Richard Kettering wrote:
We have a problem in some of our developmental mindset regarding units.
Personally, and this is based on comments I have gotten from different
people regarding the mermen, I think we should adopt a policy of
"Build it and they will come."
Our number 1 problem is in getting art. A lot of people can build
custom units, but few of them are well drawn, and even fewer have good
animations. I think we should plug in most things with decent art
that don't conflict with our fantasy world. Unless the unit branches
from an existing unit - I say we "include" it with a palatable set of
stats. By this, I mean that we put it into the game files, but not
necessarily into any of the campaigns or multiplayer eras.
These units, just like freim's new desert tiles, are materials to
build things from. They were not made in response to need, they were
made to pre-empt need. Wesnoth worked just fine with sand being used
to represent desert. No one NEEDED desert. But it is quite clearly a
monumental improvement to have it available.
I tend to agree with the overall philosophy, however, why do we have to
actually ship the images and unit stats with the game? We've already had
a system where we had a 'library' of graphics in the Wiki, and any
campaign designer could cherry pick it for their use as they wanted.
Perhaps the system needs to be revised to combat the Wiki vandalism
problem, but the point remains that if the units aren't actually used,
I'm not sure they have to be shipped with the game. Shipping them with
the game also restricts the campaign designer somewhat by saying "this
is the stats the unit should have," while just providing images
externally gives the campaign designer more implied freedom to use the
images as they want, and assign them stats and so forth.
Sure, if a unit has a use in the official version of the game, such as
in the 'Classic' era, then we can include it, but I don't see a reason
to otherwise. Especially since if the unit isn't actually used, it won't
be playtested, and so we'd be including a whole heap of units with
untested and unbalanced stats. Would we really want to do this?
David