After the Storm 0.10.18.1 [Wesnoth 1.14.x & 1.15.12+]

[Iris]

Kind of. I faced many problems myself while developing and play-testing the scenario (it had extra enemy L3s running wild in the battlefield at one point), so it might have become too easy for other players. I for one found it to be significantly hard nonetheless, even with the overpowered Nightshade Fire attack strength from 0.6.x.

[Scampada]

Why did you remove most of the Aragwaithi units in AtS? As far as I remember there was much more them in IftU and you even could recruit Aragwaithi units at some scenarios of IftU.
I really liked these new ones, and was even disappointed a little when hadn't found no trace of them in AtS (except of three NPCs in cutscenes).

[Iris]

Since being able to recruit them turned out to be somewhat counterproductive for balancing purposes in IftU and didn’t make very high amounts of sense in AtS E2, I simply decided to save some time and space by not copying them over.

I still regret including them in IftU in the first place, because I later found out that they were being used in Orbivm material as well.

(By the way, your signature has colors. That’s not good.)

[Scampada]

So they're just balance breaking? Their sprites look good, that's all for what I loved them.

(By the way, your signature has colors. That’s not good.)

Yes, my master.

[Iris]

Version 0.7.1 is out now.

Since development of Episode III hasn’t begun yet, this is merely a maintenance release addressing some known, existing issues. Most of them revolve around the difficulty level of several scenarios found in the first half of E1.

The changelog for this version follows:

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Version 0.7.1:
--------------
* Graphics:
  * New or updated unit graphics: Elvish Acolyte, Elvish Ascetic, Elvish
    Mystic, Elvish Avatar, Elvish Wayfarer, Shaxthal Stormblade.

* Scenarios:
  * E1S1 - The Skirmish:
    * Increased overall difficulty, and reduced turn limit.
  * E1S3 - Civil War:
    * Fixed the unintended visible floating crown in the bottom right corner
      of the game map.
    * Made this scenario easier.
  * E1S5 - Bay of Tirigaz:
    * Made the defeat condition involving the ally leader actually work.
    * Removed unintended forced recall.
  * E1S7 - The Search for the Past:
    * Added villages, minor difficulty changes.
  * E1S8 - Fear:
    * Increased overall difficulty, and increased turn limit.
  * E1S9.1 - The Triad, part 1:
    * Minor dialogue changes.
  * E1S9.2 - The Triad, part 2:
    * Minor Shaxthal encounter changes.
  * E2S8 - And then there was Chaos:
    * Applied minor prose suggestions from Muspilli.
  * E2S11 - A Final Confrontation:
    * Remove "turns run out" condition from the Objectives display whenever
      appropriate

* Units:
  * Balancing:
    * Increased Shaxthal Stormblade's resistances:
      * Fire: -10% -> 10%
      * Arcane: -50% -> -10%
    * Increased Shaxthal Stormblade's movement from 5 to 6.
    * Increased Shaxthal Stormblade's HP from 49 to 67.
    * Added a ranged attack for the Shaxthal Stormblade.
    * Increased Shaxthal Infiltrator's resistances:
      * Blade: 0% -> 20%
      * Pierce: 0% -> 30%
      * Impact: -10% -> 0%
      * Cold: 0% -> 10%
  * Fixed a missing image error with one of Galas' AMLA options.
  * Optimized or fixed unit animations: Fire Sprite unit tree, Control Spire,
    Flow System, Matrix Core, Shaxthal Runner Drone line, Shaxthal Drone tree.
  * Removed compatibility with pre-Wesnoth 1.9.10 AMLA XP requirements.

[cordeirooo]

I recently finished the Chapter I, going to start the next asap; but I must thank you for this awesome campaign.

Keep the good work!

[Teapot]

I've finished your two campaigns and I found them really amazing. Please, continue them!!!

I've got three very small problems to reports and a little feedback to provide you with :

Spoiler:

- A small typo: you wrote "where" instead of "were" in the first part of AtS... probably after the penultimate scenario...
- A plot flaw: during the last scenario of AtS Mal Keshar may escape the petrifying curse through level-up!
- A balance issue: during one of the first scenario of the 2nd part of AtS (where you fight against the Demon Lord, the Sentry and War Drone), the Demon Lord's troops actually manage to lure out and kill the supposedly awesome War Drone, even before he had finished recruiting. I suppose he was to be the hard one?

Another point still : I found the lack of a second healer really hard in the beginning of AtS 2 : More than often our favorite elve is bound to accomplish some kind of mission, leaving the rest of her troops without proper healing...

