Eve of the Apocalypse: Twilight

The next version is 1.13. That means upgrades are back, for all races.

At first glance they might seem the same as before. As you may remember, they were scrapped because the entire system was flawed - too often games were decided by the team that knows to pick the proper upgrades. After that, I spent some time trying to decide how to rearrange it to be better; however, after much thought I came to realize the system itself was fine, the upgrades were just inherently too strong.

So, upgrades have generally been nerfed pretty hard. Globals are gone. All upgrades focus on active abilities. Siege and Air have no upgrades at all.

It should be completely viable for a team with no upgrades to beat one with - upgrades should provide an edge, not be decisive. One could argue this makes them more or less just cosmetic, and they'd be partly right.

If you guys feel certain upgrades are "must have," please let me know, because that means those are probably too strong. Likewise, let me know if you think something is completely ineffective. Just remember: my goal is small/tiny effects of upgrades, not game changing.

DarnYak

it'd be quite cool to have some kind of unit-specific upgrades.
Maybe give spellcasters upgrades that gives them more/stronger spells. It might conflict with what Tactician already does with her ulti though.
Maybe tower upgrades: dmg/range, or an increase to the dmg it does to heros, not so much that it can outright kill them, but enough for it to be a deterrent later on in the game (most heros at a high level can easily take out towers in one single push).

a 'scaling' upgrade may be helpful to prevent heros from simply mowing down units later on. basically, every 10-15 minutes, there is a universal upgrade to the units, giving them a slight bonus to dmg and armour .etc.
not sure if that can be done ontop of what the players can already do to upgrade the units. having two different types of upgrades (the universal and the player controlled) may be kinda of hard to use properly though. not sure if this is really worth the time, if it does turn out to be difficult to implement.

but i think the tower upgrades could be added quite easily; it'd be a good tactical option, such as using 'hold person' or 'ravnous dive' then holding a hero infront of the towers to severely weaken them so you can finish them off.

How about an upgrade that causes a few basic soldiers to pop out of a destroyed building/tower? In short, instead of buying a fortification upgrade which could make the towers unkillable, make something happen when they DO die so you still take a hit. Those aforementioned soldiers could hold enemy attention for a tiny bit longer to give the rest of the towers some time.