Dwarven Campaign

[quartex]

Turin, you'll notice above 6 posts earlier me and dave bandied around a similar idea, having your most experience unit survive. But Dave is right that there are soem serious balancing issues with those two levels, you love them becuase all the combat allows you to get lots of advanced units, but a newer played might only get 1 or 2 level 2 units. If you save the most experience units for later in te campaign, you're going to have a drastically different groups of units depending on the player's skill. Killing off the army is a nice way of keeping a even playing field for all players. It doesn't matter if the combat is unbalanced if the entire army dies anyway Sure makes balancing issues a lot easier.

[Darth Fool]

To build on turin's idea, using Dave's new WML features, I think you could store the whole army and have the most advanced one or two units drift in each new scenario as free units which then would rejoin your regular army for future scenarios. Alternatively, you could have the following scenario be a recovery scenario, where you can't recall any units, but one by one your old units appear at various places (maybe random) on the map and rejoin your army...

[turin]

Turin, you'll notice above 6 posts earlier me and dave bandied around a similar idea, having your most experience unit survive. But Dave is right that there are soem serious balancing issues with those two levels, you love them becuase all the combat allows you to get lots of advanced units, but a newer played might only get 1 or 2 level 2 units. If you save the most experience units for later in te campaign, you're going to have a drastically different groups of units depending on the player's skill. Killing off the army is a nice way of keeping a even playing field for all players. It doesn't matter if the combat is unbalanced if the entire army dies anyway Sure makes balancing issues a lot easier.

first of all, i noticed you talking about it. i was just saying a way it could be integrated with the plot in a good way.

next, its supposed to be easier for better players to play the campaign, right? if not, whats the point? still, it might be balanced if you only got 2 units, which would make it so it was pretty likely most people got back about the same. and if you re-introduced those old units at the 6th scenario or beyond, 4 second-level units won't be too unbalancing. You still have to pay for their upkeep, and, probably, it would just add them to your recall list, not give them to you.

[DarkOx55]

Wow, leave for a couple of days and this thread practically exploded with replies! Thanks for all the responses.
I could have sworn I set it to only kill the Dwarvish Thunderers and Fighters. There was a time when I had it set to simply kill everything, but I thought that players wouldn't enjoy that; so I decided to make it that you'll get your verterans back when you re-gain control of the Dwarves (the plot, at least intitially, is divided into two perspectives: that of the Thieves and that of the Dwarves. Eventually, the two meet up but until then, the Thieves can only recall thief units and the dwarves only dwarf units).
However, I'm thinking of having your veteran units starting off with very low hp (as in, they just barely survived) as sort of a compromise between the two ideas. I'm also hoping that WML allows me to do that.
So, Turin I'm almost positive that your Steelclads and Thunderguards were not killed, it's just that you won't have access to them for awhile. Hopefully, this will keep a reconcilliation between plot and gameplay.
Changes I'm planning to make on the scenarios: 1. On normal and hard, less Dwarves to defend the villiage since many of them won't even get to the front lines when an experienced player is using them 2. More turns for the third scenario as it seems the majority of people are only finishing one or two quests
As for graphics, if you think I need a new church image, you've obviously not seen my "caravan" which is the single ugliest graphic ever to grace this game. Anyone who wants to make graphics for the scenario (a thieves guild, caravan, church or John) feel free to do so. Anything would be better than what I can do.
Thanks again for all your responses,

DarkOx

[quartex]

I discovered that replays saved by one version won't play with another. I tried to finish scenario 2 with my 0.7.3 saved game in 0.7.5 and then save the replay. The game played fine, but the replay was corrupt according to the application. It isn't critical to watch the replay, but at the end of the scenario it was pretty funny becuase my dwarves had migrated over to the mountains and were fighting loyalist troops in the mountains. The loyalists had of course completely overrun my town. Then the mages teleport in north of the town and massacre my dwarves which were holed up in the mountains on the other side of the map.

It's obvious what you expected us to do, and I can't see any easy way in WML to check that the army is still in the town before your massacre them. But it's a case of "suspension of disbelief". You can never assume all players will do what you expect, becuase someone will eventually surprise you. It's not a glarring error but is it possible to record the locations of my units? Then you could have the mages teleport in adjacent (or near) each of my units to assassinate them. That might make a bit more sense, than just having a fixed teleport location.

[Insinuator]

I had a an error while playing. On the second scenario, I had a berserker and when I attacked another unit, he just kept attacking until one of them was dead. He did this two more times until he died himself. Is this just a change to the berserker? I have Windows 98SE, BFW v0.7.5, and the first dwarven campaign version (don't know if there are actually any more).

[Sangel]

Yep.

[Insinuator]

Assuming the "yep" was an affirmative answer to my question, why then does the unit still display # of attacks? Not only is this confusing, it is misleading.

[turin]

Assuming the "yep" was an affirmative answer to my question, why then does the unit still display # of attacks? Not only is this confusing, it is misleading.

because the number of attacks still matter. if the enemy has a different number of attacks than 4 (which is very likely), then they get 1-3 or >5 hits per 4 hits the berserker gets. consider this:

berserker 8-4, troll whelp 8-2

berserker attacks
troll attacks
berserker attacks
troll attacks
berserker attacks
berserker attacks
berserker attacks
troll attacks
berserker attacks
troll attacks
berserker attacks
berserker attacks

and so on, until one of them is dead. so you see, it actually does matter.

[Insinuator]

Ah, I see. Thank you.