Legend of the Invincibles

[Dugi]

I am sorry for being absent for a long time again. I am thankful to dabber, edwardspec and others who kept this going while I was away.

To hint on what I was doing, I was working on another game project. As I have written a few times, it's difficult to make LotI continue because the life of Ehe protagonists after the last scenario where the leaders are left completely alone would not be very fitting for a strategy game. I have written a few short spin-offs with different characters, but that's not a true continuation. There are leader-only campaigns and some players try to play LotI with leaders only, but it's pretty annoying because Wesnoth's framework is not made for that. Years ago, I had the idea to create a standalone game with a similar items/advancements system, but a more action-based combat. Not so long ago, I have started to learn to use Unreal Engine to have more freedom, but it's pretty complex and so I have decided to create an unrelated game first (a first person shooter, which should be easy given that it's what Unreal is based on) and then use the knowledge (and possibly also earnings) to make a continuation of the story of LotI's protagonists. There is no guarantee I will be able to finish it in a reasonable amount of time, but the vision is that in a few years, you'll be able to slash the enemies and cast spells through Efraim's eyes (or Lethalia's eyes).

I am not telling that I want to give up on maintaining and occasionally improving this campaign, it's just that I don't like switching between tasks too often. I know that I am going to be tied to this project like forever.
_______________

Doing the same thing I did last time...

I like the Elvish Nightprowler; first, even without gear, it is a decent unit, but more importantly with gear it is great. I tend to use the hit-and-run bow a lot.
...

Thanks. I have used your advice to prepare a draft of what needs to be improved about those units. I have some concrete ideas, but I think it'll be better not to reveal it long before it's done. I don't want to spoil new content.

...
And just some mechanical ideas for other units you may rework, what about a unit with an aura that increases damage taken by itself and all adjacent units, friend or foe? Or an attack that provides excellent damage or utility (AoE debuff, like dazzle, slow, etc..) in exchange for causing damage to the attacker?

Your feedback was taken into consideration too. Regarding this particular question, my preferred solution is to add new abilities to make those units more unique, preferably something that isn't widely available like slow.

Regarding dazzle, I prefer to keep its use at minimum (or even to remove it) because it's bad from a performance point of view. I have copied the code from some forum long ago and I have been using very different code to implement abilities and weapon specials. I am not removing it only because it can only be used very rarely and thus doesn't have much effect on performance.

Minor point - should the Alliance ring have double the drop chance since it is literally worthless by itself? Or is Alliance sufficiently powerful it should be rare? I have tons of items, but only one Alliance ring, so I haven't tried it.

Good point. Making it twice as common everywhere. I don't want to make it too common because it would be a best in slot.

Suggestion - make Alliance an argument, and let some unit(s) AMLA the ability. Alliance 8, Alliance 16, Alliance 24, Alliance 30.

I don't think it's necessary. There should be little sources of this ability or it would be overpowered.

...
But the display is like 83.333 which makes no sense. We have gold coins at +1 or -1, so fractions
should not appear. I assume an additional rounding should be done - either 83, or 84, but not
the decimal numbers.
...

Fixed.

Displaying the price even if it was unaffordable would be rather difficult because I can't grey out the option like in usual GUIs.

The idea of automatically collecting some items
I know, Dugi, that you want the player's armies to have to bother with items. The players, in turn, want the other way around. That's why I have a Solomon proposal, at least I hope so. According to my idea, the game when it meets the victory criterion should look for items that meet one of the following conditions:
- lie in the player's village, either in an allied village or at most 2 hexes away from the listed
- are located in a castle free of the enemy or no more than 5 hex from its border
- are within sight of player or allied units. For the purpose of this condition, it is worth considering removing enemy units commanded by killed leaders
- the item is adjacent to the item qualifying for acquisition
An additional condition is that the fields with the object are not occupied by an enemy unit or are adjacent to it.

That would come with additional inconvenience. If you walk a unit over the item, you have the option to smash it to get a random gem, which is a pretty common thing to do for overly common items. If this was automatically placed into the inventory, you'd have to search through it over and over again to look for junk and end up picking it manually anyway.

I have implemented this in a project I never completed nor released and found the resulting mess in my inventory so annoying that I regretted that decision.

An idea in connection with ideas to change the heritage
From what I've seen, you have Dugi's idea of changing your heritage. I'm guessing that these changes are supposed to happen fairly sporadically... so I suggest you consider that the original ones don't spoil but activate the heritage of the other parent.

Could be.

The idea of developing teleportation
He would like to present an idea for AMLA developing teleportation capabilities.
Infiltration - allows for teleportation from/to the castle field
Hit and Blink - this would be a variation of Hit and Run capability using teleportation. It depended on the fact, that if the attack came out from some location, from which one can teleport oneself, then the unit with this capability after the attack tries to return to it, and if it teleported itself in this turn, then it teleports itself to the location, from where the last teleportation came out. In order to balance this, I propose 2 weaknesses:
- if one of the teleportation locations is in or adjacent to an enemy control zone, there is no escape.
- the number of traffic points for return traffic must be reduced somehow. Maybe by 1/3?

