EWA preview: the units
Filed under EWA Preview on January 23, 2008
Keywords: Eternal Warlords, units
On Monday, I talked about the different game interfaces for Eternal Warlords: Arena. I’m going to split the discussion of the units into two parts. Today, we’ll talk about the eight primary attributes of a unit.
Let’s start with a definition of what I mean by a unit. The unit is the principle game piece of EWA. Units comprise the team a player builds and takes into arena for battle. A unit’s combat proficiency is determined by eight attributes: Attack, Range, Damage, Type, Defense, Armor, Health and Movement.
- Attack: the bonus the unit gets to its Attack roll.
- Range: the distance in squares the unit can target its attack.
- Damage: the amount of damage the unit does with a successful hit.
- Type: damage types include blunt, slashing, piercing, poison, arcane, divine, fire, cold, and electric.
- Defense: the bonus the unit gets to its Defense roll.
- Armor: the amount of damage the unit can absorb before losing Health.
- Health: the amount of damage a unit can take before it is destroyed.
- Movement: the amount of squares a unit can move in one turn.
These primary stats allow us a lot of freedom in designing units, beyond just being offensive or defensive. We could create a unit that hits hard, but isn’t very accurate; is agile, but has a “glass jaw” (i.e., high defense and little or no armor). We could create a slow juggernaut or a quick sniper. The ability to designate specific damage types also allows us to build units with special weaknesses or invulnerabilities. Not all of the damage types will be available in the initial release.