I'm new to this board, I've registered only to encourage you pursuing this campaign, the best I've ever played! As other people told you already, your maps are awesome, your plot is really intriguing. Congratulations!!

[Pentarctagon]

I played through part II, and it was just as good as the first part. Well done

One thing I did notice though, in my stderr file there were two of these:

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error config: Illegal tile in map: (Yhs) 'Yhs' error
config: map could not be loaded: Illegal tile in map: (Yhs) 'Yhs'

several of these (location varied, but always side 2 or 3):

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error ai/actions: Error #2007 (E_NOT_REACHED_DESTINATION) in full move by side 2 from location 31,33 to location 28,33

and a ton of these (not the same locations though):

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warning engine: Could not find move_unit_fake route from 4,13 to 4,12: ignoring complexities

I don't have much of an idea which scenarios were causing this though, since I played through the entire second half of part II today, and I only noticed this when I went to look at something else.

[Iris]

- A small typo: you wrote "where" instead of "were" in the first part of AtS... probably after the penultimate scenario...

Spoiler:

- A plot flaw: during the last scenario of AtS Mal Keshar may escape the petrifying curse through level-up!

These two items will be fixed in version 0.7.2. Thanks for the heads-up!

- A balance issue: during one of the first scenario of the 2nd part of AtS (where you fight against the Demon Lord, the Sentry and War Drone), the Demon Lord's troops actually manage to lure out and kill the supposedly awesome War Drone, even before he had finished recruiting. I suppose he was to be the hard one?

Well, that’s only one of many balancing and pacing issues with that scenario.

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error config: Illegal tile in map: (Yhs) 'Yhs' error
config: map could not be loaded: Illegal tile in map: (Yhs) 'Yhs'

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warning engine: Could not find move_unit_fake route from 4,13 to 4,12: ignoring complexities

These two are normal. The first one is one of many messages that will be output when selecting AtS saved games for scenarios without shroud that have non-mainline terrains, whenever AtS’ terrains are not loaded (e.g. if you have just started Wesnoth).

(To be more specific, it’s the Load Game dialog’s map snapshot display that triggers this harmless error message. I had intended to fix the issue in Wesnoth 1.10, but I later decided it was too difficult to handle the UMC terrain case correctly without giving up diagnostics for actual broken maps in other areas, e.g. the MP game create dialog.)

The second is caused by multiple instances of forced [move_unit_fake] actions that go through otherwise impassable terrains.

Some would argue that the second case is a WML-side problem. However, considering I did struggle to make sure [move_unit_fake] worked with it in IftU back in the day (it was broken in 1.5.x or 1.7.x at one point), I prefer to just ignore those claims for 1.10. If someone can figure out a proper solution for 1.12 that doesn’t pollute stderr with these (formerly not enabled by default) warnings, that would be most welcome.

several of these (location varied, but always side 2 or 3):

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error ai/actions: Error #2007 (E_NOT_REACHED_DESTINATION) in full move by side 2 from location 31,33 to location 28,33

This is more tricky since I’m not sure how to provide useful information for a bug report against the AI; there are multiple situations in which the AI code complains about various things that suggest bugs in the game engine, not AtS; I don’t override any AI behaviors or parameters beyond the regular aggression, attack_depth, etc. options, so it’s the default AI implementation that’s at fault here.


In somewhat related news, Episode III is currently in the storyboarding phase. I’m not sure how long it’ll be there before it enters production, especially considering the new artwork required for its very first scenario won’t be very easy to make.

[Iris]

Version 0.7.2 is out now.

This is yet another maintenance release addressing some known issues. The changelog for this version follows:

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Version 0.7.2:
--------------
* Scenarios:
  * E1S9.3 - The Triad, part 3:
    * Fix problem causing Mal Keshar to be recalled in the next scenario with
      no movements for the first turn.
  * E1S11.1 - Return to Wesmere, part 1:
    * Minor difficulty tweaks by vultraz.
  * E1S11.2 - Return to Wesmere, part 2:
    * Reduced chance of the player being unwittingly attacked by drones from
      offscreen at the start.
    * Minor difficulty tweaks.
  * E1S12 - The Queen:
    * Do not let petrified units level-up.
    * Fixed typo ("where" -> "were").
    * Minor difficulty tweaks.
    * Minor cutscene sequence changes.
  * E2S10 - The Betrayal:
    * Minor cutscene sequence changes.
  * E2S11 - A Final Confrontation:
    * Minor cutscene sequence changes.

* Units:
  * Force a shroud/fog refresh whenever a door is destroyed.

