The War of the Dragon

[wesfreak]

2 beat the broken bridge, if the ai is really annoying u, undroid it and take control.


I am completely stuck on the way under. (playing at medium difficulty) i was planning 2 just go around. this didn't work. then i used a courrier 2 get the fire elemental and walled myself up in the cave where the ghosts were, giving the curse on the keep to a character who had no melee. i could probably survive there indeffinetely. start a litttle civilization. that's not the objective however. i managed temporarily kill all the monsters coming down from the north right side and blocked the other path out 12 get some units out. could only hold this window for a bit and only got out a courrier who i lvled into the non reaver line (the one with charge-can't remember name). i lvled some weavers and teleported them out and managed 2 kill the saurian leader. My plan: beat it by having my escapees kill all the leaders. this doesn't seem possible, because i only have an emissary, an envoy and a herald out there. I don't think i can heal the hydra without a scribe 2 slow it, and even if i could i wouln't be able 2 beat all the leaders and stop the infinite flow of monsters by turn 70. (it will take 29 turns 2 get the leader 2 the exit. I am currently at turn 40 and have only killed the saurian leader.

note: i used debug to take away fog and shroud.

other note: i always start off as blue instead of red. i still go first though. is this a glich?

final note: how do u post a replay here?

[Velensk]

When you post there is an option to add attachments at the base of the message. You select the replay and then click 'add the file'.

The blue color is intentional. I figured it was fitting for the windsong.

Here is a replay of the way under on normal.

Edit: note that this replay contains the effects of a few bugs that I should have fixed in the version you have, however I doubt that they would change gameplay enough to diminish the value of the replay.

Edit2: warning long watch.

[wesfreak]

when i click it it says "save file?" i press yes. i now have a text version of ur replay saved on my computor with no way 2 watch it on wesnoth. It's not a saved game that i can load and watch

here u go. 41 turns of failure.

[Velensk]

Put it in your saves folder and you should be able to load it up.

EDIT: I don't know why you'd need to save it rather than just downloading.

EDIT2: The thing you attached was a save not a replay.

EDIT3: One thing I can recommend is that whenever you get through a section with acceptable loses you save. This really helps void the annoyance of whenever you lose a cool piece because of misfortune and you don't want to have to start all the way back at the beginning.

[wesfreak]

i use autosaves
and i save frequently when i do something good, so that way if i get a ton of bad luck i can go back 2 that point.


i cant download it. it's not an option for when i click on it.

[Velensk]

This rather puzzles me because when I click on the link it dosn't even give me any options, it simply downloads the file.

I'll try to explain the approuch though it is easier shown than explained.

First of all, you have to keep pressing forward. If you have the right units you may be able to assassinate the devling leader before he is a nuisance, but this isn't nessisary. At certain points in the cave you can block the way behind you with crystals and healers. If you cycle the wounded crystals out to be healed you can hold many of your enemies behind you indefinatly. In the meanwhile you try to press forward with the main body of your force it is essentially a survival where you have to keep moving. It isn't easy to get through it, but it is possible. If you can keep your enemies in front of you, then you can safely heal behind your front line. Try to have spare crystals to plug spots or to keep your more important units alive. If you can avoid losing your units they will start to level up, and the going will get much easier. Eventually you will have to advance your rear guard, but by that time you should be able to strengthen them to the point where you can hold off your enemy even when not in the really easy to defend area. In the meanwhile you just keep pressing around the edge and you will eventually encounter the hydra. It's hard to get past that point without losing some unit, however apparently others (not me) have gotten past it without losing a unit. The hydra can be brought down with fire and arcane damage. After that you have a relativly easy travel down the other side. Do not debug out at this point, it causes problems in the next scenario. It isn't that hard even if it's time consuming (the last section that is)

[ALX23]

This is about next mission (after the one with Hydra): Lisaundra's last stand
I really liked just as I heard its' conditions

It is a hard mission where you have to survive as long as you can, and on turn 40 dragon "wins"
and on the next mission dragon appears after the number of turns you survived

I aided another really good player to complete the mission.
Our goal was to survive 40 turns without recalls.
I believe the difficulty was hard because soulless were raised.
We had a large amount of gold in the beginning, about 1100 .

After all our hard work, thinking, inventing the strategies,
finding solutions to complex tactical problems - the game ended on 16th turn... as the Dragon died

On the next mission, we could recall any of this mission's troops (about fifty units) , dragon would appear on 16th turn, and Lisaundra is the leader!

I hope such nonsense will be fixed in the next release
Never the less we enjoyed this mission. thanks



The smiley exterminators. Coming soon to a store near you.

[Velensk]

At the root of this nonsense is that you should not be able to enter Lisaundra's stand with 1100 gold. I think I'm going to specifically add a trigger to enforce this since eliminating the bonus and the village gold in the last scenario dosn't seem to work.

EDIT: I put up a quick patch that will limit you to 200 gold like you are supposed to be limited too. That should make the scenario much harder. The save where Lisaundra is the leader is unusable; you'll have to go back to this scenario.

[solmyrian]

Any eta on when maps 15-20 will be completed?

I have 1 resilent and strong oathkeeper with the spear,sceptre and the berserking "curse" who can pound almost anything to the ground.Only weakness is arcane dmg.Its really fun to have 1 super troop you can rely on.

Initially,i passed the spear,sceptre and "curse" to a reaver but it didnt do as well due to its 40% defense in most terrains so i replayed and passed the artefacts to an oathkeeper.If some of you are having problems with some of the latter scenerios,you may want to consider this tactic.