I'll consider it, it can't be implemented the way you are suggesting but it could be a fine addition to make some of the underused units more popular.

The guarilla legacy idea
With this idea, he wants to exploit all the possibilities of an ambush. Let's establish that stopping a surprised unit of real tactics is not satisfactory. So let's go! I propose the following AMLA for a guarilla unit to surprise the enemy unit:
1) If an enemy unit is surprised during its movement, the guarilla unit attacks
2) An attack on a surprised unit gains instant attack
3) If, after an attack, a monster stops being in the hostile control zone, he has the right to jump back. On offensive according to the Hit and Run capability, and in defense he gains 2 mv.
4) In an area where a unit is considered hidden this unit gains a skirmisher
5) Attack on the surprised unit gains the marksman
6) Attack on a surprised unit gains focus
7) Attack on a surprised unit gains guided

I think your proposal is needlessly complicated, but something could be made out of it. It could increase the popularity of those human rangers.

Hi, sorry if this has been asked, but there are almost 5 hundred pages and I didn't wanna read em all.

Use google and if you get nothing, don't bother. This discussion is up for over nine years and very little of the old content is relevant.

Edit: nvm I figured it out. Apparently if the unit doesn't have a fireball attack, firecast does nothing. I equipped a Warlock and a Duelist Wizard with the violent mage set and it worked fine. Messenger and Faerie Incarnation both don't have a fireball attack so firecast did nothing.

Maybe the source of firecast could add some weak fireball spell? The nowadays' main source of bugs, the rewrite of item effect support to lua, adds a lot of new possibilities.

Hi, I just wanted to comment to everyone (kinda spam, sorry) that I started uploading Battle for Wesnoth playthroughs so you might want to check them out. I'll play this campaign eventually because it's one of my favourites. My Youtube is The Lost General, thanks for the attention!

That would be probably too much for me to go through, but it should be handy if you shared some highlights here.

First, for some reason in LotI1 you can equip any item everywhere on every turn, 2 turns restriction doesn't work (and in LotI2 and Gladiators it works).

If I recall correctly, this was fixed already, but it might not be on the server.

Second, in Akula's dungeon you can get a Steel Army spearman, I advanced him to Steel Scourge. It lacks AMLAs so I gave him a book of magic swordsplay. But it doesn't work! Books don't work with units without non standard AMLAs, when I gain a new level for that steel scourge, he just automatically chose the default AMLA (+3HP +20% max XP) without showing AMLAs from the book! Unfair!

He is ridiculously strong alone, so he has no AMLA. Disallowing him to equip boos would be tricky, because there is no distinction between books and other one-time items (Orb of Demonic Wrath, Book of Courage).

Also about Gladiators. Is that scenario endless? Also there was some quirck with crafting, we got out-of-sync errors with a player crafted an item and immediately put it on, nobody saw that. But if the player crafted an item, placed it into an item storage, then got it from the storage and equip, in that case all worked fine. It's strange!

This is probably some synchronisation error.

P.S. Also I like that Deathblade Inheritance became a dropable axe, not a craftable item. You can pick it for Lethalia or another deathblade and create your undead legions xD

It was so expensive to craft that it was affordable only when it was nearly useless. So I had to make it more available.

Removing 'Legend of the Invincibles (beta)' using the add-on manager leads to 'beta.pbl' being left over.

edwardspec, can you please have a look at this? I am still totally clueless about the CI stuff.

Old bug but still exists in the latest stable: if you try to enter the Tunnels of Cruelty (location of Inferno where you pick evil Lethalia) again, after you picked her, the game freezes and crashes

Can you please provide a save file if it's not already fixed in the beta?
Crashes are a problem of wesnoth rather than my campaign, but the freeze before could be my fault (and there is a way it could have caused a crash indirectly).

<Invalid WML found> [unstore_unit]: variable 'second_unit' doesn't contain unit data

This was reported on github and I think I've fixed this.

Edit 2: the tooltip on incinerate claims that experience for units killed by the burn effect goes to the unit that applied the burn effect, but that's not true. The overlord incinerated a unit and I let the unit burn to death - the overlord had 273 experience before and after the incinerated unit died.

If the invalid WML message appears, the execution stops and no later code is executed.

Edit 3: Dwarvish Technocrat (the level 4 dwarf rifle guy) has a movement cost of 1 for all terrains. I have one with 12 MP and he has mobility to rival Efraim and my gryphon rider. Maybe it's part of his technology?

Dwarves tend to be slow but with cheap movement. I didn't expect it to be abused this way.

