Skirmish Tournament and Persistent Units

[Dylan]

Just played version 1.4 for a bit and it felt great.  I was especially glad to see Hard difficulty made easier.  In 1.2 I was unable to finish the very first battle on Hard!

It's only the best games that make me think about ways to improve them and I've had lots of ideas for Kingdom Elemental.  The simple interface is one of the game's strengths and I'm sure you don't want to ruin that.  Here's some ideas anyway:

It feels like Skirmish mode would be improved by some kind of persistence or progress.  In the campaign you unlock the next battle and that's a pretty big reward.  Victories in Skirmish leave you kind of empty and unrewarded like you didn't get anywhere for your effort even though the battle was fun.

1) Progress.  Generate a tournament instead of a single battle.  Give the player a random set of unlocks to start and a small amount of unlock points.  Each victory should award new unlock points and a new battle just like the campaign.  Choosing where to put unlock points is a big part of what makes the campaign so fun.  Also, the random starting unlocks would encourage players to explore unfamiliar tactics.  It would probably be best to display the full tournament ladder each step of the way so the player knows what they're working towards.  Maybe it's a boss with a randomized name.  Maybe the player gets a trophy or another tick on a counter for each tournament they win for each difficulty.
2) Persistence.  Level up characters that the player can use again and again - until they die.  This would provide a lot of character attachment especially if the player could choose names.  On levelup each character could gain hit points/damage/cooldown decrease/speed and their deployment cost would go up.  It would be really cool if a character could hit high enough level to gain an ability randomly from another class. I'd be really attached to a swordsman that gained siphon blood, an archer that gained invoke fear, or a cleric that gained feign death.  Of course the deployment cost would have to go up.