Designing Combat II : Can a Boar carry a sword?

So you find a cool two handed sword called the ‘wordkiller’ it can briefly silence an enemy on hit, and is an impressive twohanded sword.

So you give the wordkiller to your wild boar to take into battle…. No. that can’t be right that’s just silly it doen’t even have opposable thumbs, fine.. perhaps we make things be ‘humanoid’ to be able to carry a weapon… hmm still not really, how can I tell the player why they cannot equip that item to this unit or that item to that unit, besides a little gremlin is technically humanoid, but there is no way it could wield a massive two handed sword.

How can I make it as intuitive as possible that units cannot use.

In other news, we have a problem with unarmed units. Sure as a wizards staff is stiff -an unarmed goblin would use their bare fists to claw at the enemy. I want to avoid the situation where attackers and defenders just stare gormlessly at each other because they have no weapons.

Introducing Improved unit slots!

A unit will have a number of empty slots. These can be used to place cards of the matching type into them.

In this example the goblin has 2 empty attack slots. The fist icon indicates they have a default unremovable ability (this will be weak but not 0)

The gold slot is for clothing or armor, this slot is only 1 slot big

So now the goblin can be built as a fast attack or a slow attack. It explodes the player choices for build as you can enchant weapons, and build synergies but the limt by type transfers some of the variability back onto the unit type. Consider a spellcasting unit, might look like this:

So spooky jr here starts with dancing lights, a very weak despair dps spell, think of this like a cantrip or level 0 spell. They could have a couple of loadouts based on magic items in blue, they cannot wield any weapon as they are a ghost. In this example ghost and goblin have non-overlapping slots. But you could have overlapping slots, creating a tension for where to put what, for example:

There could be synergies and interesting builds. Especially if we have passive effects on the unit, for example perhaps a shadow thief does ‘double poison damage’ this would make the throwing knives potentially better than the recurve bow but only for the shadow thief… likewise perhaps the ranger could get -10% cooldown when using two weapons- this could might make the two daggers slightly better than one sword… and so on.

The goal would be to reward the player for finding ‘broken’ combos.

But wait… why are we here again? That’s right boars… boars can’t hold swords.. so this system should also have a non-slot ability, an ability that triggers on cooldown but cannot be overridden. This can be used for any unit that cannot use items AND for any ‘negative’ abilites

An example of negative, could be a berserker friendly unit attack:

Why the negative attack is extra… juicy, is because a smart player might find a way to turn the penalty attack into a bonus- for example they might find a weapon that attacks everytime an ability triggers, harnessing the friendly attack to boost the unit’s damage further. Another way might be they make the beserker vampiric, then the friendly attacks become friendly lifesteal. These ‘hack’ methods are exactly the kind of gameplay I want to craft and encourage!

No. Boars can’t hold weapons.