Shinobis are a cool concept, but they’re quite useless as they are now (only good in water maps, and only because of sabotage), so I’ve come up with an idea to make them viable and more interesting. It consists of the following aspects:
Make Disguise not detectable. Musafadis’ stealth is detectable because you can mass them, but you’re not meant to mass shinobis (you can’t, anyways) and you could still be able to look at a disguised shinobi and realize it’s not one of your workers. Any damage on him would remove his disguise.
Shinobis are meant to be assassins. Let them outright kill a unit (except siege and elephants) with their first attack while disguised (yeah, heros too, they’re assassins). They will lose their disguise after that first attack.
To balance this changes, make them limited units, like Bannerman Samurai (they even have a unit count over the Bannerman count already). You don’t want to use them in groups anyway, as their disguise would be too obvious. Maybe you could get upgrades in Koka to make the max shinobi count higher (the higher the age the more shinobis you can get) or you could even have to unlock the aspects I mentioned before (like the instakill damage assassination when disguised)
This would make this units a lot stronger and interesting to use, but they would remain difficult to use properly and their max count would limit their use to assassinating/sabotaging a few key objectives and playing a disguise minigame against your oponent.
That’s not interesting, that’s frustrating. How are you going to defend against them if you can’t detect them? They can already bypass walls. Say your camera is in another place, they get a guaranteed villager kill. And even if you look in the right place, it’s still hard to notice a villager being an enemy unit. They’d get in a wood line, kill a vill instantly, then teleport away to safety. And if they’re more than 1, that’s several villagers dead, rinse and repeat. You’d probably need to leave groups of units at every resource pocket only to exchange a vill for a Shinobi. Sounds very tilting, and similar to the frustrating gameplay of Starcraft, where you don’t get to react.
They are not useless at all, they do considerable damage vs melee units. 1 shinobi beats a guilded spearmen for example so they are perfect to counter most melee units. Vs ranged units is where they struggle. Their melee dps is very high for their cost they also kill villagers very quickly and do good siege damage with their abilities, they are far from useless on land especially since the recent buff.
Shinobi aren’t great, but giving them a one shot assassinate ability sounds too strong. That’s basically a guaranteed villager kill with every Shinobi.
Well, I’ll use this as an awnser to everyone. I agree that might be too strong, especially on villagers. I just wanted to give ideas on how they could stick a bit better to the “assassin” theme.
Anyways, maybe if they kept them like they’re now but changed disguise so TC, towers and scouts didn’t reveal them, and if they were able to, for example, oneshot ONLY heros (Kan, english king, Jeane, dominion monarchs, etc.) they could see more use even on high level play and would feel a lot more like assassins and spies that disguise and infiltrate the enemy base. It would be fun to remain disguised and wait, only to jump on a kan or Jeane with smoke bomb to eliminate him/her.
Disguise being undetectable would also make it less like stealth, that is supposed to be detectable because it TOTALLY removes the vision on the unit.
Anyways, as I said, just trying to throw some ideas.
Actually shinobi needs to be disguesed all the time and it should do the normal gathering animation of a villager but it could be a targetable by player.Like in the starcraft zerg spie i forgot its name.
Adding shinobi disguise a villager animation like gatherin wood,food or gold makes it far more better but he will not gonna drop anything just going to act like gathering until new order given.When player brings mouse cursor on to the villager it will turn in to a sword and he can attack it any time.
Edit:I take back what i said here because in war they can get past the defences and kill villagers.I think koka township needs another unit like with no attack just to spy enemy.