I’m lazy so I’m just pasting what I wrote for myself to describe this:
Unit flag, infiltrator unit. Can be added to units like hero flag. Infiltrators have a chance to aggro enemy military units at short range, similar to wolves having a chance to attack non-scout units but not always doing so. Mainly to make sneaking into AI bases more risky. Human opponents can manually attack infiltrators, and infiltrators can manually attack units and will fight back if attacked (like a boar). Structures attack infiltrators to defend other units. Infiltrators show up for enemy players based on nearby units, acting like sheep for the purpose of color conversions, so viewing an ally’s base will not immediately reveal infiltrators.
Chance to be attacked is based on the infiltrator, not a spot check by enemy units, so being close to 50 enemy units has the same chance to be revealed as being close to 1 enemy unit. (? or maybe not, so all 50 units don’t attack at once. Solution: infiltrator randomly varies its stealth level over time, from ‘very good’ to ‘average’, so it can be possible to trick 50 units but also to be detected by one unit.)
Clicking an enemy infiltrator will say the owner and use owner’s color, but player-based above-unit HP bars will use the false color.
Good infiltrator units: fake trade cart (speed without Caravans) with carry capacity of 2 foot units that can garrison in rams (no speed boost from infantry); spy villager that can pretend to do work gathering resources, but never collects anything. Cannot build, but can attack like a villager (including Sappers).
Basically, these are actual spies! Another idea I’ve thought about was what if the Spies technology made an enemy unit close to an enemy king give you line of sight, but I guess that isn’t really the purpose of the technology in Regicide games.
Obviously, no normal unit would have the Infiltrator flag. This would be for fun custom games, the sort of thing that streamers like T90Official do with their community or unusual tournaments; sort of like something like the exploding villagers mod. Map scripts would define these units, give them the infiltrator flag, and make them trainable from some building. Maybe a certain unit could even have a conversion button, like what Rathas have, between a non-combat Infiltrator mode (looks like a villager) and a combat mode.
Cool idea that would make for some fun custom games or official scenarios?
- It would make the game better
- Nice, but worse than 20 other ways to improve the game
- Bad idea that would make the game worse
- I don’t understand the suggested mechanics of how it would work
(My browser is about to be read-only on Discourse after this month)