VRA - Vaelia Random Adventures [SP Campaign]

[vghetto]

The AI seemed more intent on coming directly at me than picking up villages while doing so. But, it doesn't really matter. The "problem" I had was just that there was too much gold and/or too many ways to get more, and as it started building up it got easier to get more. I think...

1) The bounty you get for a kill was probably high. When I saw it (animation set so fast I normally wouldn't be able to see it) it was usually about enough to recruit a new unit. So, if the AI and I each have 10 units and I kill two of theirs, I now have enough to recruit two more, so now I have a 12-8 unit lead. That seems like it could really tip the balance quickly in my favor. Of course, I'm assuming the AI doesn't get a bounty for killing my units (like it doesn't get yields, and doesn't seem to pick up crates).

2) There were either too many crates, or they had too much gold. It might make things more interesting to have some of them booby-trapped, say a small amount of damage and poison. If they are always going to be positive, I'd recommend removing the prompt asking if you want to open them.

I love these points, and most of them are doable. the bounty is the cost of the killed unit, i could either half it or better yet make them get a bounty when they kill my units. I will go with the latter. having booby trapped crates is doable. also yielding units to the enemy sounds like fun. it could become a ping pong match lol. the only point that i'm not sure about is the animation graphics for the floating text. I think there's an issue about that on github and a fix is on the way. i'll try to add a [delay] tag somewhere and see if that would help.

[vghetto]

I uploaded the latest changes: enemies can yield to each other and your units can yield to them. It uses the same percentage 40%. all enemies get a bounties on kills and chests have a 20% chance of dealing poison and a 10% decrease to hitpoints. the [delay] tag fixed the floating text thing, it shouldn't flash past the screen anymore. I also brought down the number of enemies you'd have to face before they start to level up.

[vghetto]

Hello,

I uploaded VRA to the addons (1.14) server because I thought it was ready and I didn't have any new ideas to add to it. So that was done and as usual I turned out to be wrong. 2 new uploads quickly followed suit. sorry about that.

Here is what has changed since the first upload:
In order to avoid their accidental death by village rebels. All AI leaders are forbidden to move from their keeps on turn 1 refresh. (thanks to Secrets of the Ancients for that idea)
The way a chest nail does damage changed internally. Instead of object->effect, turns out there's a tag called harm_unit, so I used that. And, the amount of damage dealt differs with each difficulty. 10% 20% 30%
The way potions heals also changed internally from object->effect to heal_unit.
Reason for those changes is that it gives animation, sounds and the correct floating stuff. Yay!
I tried playing on HARD and boy it was tough. the 1 hitpoint and the poisoned status of the yielder was unreasonable. and the fully healed on easy and normal was also suspect. So i changed the way units surrender.
surrender percent changed and it depends on the difficulty. (40 30 20)
a yielded unit retains a fraction of its health. currently 70% 60% 50%
poisoned, slowed, uncovered status are carried over on all difficulties.
Finally the last major change was that if the yielded unit is on a village, then explicitly call capture_village to switch its side as well. Doesn't work for when the rebels get a yield though, i'm not sure why.

Changes that happened before the initial addons upload but after my last post include:
carryover is now set to 100 50 0.
Troll Hero was added to the random hero list.
a yielded units shows the text yield and gold text has $ sign instead of +.
music for base select map.
AI recruit limits, fog, shroud settings can all be tweaked in the config file.
I don't remember what else was changed.

Enjoy.

[vghetto]

Hi,

I changed a lot since my last post here, mostly internal stuff. But, there were some changes that would affect the player.

I reduced the number of villages on regular and cave maps to around 25 on normal and hard. On easy it's a bit higher but not that much.
Sigurd was already around 25 I didn't change it, but WCII varies. I didn't change it in WCII because it's complicated. Some of them you'll get a low number and other you'll get a very high number like 50.
For the cave maps it is difficult to pin down how many villages you would get, it varies between 15 and 30. It depends on whether some cave chambers are rendered.

I removed Troll Hero from the allowed to recruit list. It shouldn't affect the starting gold calculation but you could recruit Troll Heros if you happen to start as one.

All maps have an early finish bonus and the carryover was dropped to 40 for all. You can change whether you get a bonus or not in the utils/config.cfg file.

I reduced the number of potions and chests. You'll get one of each kind on hard, two of each kind on normal and three of each kind on easy.

A note on whether to keep some units in your service or to dismiss them. Since your recruit list will determine your starting gold, keeping low level units will affect the calculation and bring down your starting gold for each round.

I officially classed this mod as Novice level in the description.

That's about it for now, thanks.

Attached are a couple of replays.

