Liberty

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Liberty

Post by Development Team »

This is the main development thread for the mainline campaign Liberty. The original first post for this thread follows.
zookeeper wrote:Since Liberty is a mainline campaign as of Wesnoth 1.3.7, here's a thread for discussing it, reporting problems and making suggestions.

For the 1.2-compatible add-on campaign, please post in this older thread. This thread is intended for the mainline version of the campaign, and the 1.2 version is basically unmaintained.
tsr
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Post by tsr »

Ok, I just played this through today on the toughest difficulty and I found it very non-hard too beat (admitedly I save-loaded a few times, but mostly because I didn't want to restart a scenario and I did restart the elensfar scenario once after recruiting too many archers to face undead at night).

I see two things that made it easy:
1. too many loyal units
2. saurian didn't recruit anything or at least very little, which made the third scenario too simple and landed me a gold carry of over of 800 gold.

I chose for Murlock[1] to join me in the final battle, but next time I think I'll ask some of his units to come with me, a leveled thief or four seems like an excellent thing to have in the last scenario :)

Bugs:
- dotting in storyline maps was made mostly of the coast and each dot very close to the others.
- last scenario - dialog: maybe I just misread but I got the impression that Murlocks units had to get under the towers to destroy them, this freaked me out at first but after ruining the first tower with my units I knew I had made a mistake.
- kill the lich scenario: it wasn't enough to kill the lich you also had to kill the sorcerers and for some reason my ally - Murlock - didn't finnish the western sorcerer although he had the manpower to do so, boring to need to go back and finish him myself.

Other comments:
- I think the second scenario needs something, after three rounds of recruiting and holding back the enemy attacked me on my strong hold and I could easily arch him do death, after cleaning up inside the village I jsut had to go and kill the leader. Maybe the leader can escape if he is left for last and return in a later scenario, that would of course require him to not be so passive :)

- the sneak around the guards scenario could have a couple of randomly moving guards on hard so that you actually had to think which way to go, as soon as you have understood how to move forward (that is after the introductory dialog) it's just about grinding it out.

- I really like how the horse-men and orcs battle it out in the last scenario took me by surprise

Ok, that's it, over all I think this is a great campaign, it was a long time since I played it last time.

/tsr
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Turuk
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Post by Turuk »

I am playing through this now, and two major issues, one of which tsr mentioned, is that Tarwen(cavalier in the second scenario) and the saurian in the third, do not recruit units at all, which makes them incredibly easy to beat. The second is that in the third scenario, your ally does nothing to kill the saurian, just wanders around gathering villages and sending units back and forth.
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Blarumyrran
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Post by Blarumyrran »

also, the friendly paladin in Halstead level was supposed to be the son of the king of elensefar, right? but he uses the default paladin portrait, which looks a lot older than the portrait of the elensefar king in the elensefar level. so theres inconsistency.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

tsr wrote:Ok, I just played this through today on the toughest difficulty and I found it very non-hard too beat (admitedly I save-loaded a few times, but mostly because I didn't want to restart a scenario and I did restart the elensfar scenario once after recruiting too many archers to face undead at night).
It's supposed (I guess?) to be a rather easy campaign, but the difficulties might very well need some balancing as it's not really been done yet for the mainline version.
tsr wrote:I see two things that made it easy:
1. too many loyal units
2. saurian didn't recruit anything or at least very little, which made the third scenario too simple and landed me a gold carry of over of 800 gold.
I agree about the loyal units: how many of them survive the first two scenarios probably decides quite a lot about how easy the rest of the campaign will be. Should be easy enough to change some of them to not be loyal or something like that. Will have to look at that saurian leader, there's apparently something funny going on there.
tsr wrote:I chose for Murlock[1] to join me in the final battle, but next time I think I'll ask some of his units to come with me, a leveled thief or four seems like an excellent thing to have in the last scenario :)
Who the heck is Murlock? I presume you mean Helicrom and you're using a translation or something.
tsr wrote:- dotting in storyline maps was made mostly of the coast and each dot very close to the others.
I'll work on the bigmap stuff if we happen to get a proper bigmap for the campaign. Looks a bit unlikely though, so I guess we'll have to do with the one currently used.
tsr wrote:- last scenario - dialog: maybe I just misread but I got the impression that Murlocks units had to get under the towers to destroy them, this freaked me out at first but after ruining the first tower with my units I knew I had made a mistake.
What do you mean by "ruining the first tower with my units"? Do you mean overall that it wasn't clear that you were supposed to get units to the trapdoors in order to destroy the thing?
tsr wrote:- kill the lich scenario: it wasn't enough to kill the lich you also had to kill the sorcerers and for some reason my ally - Murlock - didn't finnish the western sorcerer although he had the manpower to do so, boring to need to go back and finish him myself.
Right, that's probably something I forgot when changing the three liches to two necromancers and one lich. Will fix.
tsr wrote:Other comments:
- I think the second scenario needs something, after three rounds of recruiting and holding back the enemy attacked me on my strong hold and I could easily arch him do death, after cleaning up inside the village I jsut had to go and kill the leader. Maybe the leader can escape if he is left for last and return in a later scenario, that would of course require him to not be so passive :)
I agree, something will need to be done there. We'll probably either have the leader charge the player just like the rest instead of sitting in his keep or allow him to recruit a few units.
tsr wrote:- the sneak around the guards scenario could have a couple of randomly moving guards on hard so that you actually had to think which way to go, as soon as you have understood how to move forward (that is after the introductory dialog) it's just about grinding it out.
Agreed, but that's rather hard to do so that it'd always be guaranteed that you could get past the guards without fighting. I do plan on trying to randomize the positions of the guards somewhat, so that you can't always use the exact same route.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

