GAE/Effects

Effects are added bonuses that can be added to attacks, allowing the unit to cause an extra effect with an attack. For example, it may "poison" the opponent and slowly drain their HP, or you could slow a unit by reducing its move speed, etc.

Usage
Effects are embedded in the &lt;skill&gt; tag of the unit's XML. At this time, only attack skills and emanations (described in the next section) are supported, but a new "cast spell" skill type will be later added to allow effects to be put on friendly units.

XML definition
More XML elements are planned, but are not yet implemented and thus, excluded from this page.

effect
There is one effect tag per individual effect on the attack (if multiple are added), all which are children of the main effects tag. There are a number of attributes, with the name, bias, stacking, and duration being required, and the rest being optional.

static-modifiers
Static multipliers increase or decrease stats by a set amount. All child tags will have a value attribute which denotes how much it should be increased or decreased by.

multipliers
Similar to static modifiers above, and using the same children nodes, multipliers instead multiply the stat by their amount, with the default being 1. So if a multiplier is 2, they'll have that stat double, if it's 0.5, it'll be halved, and so forth.

flags
Flags effect various aspects of the "effect". Each nested element has no attributes or children.

recourse-effects
Recourse effects are an entirely new effect that is added inside of the effect to modify the user. For example, you could have an EP draining attack that would give the foe negative EP regeneration while giving the attacking unit a positive EP regeneration.

Archer example
The below is an example of an extended attack of the archer adding a poison to the arrows which causes blindness and 50 damage per second for 8 seconds. Note that the only part of this snippet that is modified from the original is the addition of the &lt;effects&gt; tag.

By using the multiplier of 0.2 for sight, their sight is reduced to 20% of normal. Reducing it further may result in a sight of zero, which would make them incapable of attacking even targets directly adjacent to them.

Archmage example
Effects can be used on attacks with a splash effect as well, this will cause all units in the splash radius to be effected. By default, all units are effected equally, even if they are on the very edge of the splash radius. However, by adding the flag &lt;scale-splash-strength&gt; to the &lt;flags&gt; section of the effect, this behavior can be overridden causing the strength of the effect to be weaker on units further from the point of impact. The strength of the effect isn't exposed through the XML interface, but it effects all attribute modifications (both positive and negative). Below is an example a theoretical effect added to the ice attack of an archmage. Presuming that the ice is cold, let's say that this will temporarily reduce the movement and attack speed of the target. However, the effect will be relative to where they in the splash radius.

You may have noticed that the "stacking" attribute of the effect tag was set to "stack" this time instead of "overwrite". This means that successive attacks which cause this effect will accumulate, increasing the total effect. Each instance of the effect has it's own timer, so they will wear off one at a time. When set to "overwrite", the previous effect is simply overwritten and the duration reset. This isn't recommended for use with apply-splash-strength however because a second effect may be weaker and overwrite a stronger one.

Initiate example
This example illustrates the use of a recourse effect, which will effect the user, in this case, regenerating HP and making them faster.