I sort of want to see a "randomized" ninja army game in a rougelike style, sort of like the newest Fire Emblem.
Units have three systems, and ALL units have such abilities.
1. Each unit has blade abilities determined by the weapons they wield. For instance, a unit with a katana and wakizashi would use different techniques from someone with with a two-handed sword, even if they were using the same style. Different combinations may be better with some styles than in others, such as a style based on movement not being as good with a two-handed sword than with a katana.
Many different combinations are possible, but there are only ever two slots to use at one time. For instance, a katana and Shuriken are a valid combination, two sets of Shuriken (They don't run out, but two sets mean you're going to be a shuriken machinegun), or a two-handed sword are also valid, but three katana are not.
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The second system is spirit attacks- each unit gets an affinity, a detriment, and a starting skill.
For instance, one unit is good at water techniques but bad at metal techniques, and it's starting skill is Bomb. It's first available skill is Water Bomb, which fires a large orb of water that violently splashes everywhere once it makes contact. It makes for good crowd control. Later it can be upgraded, through prefixes determined semi-randomly (If your unit often winds up critically injured at the end of missions, the chances of vampiric or "more damage w/ less HP" prefixes go up, for instance) and a list of three are presented at the time the attack will be upgraded.
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Lastly, all of your weapons can be forged to have a name, or by default, a prefix or suffix.
This is the least of the mechanics, however, it adds chances of things happening during your blade skills- such as a chance of poison. They are all more or less equal, and don't do much overall.
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So, if I were to set up a unit, I could have:
Weapons:
Katana + Shuriken
Blade Tech:
Reaper Gambit (Katana. Heavily hurts actual chance to hit while guaranteeing an instant kill.)
Switch Storm (Shuriken+Katana. Numerous weak attacks followed by a guaranteed crit.)
Afterimage (Counters the next enemy attack with an unblockable but weak strike.)
Spirit Tech:
Multi Metal Disc (Originally was a single linear attack, now three discs at 55% power. It means that a miss is unimportant, but high defense enemies take less damage in general.)
Metal Swarm (Chooses an enemy within an area around the unit and does damage per turn as well as debuffs.)
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The Shuriken, Mushimugen, has a chance to cause poison (5%).