Do any of you know of other user made campaigns having this level of difficulty and interesting magic items?thx!

[Velensk]

As soon as I finish working on a real life project I'm involved in I'll get back to working on this. I estimate that I will have the campaign finished before the summer is over.

[zergling]

Hey Velensk, great campaign. I've played all the way through Valimoi Ruins. In case you want some info on balancing the last few scenarios, here's the amount of gold I had at the start of each (I think I was playing on medium difficulty):

Temple of the Deep: 345
Return to the Mainland: 300
Therians: 584
Valimoi Ruins: 684 (I would have carried about 750 to the next level.)

I thought all four were definitely easier than the rest of the campaign, although I had a lot of flying units (seraphs, lightbulbs,...) which helped on Temple of the Deep and Therians.

[Velensk]

I thank you for your feedback.

I've gotten back to working on this, and don't worry the next scenario is much harder than those ones.

The temple of the deep was never intended to be extremely hard, just different. The old version was nearly impossible because the water started rising at turn 3 and there were more enemies.

The return to the mainland was supposed to pit you up against a huge number of foes, but still be very easy to beat.

Therians wasn't supposed to be tough, it was merely supposed to make you try to rescue the civilians so that you could increase your stockpile of troops.

Ruins of Valemoi was supposed to be to give you an easy scenario for you to train your new therians in.

However the next scenario is supposed to be challenging.

[Statue]

That is because the trick is to not fight all your enemies.

I made a mistake near the end that resulted in the lose of a seeker, but otherwise I played fairly well and got lucky a couple times, this was my third attempt at the lvl.

Hi. First of all, thanks for the campaign, it's a nicely different challenge to many other campaigns I've played, and it's nice having to learn how to play a different range of units.

I'm finding the second scenario "Swiftly South" a bit pesky. I get around halfway down the map, take out the first boss and his minions, and then find I can't proceed very much due to the peasant and cavalry spam from the second boss at the bottom. Velensk, I know you posted your strategy for it in a replay and I've tried having a look at it, but due to version conflicts it doesn't load in the current version of wesnoth+WotD (I get a unit not found error message).

Any1 got a current (wesnoth 1.6.4/WotD 1.3.4) replay of the correct strategy, or if not a description of the idea? Toyed with lvl 2 soak blockades and run-arounds, but cavalry are good at picking off those I send running.

Thanks.

[Velensk]

I'll try to post another replay of that scenario shortly, but the root of it is that you need to mislead your enemies as much as possible so you are never fighting all of them at once. You need to try to use crystals/seekers to lure the infantry into the mountains while you run around them, try to get cavalry to be stuck chasing courtiers on the other side of the river and other such things. That being said it is extreamly helpfull to have a decent number of weavers on hand to benefit from Alloria's leadership and take out cavalry relativly easily. If you can split up their forces then it becomes much easier to deal with your enemies and avoid loses.

EDIT: This certainly wasn't one of my better runs through it, though it is a conclusive victory it replied a bit more on luck than I'd like. My cavalry lure didn't work out as I had intended, but hopefully this gives you some idea.

[Statue]

Hey Velensk, thanks for that new replay and the hints for Swiftly South, was invaluable in me learning how to tackle it effectively. Waltzed thru it first try using that strategy and managed to get quite a few units levelled in the process.

Hitting another wall on scenario 5 The Way Under. I've tried holding the first castle area near the beginning, plugging the gaps with oathkeepers and shards as some folk in this thread have done, but with the pesky cuttlefish my shards shatter in one round of being up front, and by turn 15 or so I'm over-run, so either I'm being unlucky or not defending it very well (I like to think it's a bit of both lol).

Been trying an alternative, getting units on the move pronto and only hanging at the first castle just for a few rounds purely for recruitment purposes, then leaving a few shards around in some of the passageways to buy my main units some time to rush up north. I've attached a replay of my first attempt at that alternative approach (hesitant to call it a strategy as that makes it sound a little more elegant than it certainly looks in the replay lol). That way I got as far as the open area where the saurian leader is before a combination of the enemies breaking thru from my rear and the masses of them that manouvre from the west to meet my rush overwhelmed me (I think I counted 8 cuttlefish, which take a lot of hitting to kill, a bunch of nagas, bats, saurians, and a bunch of devlings that came along from the north - essentially I was caught out in the open from all sides and pulverised, by apparently all of the enemies that I thought I was blocking off at my rear; they simply found their own alternate route to get to my position). Given it was my first attempt at rushing north like this, I wasn't aware what I was rushing up into, so as you can imagine I wasn't placing my units in the best positions which hindsight would have granted me knowledge of. I also wasn't aware of how the enemies I'd been leaving behind earlier in my rush and block advance would be able to simply go round a different route to get to the open area with the saurian leader, so the blocking as I went northwards was essentially just saving me up some trouble for later. So with all that unknown stuff it was not an optimal rush at all, and watching my replay back I see loads of unsound moves (though to be fair to myself, some are unsound moves given my ignorance of what I was rushing into and how the layout pans out). What I'm interested in is whether this rushing approach is doomed to failure due to the accumulation of enemies that thereby await at the open area or, if I do so without some of the unsound moves I make in the replay it is possible to win this way? Also in general would be happy to receive any advice generally on what I appear to be doing badly. I got fairly proficient at wesnoth with the mainline campaigns and the common troops but am aware I do kinda suck with Windsong units

Thanks, and thanks again for this campaign, enjoying it immensely and finding it quite a juicy challenge.