Syntax_Error wrote:also, the friendly paladin in Halstead level was supposed to be the son of the king of elensefar, right? but he uses the default paladin portrait, which looks a lot older than the portrait of the elensefar king in the elensefar level. so theres inconsistency.
Fixed now.
tsr
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Post by tsr »

zookeeper wrote:
tsr wrote:I chose for Murlock[1] to join me in the final battle, but next time I think I'll ask some of his units to come with me, a leveled thief or four seems like an excellent thing to have in the last scenario :)
Who the heck is Murlock? I presume you mean Helicrom and you're using a translation or something.
I forgot the [1] in the end of my previous post, here it comes:
[1] I don't think his name is really Murlock but I just don't remember the real name, it's the leader of the magish outlaws I refer too anyway
zookeper wrote:
tsr wrote:- last scenario - dialog: maybe I just misread but I got the impression that Murlocks units had to get under the towers to destroy them, this freaked me out at first but after ruining the first tower with my units I knew I had made a mistake.
What do you mean by "ruining the first tower with my units"? Do you mean overall that it wasn't clear that you were supposed to get units to the trapdoors in order to destroy the thing?
What I meant was that I thought that only Helicroms units could climb down there and do the job, probably just a mistake by me, let me check the cfg-file...yep, reading mistake by me, feel free to ignore (it said '...one of our men...' while I read '...one of my men...').

I think it was very clear that someone needed to get to the center of each tower, I just thought it had to be one of Helicroms units, my mistake.

/tsr
mpolo
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Post by mpolo »

At the point where the peasants became outlaws, I ended up with a footpad with 38/36 experience.

The AI seemed to be particularly stupid in this campaign. Allies were not worth having (for me at least). Helicrom (or however you spell it) recruits hordes of units, who just run around back and forth and being generally ineffective. I punched down to kill the lich and was surprised to see that I hadn't won the level. So I had to slog back up to the last necromancer. In Helicrom's defence, he did finally decide it might be a good idea to attack by the time I got there, so I only had to do the coup de grace on the necromancer.

About to do the last scenario...
mpolo
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Post by mpolo »

The final battle (on easy) was extremely easy, in large part because those swordsmen get very easily distracted from their guard posts. I only dealt with 2 of them, and could have avoided one more. Also, the enemy general only recruited one castle (almost) full. The supposedly tiny orcish army was actually much bigger than the Wesnoth army (not counting the one set of reinforcements that arrived). I probably could have killed the leader without much problem, but went for the objective instead.

The other factor that made this extremely easy was having near infinite gold coming in -- like 1400 or so. I "only" recruited/recalled three castles-full, though. This came from finishing a couple of scenarios very early.

The female fugitive has male animations, by the way -- her hair gets magically swept into a hood...
Stedevil
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Post by Stedevil »

Just played though this on hardest difficulty w BfW 1.3.9

Good: Nice storyline & pretty pictures
Bad: Just heaps and heaps of gold there is no point in spending while lots of enemy leaders dont seem to have any gold to actually spend on buying units.

Bugs:
* Several scenarios forget to give you extra gold for turns finished early.
* Enemy knights that turn into undead tend to get too many abilities to fit in the GUI
* When taking on the 1liche + 2 necros your allies units does not reveal the area for you.
* Recallable units with enough XP to already have reached next level.
(*) Some confusion throughout which units are actually neutral and which are chaotic. At least some seems to change and some dont which is kind of a PIA. Why not just stick with the same alignment throughout the campaign for each unit type?
zookeeper wrote:
tsr wrote:I see two things that made it easy:
1. too many loyal units
2. saurian didn't recruit anything or at least very little, which made the third scenario too simple and landed me a gold carry of over of 800 gold.
I agree about the loyal units: how many of them survive the first two scenarios probably decides quite a lot about how easy the rest of the campaign will be.
There is no reason what so ever that you wont manage to keep ALL your loyal units alive (king + 11 units... :shock:). You are not in a rush so you have plenty of time to be careful and take out the enemy with 0 or very low losses.