[cerion]

Episode II: (medium difficulty)

1) By the Moonlight - best strategy in this one seems to be to take over all allied villages and let their units that charged out die while building up a large force of ruffians to hit the enemy in the open fields in front of town... would be funny if the allied leaders complained about this

2) The Heart Forest - the way the "save Allyna" event is triggered unfairly penalizes the player for scouting, which is rather annoying when you find out that the whole thing was staged

5) The Eastern Front - map could probably use some denser forest cover to help the AI out. Or move friendly villages into contact with the forest to the east of the player to create a strategic choice whether to defend them at the cost of allowing the elves favourable terrain. It's too easy to beat this scenario by just spamming skeletons since the elves walk out into the open to attack.

6) The Voyage Home - rushing with 1 keep of ghosts/fairies to the mini-castle in the east and letting the 2 slow heroes catch up works well here, which makes the desert trek a lot less annoying than Wesnoth desert treks usually are. Nice scenario.

11) Final Confrontation - started this with 1300 gold carried over from the previous scenario which is a bit silly. Finished with 1000 after recruiting 2 keeps initially and 2 more just before the boss. The demon AI aggression probably needs a tune up, my forces just camped in front of the entrance to the room and the demons were too scared to attack.

[taptap]

Episode I (Banebow, Hard, 1.10.1)

Scenario I: Nice start. One needs to fully appreciate that Mal Keshar has less than half of the HP compared to the end of IftU. Galas has a hunter sprite but a bow attack and lost his leadership. But I guess it is on purpose that you limit accessability to leadership and healing. The recruiting options are unexplained, they change from scenario to scenario without much explanation. (Ghosts, adepts, bats all are available or not but never explained.)

Scenario III: Turns out pretty easy but forces you to kill most elves. Storywise it is a big question mark. While the civil war still parses somehow, the decision of that council (represented by an elvish enchantress !!!) to ban elves altogether from some parts of world is incomprehensible to me. I mean there were two sides in the war?

Scenario V: Nice scenario, but on the easy side, the saurians are weak to your attacks, you are strong to theirs. Skeleton arches and ghosts did the most work.

Scenario VII: Nice + easy cave exploration.

Scenario VIII: Nice fight above earth against Shaxthals.

Scenario IX: Puzzle time again. Felt like falling into a big plot hole. How do we ended here? It seriously looks like you are out of story ideas, it is the fourth time we face this person, counting IftU, it is even the same special effects.

Spoiler:

You kill the hero of the campaign for nothing, for no in-game effect whatsoever.

...

Finished the first episode now. I admit I don't like the story twist

Spoiler:

that you give to the whole events in the next episode. They destroyed something but of course we have copies. This is like in a cheesy TV series. It is the same with Elyssa earlier, you kill her once, she is hahaha mysteriously regenerated, you kill her twice, but she is resurrected from the remains, you kill her a third time, but our foolish heroes let her walk. I mean you have enough bad guys why are you doing this. Repeat this several times and it really hurts your plot, because the thing you hype in one episode will be devalued in the next one. In fact you don't only do it with your own story but with UtBS as well, Yechnagoth is slain, but the heart is hidden somewhere else (AtS 1).

Episode II (Hard etc. as above)

1) By the Moonlight - best strategy in this one seems to be to take over all allied villages and let their units that charged out die while building up a large force of ruffians to hit the enemy in the open fields in front of town... would be funny if the allied leaders complained about this

I only recruited some ruffians to preserve income and capture villages in the beginning, 2-3 sprites and kept reinforcing with footpads.

2) The Heart Forest - the way the "save Allyna" event is triggered unfairly penalizes the player for scouting, which is rather annoying when you find out that the whole thing was staged

Yes exactly the event even triggers if you walk on the right side of the map avoiding the trolls, and she must be dumb to stage such an event that got her killed (in several trial runs before I understood the trigger). And how she knows she gets the opportunity accompany the player / in fact how she knows there is someone coming to rescue her when she is really so surrounded that she dies within one turn.

[taptap]

Episode II, Scenario IV:

Could be a great scenario but obviously not balanced. Unhittable L3 fairies of course go wild through any Shaxthals they got involved with. Very easy (whether you know about the events or not).

Forest spirit:
What always bugged me is the forest spirit being all fire, but having a relative weakness to fire instead of cold. This makes about no sense. I would change the unit from fire to cold weakness, it doesn't matter against undead who have arcane anyway as the main damage and the demons are split between fire and cold damage anyway. It makes them stronger against orcs, but I guess this doesn't matter too much in your campaigns. It is not that they are used in MP play as sylvans nowadays.