Edit:
Sorry for the rampant version releases, very unprofessional. There were some issues that just had to be fixed right away.
Enemy internal team name wasn't being set correctly, it didn't affect the play but it was still a bug.
Fixed rare ally AI issue in the volcano map, once all enemies are killed the allies would stand still and won't budge. If they happened to be on one of the volcano's exits that meant game over for you.
The code to handle that was already there, but I don't think I had it right the first time. Now it should definitely work. (fingers crossed)
I revisited the rebels code and fixed the number that should pop up for your allies. Before it treated them as enemies and spawned an the extra rebel occasionally.
I removed rebel tweaking from the config file, there was no need for that. The defaults are fine as they are.
I removed the silly messages that Vaelia says when the rebels first come out.
Better sighted event for the ally.
Each enemy faction that you face will have in their recall list a loyal unit for each type. The recall cost for the enemy is now set to 0. That means they will recall ALL of their loyal units unlike before were they recalled some.
The AI recruitment_diversity was replaced with code lifted from Wings_of_Victory (great campaign, highly recommended)
When you start a new game, the Sergeant will not factor into your starting gold on round one. They will factor once you have another Sergeant in your recall list other than Vaelia. This forced me to use my peasants on round one and getting the reward of leveling a couple of them by the end of the round.
I'll attach a replay with the latest changes and the lower starting gold. I managed to survive on Normal, that means it should be a piece of cake for you.

[Konrad2]

Regarding the blue money numbers, it would be nice if they were yellow instead. And no dollar sign maybe?

And I think you said somewere that yielding units are reduced to 1hp on hard. That is not the case right now.

[vghetto]

Regarding the blue money numbers, it would be nice if they were yellow instead. And no dollar sign maybe?

And I think you said somewere that yielding units are reduced to 1hp on hard. That is not the case right now.

Hi,

Thank you for trying out VRA.

I'll change the color to yellow for the earned gold.
As for the dollar sign, is there a conventional currency symbol in wesnoth? I would use that if it exists.
I had it show +10 before, but that didn't make sense to players. I don't play the gold sound jingle (intentional) and it could be confused with 10 XP.

Maybe have it show 10 GP or GP 10? Any suggestions are welcome.

You are right, I did have the yielding unit HP set to 1 on hard in the past.
When I tried it out, I found it to be a bit sadistic; they never stood a chance, and you'd never get a chance to protect them because they were the first to be targeted on the enemies turn.
I mentioned that alteration in the post before last.

Here is what I have it set to at this moment. I think these are reasonable values:

Code: Select all

# Health percent of the unit that yielded. (EASY NORMAL HARD)
#define VRA_GAME_SURRENDER_HEALTH
    {VRA_VAR vra.game_surrender_health 70 60 50}
#enddef

I think I read in the strategy guide that a 50% health might withstand an enemy attack, so yielding unit HP on Hard is now set to 50% of their maximum health, the poison status depends on whether originally the unit was poisoned before yielding or not. Poison/Slow status applies to all difficulties.

One of the things that is on my to do list is make all those utils/config.cfg options available to the player once they start a new campaign instead of having to edit the config file themselves.

[Konrad2]

I think changing the color to yellow and maybe adding some help for 'looting' and 'yielding' in the first scenario would make it clear enough.

[vghetto]

This is what I settled with:
Gold number is in yellow and no dollar sign or anything.
The objectives explains the gold and the yield thing.

With the help of insert_tag and show_if magic, the objectives will show what enemies you have to defeat, if they are allied, if you have an ally, if they are leveled up.

Once an enemy leader or your ally dies they get removed from the objectives.

And all of that was just to remove a tiny $ sign
That is how truly helpful small suggestions could be, thank you Konrad2.

Screenshot of the objectives

Spoiler:

[Konrad2]

Why does the enemy not recruit for all the gold it has? I ended a scenario with my enemy having 250 gold.

[vghetto]

I uploaded a major update. I thought it deserved being labeled as 1.1.0.
I don't know how this update will do with old save files; there were many variable name changes in the process.

This is what has changed:
Some of the utils/config.cfg settings that I kept telling you about can now be set by the player once they start a new campaign.
I didn't move everything to the dialog box, only the ones that I thought were vital for the player to tweak.

Here is a screenshot of the dialog box

Spoiler:

For the Vaelia type, you can write multiple unit types and it would pick one of them for you at random.
example: Sergeant, Mage, Dwarvish Fighter

Why does the enemy not recruit for all the gold it has? I ended a scenario with my enemy having 250 gold.

That was the recruit limit in effect. It was set to 15 on Hard. If you'd look back at the replay you'll notice that their unit count was consistently around 16 units till the end of the scenario.
I've changed that in the latest update, by default it is set to 999 (i.e. disabled limit) and if someone finds it too hard they can reduce it back to 15. The minimum is 9, which was the old EASY setting. NORMAL was set to 12 back then.
Again, thank you for trying out VRA, I hope it's enjoyable.

[vghetto]

Hi,

Here is what has changed since my last post:

Fixed internal bugs and I'm sure that I've introduced brand new ones.

I reduced the map size of all regular maps to 32x32 and increased Sigurd maps from 30 to 32.
Because of the new sizes, there is simply no space for an enemy side 4, therefore side 4 was removed completely.

