit that deals damage to it. (It cannot otherwise directy attack enemies.)
The longer the distance is that we look to cover with this spell, the more mana it costs. Investing 150+ mana it outranges everything else in the game. But, of course, you still have to know where to target the ability. And the ghost takes time to appear at the destination, as if it would travel there normally. This can certainly lead to interesting long-range mindgames, where the defender has, upon getting their position scouted, enough time to suspect the impending Hologhost Haunts and shift the position to dodge part of the damage. Or the attacker can just hit a blind prediction on how the enemy is set up.
Notably the ability deals no damage to buildings.

Stealth

While Hologhosts do completely disappear on their way to Haunt - turning invisible to _all_ players - there are also regular stealthed units in the game.
The challenge here being to balance such a binary attribute in a game where army compositions aren’t fixed.
So first of all, Witch King and defense towers will reveal stealthed units. Second, any unit with Perception 13 or more will also reveal stealthed units. This gives a lot of generically available counterplay.
The stealth units themself are also designed such that their stealth becomes stronger in the later game.

The Ambush Crew is a Coven composed of one melee and one ranged units with the same kind of stealth: The become visible for a while after executing an attack. The visibility duration depends on their Lore attribute. If a player manages to max out Lore on their Ambush Crew, they will find themselves in possession of some permanently stealthed fighters. What’s more is that the attacks (ambushes!) of these units deal double damage when launched out of stealth.

A second source of stealth is the Astral Dino. It executes a special move, the Astral Song, which cloaks all nearby ground units, friend and foe alike. But the Astral Dino himself does reveal cloaked units. Did the other player also bring detection?
Counter-play to the Astral Dino is simply that it must regularly sing its Song to maintain stealth. If it starts attacking, the cloak will fall off. So either multiple Dinos must be meticulously micros, or they got to be grouped with different ground units.
The alt unit of the Dino’s Coven is a flying one, however. It covers one weakness of the Dino - fighting air units - at the cost of not really synergizing with it otherwise.

Other abilities

This robotic Sniper comes with a long range to boot, growing into one of the longest ranged attacks in the game at maximum Perception.
What’s more is that this range is only relevant for target acqusition. Once a target is acquired, the attack can keep going at any range, so long as visibility is never lost.
This makes it extremely attractive to pair this bot with units that are good and durable scouts. Like perhaps stealthed units, being intentionally kept from attacking.

The Skeleton Archer has a very slow attack, but comes with a specialty: It keeps reassembling after being destroyed. This makes it a unique damage sponge.
The counterplay is to position any unit on top of the skeleton’s remains, which will happen almost naturally for melee units fighting the skeletons, but require specific micro investment from ranged enemies.

Closing

To not make this post grow too unwieldy, this is just the tip of the iceberg, the most tide-turning units.
I personally hope that, if no one plays the game, at least some of its unit designs may be stolen.

Thanks you for reading. Cheers!

RTS Design in Hypercoven

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