[Iris]

I had intended to respond to feedback nearly at the same time I posted the 0.7.3 announcement around the first week of March, but my continuing work—on the add-ons management code in Wesnoth 1.11.0 and the story outline and early artwork for AtS:F—has seriously messed up my plans in ways I didn’t expect at the time. I apologize for that.

Thus, I’ll answer here and now instead.

2) The Heart Forest - the way the "save Allyna" event is triggered unfairly penalizes the player for scouting, which is rather annoying when you find out that the whole thing was staged

Indeed, and I believe there’s a way to break the sequence for some reason. I intend to rewrite it before 0.7.3 so it doesn’t come off as frustrating as it is right now, although I’m not entirely sure exactly how.

5) The Eastern Front [...] It's too easy to beat this scenario by just spamming skeletons since the elves walk out into the open to attack.

That’s interesting. I think in my final (sixth) playtest run before releasing the first version with this scenario I couldn’t resort to spamming anything because of the enemy units with ranged arcane attacks.

11) Final Confrontation - started this with 1300 gold carried over from the previous scenario which is a bit silly. Finished with 1000 after recruiting 2 keeps initially and 2 more just before the boss. The demon AI aggression probably needs a tune up, my forces just camped in front of the entrance to the room and the demons were too scared to attack.

Noted. Regarding the gold, though, maybe the heroes found the elvish treasury?

Scenario IX: Puzzle time again. Felt like falling into a big plot hole. How do we ended here? It seriously looks like you are out of story ideas, it is the fourth time we face this person, counting IftU, it is even the same special effects.

Spoiler:

You kill the hero of the campaign for nothing, for no in-game effect whatsoever.

Spoilers involving IftU, AtS E1 and E2, and AtS:F here:

Not really the fourth time for the characters, but rather the second time, since the transition from IftU S22-B (Face of the Enemy) to S23-C (Dark Hive) doesn’t count for them. Note that it was Anlindë alone who faced Elyssa the first time and died afterwards, so even that doesn’t count for the actual protagonists, making it their second encounter with her instead.

And I beg to differ about the “run out of story ideas” part. In particular, this was the only part of plan since years ago that didn’t change as AtS’ plot was rewritten multiple times during its early development. This particular character does have importance beyond the flat Hero Killer role that she seems to be so far, but I decided to not be explicit about it for the majority of AtS E1. In particular, there are very specific hints at the end of E1S9.3 (where Galas dies) and E1S13 (the episode’s epilogue sequence, when talking to Mal Hekuba), and even more starting with E2S10 (The Betrayal, when Elynia talks to Mal Hekuba (!)).

I am also aware that there might be many inconsistencies when taking IftU and AtS in continuity, but this is mainly because AtS departs from the tone and techniques I used in IftU, on purpose. While I’d like to go back and fix IftU, I decided years ago that doing so would only delay AtS’ development more than it has already been delayed (far too much for my taste). The plan is to continue and finish AtS and only then worry about fixing IftU, assuming I don’t go ahead with the plans for a prequel campaign with a different set of protagonists first.

As for killing Galas, this does have some gameplay effect: Elynia is the only party healer, and she must now sit around in a keep recruiting and recalling units whenever possible, instead of assisting wounded units in the battlefield with her mobile heals+8 ability, and her slowing ranged attack. There are situations in which this is only a minor inconvenience thanks to multiple keeps and short distances, but it’s not always the case. Additionally, Galas was a decent melee fighter given for free, whereas Elynia is not; you don’t get any such again until the very end of E2, and the start of E3.

Regarding twists and the campaign as it is overall, I’m perfectly aware that I can’t please everyone (especially since this is only my second-ish time writing a story for a game or anything), but from my point of view AtS E1 and E2 were fun experiments despite the terrible pacing issues that are painfully evident in some scenarios (E1S11/E1S12 and E2S4 come to mind) and there’s nothing too terribly wrong that would compel me to rewrite them, unlike IftU.

Forest spirit:
What always bugged me is the forest spirit being all fire, but having a relative weakness to fire instead of cold. This makes about no sense. I would change the unit from fire to cold weakness, it doesn't matter against undead who have arcane anyway as the main damage and the demons are split between fire and cold damage anyway. It makes them stronger against orcs, but I guess this doesn't matter too much in your campaigns. It is not that they are used in MP play as sylvans nowadays.

This sounds like a good idea, although I may opt to keep them slightly weak to fire since they are not proper fire demons or spirits.

[tribes45]

Very interesting campaign! When I played it, I couldn't stop. Story was very interesting as well