I reduced the number of villages on all regular and Sigurd maps. There should be around 10 villages, give or take.

For WCII maps I reduced the number of villages, but reducing the map sizes turned out to be tricky.
The magic numbers in wcii for iterations seem to matter, and the maps looked different when I changed them.
I use the standard WIDTH x HEIGHT x 1.25 for iterations on regular and Sigurd maps, I have no clue what standard WCII uses.
So expect the number of villages in WCII to vary wildly. (I haven't fully tested this change)

I included scenario names to all regular and cave maps. I've also created 5 new maps to bring the total of maps to 62.

The maps are:
These are the same as multiplayer Random map but with modifications or fixes.
Plain (with less snow)
Marsh (with less lakes and rivers)
Desert
Winter

My variations on the above, with my own temperature settings for all of them:
Coastal Plain
Coastal Marsh
Coastal Desert
Coastal Winter

*New?* Winter Snowfall (With parallel roads). It looks a bit like Sigurd's Frozen. You can get to it from the Winter village.

The following you can get to from the Plain village:
*New* Elvish Delight (Mostly forest, with narrow 1 hex roads).
*New* Elvish Ecstasy (All forest and forest hills with clear 3 hex wide roads)
*New* Dwarvish Delight (Mostly mountains, with narrow 1 hex roads).
*New* Dwarvish Ecstasy (All mountains with 3 hex wide roads)

Cave maps, you'll get to them from the cave village:
*New* Cave Entrance: Unlike the other caves, this is not done in lua. It uses widened parallel roads to create the caverns, so all keeps should be reachable, hopefully.
Caverns: very big map with chasms. Don't end turns with units over the chasms or lava, they will die.
Small Cave: Diamond shaped cave.
Big Cave: with many random chambers.

I also lifted some code from various new places, (Dead Water, Defense_of_Elensefar, WML_Guide, Genesis)
New pickupable map object when you have shroud on comes from WML_Guide.
Dead Water+wcii code was used for the map Cave Entrance.
Allied AI now uses code from Defense_of_Elensefar.
I copied a clever bit of code from Genesis, but haven't actually used yet. It might come in handy in the future.
See Credit.txt on github for what else I've used.

There might be other changes that I forgot to mention, it doesn't matter.
Sorry for the many uploads.

[vghetto]

Hi,

Here is what has changed since my last post:

I've included the ability to recruit Dwarvish Miners in all cave maps.
The miners can dig a tunnel for you by right-clicking on the cave wall or cave chasm.
I also included a small 20x20 cave map with no passages between the 2 keeps, you'll have to dig your way to them.

The Dwarvish Miner unit and images comes from the Sceptre of fire campaign. Code for the digging can be found here:
https://github.com/virtualghetto/Vaelia ... _miner.cfg

Edit:

The animation for the bounty was glitching when it happened in the die event. I noticed it especially with the Dwarvish Guardsman that after they were killed and removed from the screen, they would pop back on for a split second as the floating text for the gold was happening. So, I moved the bounty code to last_breath instead.
The delay stuff for the floating text (gold, Yield) was also being inconsistent, sometimes it happened fast and other times it happened slowly. I messed with that a bit and now its' floating more smoothly on my version of wesnoth. Please let me know if it was working fine for your version and I completely broke it.
I also modified the code for the digging to update the fog/shroud area after a fresh tunnel was dug.

[WanderingHero]

Maybe I just suck, but how are you supposed to win the first scenario on hard? No matter what I pick I seem to be drastically out numbered and out matched and the sergants i can recruit stand no chance. Or am I meant to change V to something else?

[vghetto]

Maybe I just suck, but how are you supposed to win the first scenario on hard? No matter what I pick I seem to be drastically out numbered and out matched and the sergants i can recruit stand no chance. Or am I meant to change V to something else?

Hi,

Thank you for trying it out.
I admit, there is a fair bit of luck involving the first couple of rounds. It mostly depends on the enemy that you might get, but I'm not expecting you to defeat the leader from the get go.

Watch my replay above v1.0.11 or Konrad2's replay (hopefully they will load with the latest version) and see if they might help you out.

You could try other tactics like splitting your army of peasants and sending them in two or three directions so as to split up the enemy's army as well and not have to face them head on. Other tactics might involve capturing then abandoning the villages for example, and then recapturing them when you get the chance to draw the enemy back in their direction.

There are other ways to get through it, you can limit the number of recruits for the enemy or tweak some of the variables in utils/config.cfg. I think both replays above had the limit set to 12 and 15 respectively.

Or, you can try this little spoiler.

Spoiler:

On the maps other than Sigurd or WCII, there is a Castle in the middle of the map. That keep is special, try to get Vaelia to it and launch your attacks from there.

The feature to change Vaelia's type was added just incase the player gets tired of starting off as a Sergeant. You could try it if you like. But, like the other settings, you can't change them once you've begun.