When does a class warrant a sub-class?

Question

For example, I am trying to build an enemy class for a simple game. Each enemy that spawns has a type which affects it stats which are fields in the enemy class.

class Enemy:
    #Base Stats for all enemies
    name = "foo"
    current_health = 4
    max_health = 4
    attack = 0
    defense = 0
    armor = 0
    initiative = 0
    initMod = 0
    alive = True

Should each type be a subclass of enemy like so..

class goblin(Enemy):
    name = goblin;
    current_health = 8
    max_health = 8
    attack = 3
    defense = 2
    armor = 0

    def attack(){
        //goblin-specific attack
    }

But this method means that I would have to build a class for each individual type (which would be 80+ classes), or is there a better way to do it? This enemy is going to be randomized, so I was thinking the types could also be put into a dictionary which uses the names of the types as keywords. Although I'm not entirely sure how I could implement that.

Answer 1

If you want to go the dictionary route you could do something like this with a tuple being returned by the key:

enemy_types = {"goblin": ("goblin", 8, 8, 3, 2, 0, goblin_attack)}

def goblin_attack(enemy):
    do_stuff()

Though you may want to use a named_tuple

https://stackoverflow.com/a/13700868/2489837

to make sure you don't mix up the fields in the tuple