[Wesnoth-dev] Changes to Plague

[John McNabb]

Hey All,
        Many moons ago I had provided a couple of different patches to
modify plague, but the patches were orthogonal to each other and didn't
work togeather.  Still, much of the discussions that went on about those
patches were quite useful, and I now have an implimentation that merges
the two along with what I think were the best suggestions at the time.  I
would like to propose the following changes to how plague works.  To
recap, plague currently works by making an exact clone (including XP)  of
the killing unit and places it in the location of the now dead unit.  The
only exceptions to this are if the killed unit is of race undead or is on
a village.

        My proposed change is as follows:  
0)  race undead units and units on villages would still not be reanimated.

1)  plague by itself would create a unit of the same base type as the
killing unit, but not an exact clone.

2)  plague(UNIT_TYPE) would create a unit of type UNIT_TYPE.

3)  if a unit is killed that has a "undead_variation=VARIATION", then 
the type is modified to add the variation.

4)  units with undead_variation="null" cannot be plagued.

These changes would allow the creation of the 'winged corpse', the 
zombie-drake variation associated with plagued drakes, as well as the
flexibility to have units such as a necro-sorcerer, able to have an
attack that spawns lower-level undead of a different type or level.  
Overall, I think it will be a vast improvement.  

I do, however, recognize that this could be a pandora's box in opening
some balancing issues.  I don't think they are that bad, but here are some
of the ones I can see.  On the one hand, walking corpses will be weakened,
since the clone will no longer get the XP of its predecessor.  On the
other hand, with different variations, it opens up the possibility of
strengthening walking corpses through their variations.  You could, for
example, give the winged corpse high resistance to fire.  In any case, it
will require some balancing.  I could also foresee a whole bunch of units
being proposed to have plague(whatever), or a whole bunch of variations
proposed.  We clearly would not want a horde of different plagueing unit
types out there, but I think we can reasonably limit the number that we
except into the main-line.  This would, however provide a potentially
useful mechanism for user-campaign specific units.

Anyways, I have the code basically ready to go.  I have a few more tests I 
want to run to make sure I've tested all the different possible failure 
modes I can think of.  If there are no objections, I will commit it in the 
next few days.

John aka Darth Fool

-- 
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        "In theory, theory and practice are the same, 
                but in practice they're different."
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John W. C. McNabb
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