I would leave just the father&son as 0 upkeep (possibly 1 and 2 more loyal units respectively for the 2 easier difficulty levels). Then instead balance the gold in first scenario with giving all villages to the player from start (the 2 village guard units should probably also be put in play from the start to OR 1-2 villages should be removed).That also would make it a lot more urgent to get to those wolves as quick as possible (even at the cost of losing units as you go) since you will also lose lots of money if you let the enemy take too many villages.

Another big improvement would be if most wolves actually went with the goblin leader. Way too easy now to trick 2-3 of them into attacking straight into your 10 starting units by moving close enough on the first turn (I assume moving the closest ones 2-3 hexes to the right would fix that). Making the player have to spread out his forces to chase them down would make the scenario a lot more interesting too.
tsr wrote:- kill the lich scenario: it wasn't enough to kill the lich you also had to kill the sorcerers and for some reason my ally - Murlock - didn't finnish the western sorcerer although he had the manpower to do so, boring to need to go back and finish him myself.
I never trust my allies to do anything organized and efficient when I play. Sending 2-3 of my men west to take out the important enemies and stealing all the allies villages on the way worked out very well for me so I dont see a real problem here.
tsr wrote:- the sneak around the guards scenario could have a couple of randomly moving guards on hard so that you actually had to think which way to go, as soon as you have understood how to move forward (that is after the introductory dialog) it's just about grinding it out.
Agreed, but that's rather hard to do so that it'd always be guaranteed that you could get past the guards without fighting. I do plan on trying to randomize the positions of the guards somewhat, so that you can't always use the exact same route.
At least randomization would be a nice improvement for replay ability, but in any case there is no problem in that scenario what so ever with just brute forcing your way through. Since the enemy units only attack when that SPECIFIC unit sees you you can pretty much just pick off almost all units 1 by 1 with 3-4 units in total. If 1 enemy unit sees you, why dont the rest (at least the ones nearby) also help out when 1 enemy charges you?

In any case, definitely a campaign with stable mainline potential if it gets some more love and care.
Stedevil
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Post by Stedevil »

As an update I would like to mention I now tried to replay the campaign with deleting all the non hero loyal units after the first scenario, It works quite well with no mayor money or balance issues. However, due to the lack of the Saurians actually buying units and attacking you still end up finishing that scenario after 15-20 turns of 40 leaving me with about 1000 gold. So unfortunately not much point in balance testing past that point until that gets fixed.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

I changed the turn limit of A Strategy of Hope from 44,42,40 to 35,30,25. That should eliminate some of the excess gold.

I'm planning on trying to randomize the positions of the guards in Hide and Seek, but it won't be finished for 1.3.10 yet.

I'll have a quick look at whether I can remove the loyality of the units of the first scenario without upsetting the balance too much.

EDIT: Ok, I've now made the beginning peasants (except for Baldras and Harper, of course) non-loyal, and have the scenario an early finishing bonus as well. The campaign will certainly be harder without all those loyal units, but I don't think that's too bad (since the massive amounts of gold were pretty lame).
Jozrael
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Post by Jozrael »

I just played thru a lot of campaigns today, having made the switch from stable to dev.

Liberty has been my favorite so far, excellent job, I adored the story (still rather easy on hard mode, but you can't make it impossible. Ditto on most of the things people have said here). Also, does anyone know if Descent into Darkness is still maintained? I don't like the ending xD
Stedevil
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Post by Stedevil »

Jozrael wrote:Also, does anyone know if Descent into Darkness is still maintained? I don't like the ending xD
Yes it is. :)
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Stedevil
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Post by Stedevil »

zookeeper wrote:I changed the turn limit of A Strategy of Hope from 44,42,40 to 35,30,25. That should eliminate some of the excess gold.
I guess that works out well for a quick fix. However the real problem I assume is the lack of gold for the Saurian AI player. There is just no way to win in 15ish turns if you are actually attacked from both sides.

Right now you can literally send only 2 single units to take out the Saurian commander (he only fields like 4-5 units in total and they move to attack your AI friend). This allows you to send almost ALL your forces SE towards the Orks, hold them back and (as ork AI money runs out) push through and finish the leader.

If you actually where attacked properly by the Saurians (eg 20-25 units, instead of 4-5) finishing in 25 turns might actually be a very very hard target to reach.
EDIT: Ok, I've now made the beginning peasants (except for Baldras and Harper, of course) non-loyal, and have the scenario an early finishing bonus as well.
Did you give ownership of all the villages to the player as well? If not then one will haemorrhage gold quite bad in the beginning. OTOH, you get all your units for free and in worst case you have just minimum gold for next scenario (which realistically is not very much less then in a best case result). So everything considered it might work just fine.

Also, did you consider moving the start placement of the wolves a bit further away in the first scenario or is it deliberate that 2-3 are easily fooled into attacking you?
The campaign will certainly be harder without all those loyal units, but I don't think that's too bad (since the massive amounts of gold were pretty lame).
Indeed, and I'd be interested in trying it out. How do I do to try this out before 1.3.10. I compile from source right now so what would be the easiest way to do it? Get SVN or manually edit my version and recompile?

Anyway, keep up the good work. :)
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