If you dazzle the black souls in ch7 sc14, you can the the real unit, and not the black one.

This is hard to fix, dazzle is so horribly implemented that I am considering to remove it.

In ch8 sc10 in line 197 is written speaker=enemy - I'm sure it should be speaker=petty_enemy - there is no unit with the id enemy.

Fixed.

_______________

Votes from this batch:

Elvish Nightprowler - 18
Elvish Overlord - 9
Elvish Seer - 19
Elvish Warlord - 5
Exterminator - 15
Forester - 4
Goblin Ravager - 0
Goblin Warbanner - 0
Grim Knight - 0
Faerie Incarnation - 18
Infernal Knight - 5
Lich King - 4
Lunatic Knight - 10
Monstrosity - 0
Orcish Nightblade - 0
Orcish Strafer - 4
Orcish Warmonger - 4
Phantom - 3
Pilum Master - 4
Predator - 3

I will add a poll with a new batch.

Now, are there some errors still remaining in the beta or may I publish the current state of the beta as a stable version?

[dwarftough]

Old bug but still exists in the latest stable: if you try to enter the Tunnels of Cruelty (location of Inferno where you pick evil Lethalia) again, after you picked her, the game freezes and crashes

Can you please provide a save file if it's not already fixed in the beta?
Crashes are a problem of wesnoth rather than my campaign, but the freeze before could be my fault (and there is a way it could have caused a crash indirectly).

Here it is, I played this save in the stable, it crashes in the beta as well

[edwardspec]

Removing 'Legend of the Invincibles (beta)' using the add-on manager leads to 'beta.pbl' being left over.

edwardspec, can you please have a look at this? I am still totally clueless about the CI stuff.

This is a problem with Wesnoth's uninstaller (nothing on addon's side is causing this).

[gnombat]

Removing 'Legend of the Invincibles (beta)' using the add-on manager leads to 'beta.pbl' being left over.

edwardspec, can you please have a look at this? I am still totally clueless about the CI stuff.

This is a problem with Wesnoth's uninstaller (nothing on addon's side is causing this).

That might be a bug in the uninstaller, but you could probably fix this in the addon by adding *.pbl to the _server.ign file. The documentation specifically recommends this ("If you create a custom _server.ign, you should add these entries to it").

[Dugi]

Here it is, I played this save in the stable, it crashes in the beta as well

This seems to be an error in Wesnoth, it actually writes an error message that suggests that an algorithm doesn't correctly handle a corner case.

I have created this issue ticket for it.

LotI2-Tunnels of Cruelty.gz

It's just easier to get it to crash with this save file

(271.51 KiB) Downloaded 139 times

UPDATE: It was an error in the scenario code that set the conditions right to trigger a crash bug in Wesnoth. The crash bug in Wesnoth was fixed for 1.15, I have fixed the scenario error in github, the next beta should be without it.

Are there any more unresolved problems?

[dwarftough]

Well, if there's a new poll here and it mentions Snow Hunter, I have some words about this unit. I voted for it, in my opinion it's quite a good unit, both being 2lvl (so it gets incredible boost from leadership) and resistances (cold res allows to wear "what no man should know" and this item gives good boost and others can be assembled to make a tank from Show Hunter) and attacks (give Forest Burner bolas and this units has blade, impact, cold and fire). One thing I could mention is that blizzard attack somewhat disappointed me cause it didn't slow. It's ofc massive damage but damage is usually small while slow would be much more handy (maybe it's me how more used to slowing). Also it's a bit pitiful that not so much frozen ground to use snow ambush and other things can be found later after you afforded this advancement, maybe you can make it in Arctic Wasteland but then the only snow you'll find is on the Island of Atrocity, not much. But overall it's a damn good unit, both time I played I heavily geared snow hunter's leader and used him in Inferno.

[Dugi]

I have uploaded the incremental fixes to the server. The changes to units were not done yet because I don't have all the data at the moment, but thanks to your feedback, I have written down a lot of ideas that should help me restore the balance between units.

[dwarftough]

Are there any more unresolved problems?

I have found several issues in a more-or-less up-to-date version, I guess they aren't fixed.

1. The Doctrine of Vindictiveness has no icon when you pick advancements. Look at a Snow Huntress (27,9) in a corresponding attached save.

2. For some reason some gems are accumulated in the item storage and they are not usable for crafting. Though they can be used if you drop them on the ground from the storage and pick back (or you can smash a gem into a random gem which allows to kinda transmute but always spending one gem be it obsidian or not). I suppose that's not how it should work, gems shouldn't be stored there. Look at the item storage > gems in a corresponding save. I have an amethyst in the storage. But then look in crafting items, this menu shows 0 amethysts.

[Yellowsilver]

Are there any more unresolved problems?

2. For some reason some gems are accumulated in the item storage and they are not usable for crafting. Though they can be used if you drop them on the ground from the storage and pick back (or you can smash a gem into a random gem which allows to kinda transmute but always spending one gem be it obsidian or not). I suppose that's not how it should work, gems shouldn't be stored there. Look at the item storage > gems in a corresponding save. I have an amethyst in the storage. But then look in crafting items, this menu shows 0 amethysts.

I have seen the same issue, and I think it was already mentioned in the thread. It happens when the gem is taken at the end of a scenario. I suppose you have seen a message once saying "Amethyst was automatically picked", and instead of being with other gems, it's put into the item storage.

[dwarftough]

I have seen the same issue, and I think it was already mentioned in the thread. It happens when the gem is taken at the end of a scenario.

It may be so, I haven't seen this mentioned here. And didn't search for it, to be honest

[Yellowsilver]

I haven't seen this mentioned here. And didn't search for it, to be honest

I did just now and I didn't find. But I thought I had seen it already.

This is only what I have observed. All gems that were picked at the end of a scenario were put in the inventory, on regular LotI.

[Kraim]

This campaign is perfect.
I have also really enjoyed The beautiful child.
Do you think about creating new spinn-offs, maybe from the reality where Efraim and Lethalia are, or from the "Beautiful child" reality ?
Good luck with your new project.

[JSC]

The idea of automatically collecting some items
I know, Dugi, that you want the player's armies to have to bother with items. The players, in turn, want the other way around. That's why I have a Solomon proposal, at least I hope so. According to my idea, the game when it meets the victory criterion should look for items that meet one of the following conditions:
- lie in the player's village, either in an allied village or at most 2 hexes away from the listed
- are located in a castle free of the enemy or no more than 5 hex from its border
- are within sight of player or allied units. For the purpose of this condition, it is worth considering removing enemy units commanded by killed leaders
- the item is adjacent to the item qualifying for acquisition
An additional condition is that the fields with the object are not occupied by an enemy unit or are adjacent to it.

That would come with additional inconvenience. If you walk a unit over the item, you have the option to smash it to get a random gem, which is a pretty common thing to do for overly common items. If this was automatically placed into the inventory, you'd have to search through it over and over again to look for junk and end up picking it manually anyway.

I have implemented this in a project I never completed nor released and found the resulting mess in my inventory so annoying that I regretted that decision.

Upsss! I didn't know there was so much fuss about it.

The idea of developing teleportation
He would like to present an idea for AMLA developing teleportation capabilities.
Infiltration - allows for teleportation from/to the castle field
Hit and Blink - this would be a variation of Hit and Run capability using teleportation. It depended on the fact, that if the attack came out from some location, from which one can teleport oneself, then the unit with this capability after the attack tries to return to it, and if it teleported itself in this turn, then it teleports itself to the location, from where the last teleportation came out. In order to balance this, I propose 2 weaknesses:
- if one of the teleportation locations is in or adjacent to an enemy control zone, there is no escape.
- the number of traffic points for return traffic must be reduced somehow. Maybe by 1/3?

I'll consider it, it can't be implemented the way you are suggesting but it could be a fine addition to make some of the underused units more popular.

OK. You just have to make sure that units with such skills do not become universal first impact units. The ability to (...)Hit and Blink(...) looks like it would be abusive.

[dabber]

I have played part 2 repeatedly, but haven't played part 1 in more than five years. I finally decided to play part 1 again several weeks ago. Playing on hard difficultly, chapter 2 was easy, and chapter 3 is a cakewalk. There are no enemies that will ever attack any of my people. Not just the heroes are too scary to be attacked, but the "common" soldiers are sufficiently powerful that almost no enemy attempts to hurt them. That was largely true in chapter 2 also, but there were at least some powered up elves there.
Edit: Oops. AI aggression was changed a couple months ago and I didn't pull it. It is still really easy though.
Looking at what enemies are available, this makes sense. Most of the enemies are level 2 (or lower), and my people are all level 4 or 5, plus magic equipment. That should be a mismatch. I hacked a couple scenarios (3_09 Ambush and 3_11 Achilles Revenge) and replaced the enemies with all level 4s. That made very little difference - enemies would still move next to my people and not attack. My troops needed more time to kill them all, but enemies still died while inflicting insignificant damage. This isn't an AI bug - I debug summoned some demon warriors and they attacked me.

I don't remember part 1 being this easy. What changed? I think equipment changed. I think there is better equipment available in part 1 than previously, and also more equipment. My vague memory is 5 years ago my troops would have multiple empty slots in part 1. Now my troops are usually fully equipped. Is beelzebub the cause? Is the concept of rare drops part of it?
Or am I alone, and other people find chapters 2 and 3 more challenging?

[dwarftough]

Or am I alone, and other people find chapters 2 and 3 more challenging?

They are more challenging when you first try them, without previous LotI experience.