MP coop campaign: World Conquest

[TL]

1. The hero unit gets you an extra unit that can move in the first turn, which lets you move to secure key points that much faster. Probably the least important point, but beating the AI units to an important village or chokepoint can make things much easier.
2. The hero unit is slightly more powerful than a standard unit, thanks to better-than-normal traits. Not a big deal, but nice.
3. The hero unit is loyal. This is kind of a big deal; it will save you big money over the course of the campaign. Now, the extra firepower provided by 60 gold worth of standard units will also help conserve money overall--you can save more of your units and probably finish earlier--but this is balanced out by extra upkeep as well.
4. The hero unit can be a unit that you can't recruit normally. Granted, you can spend picks to add them to your recruit list--but you can't always get all available hero types as recruits right off the bat without spending a couple of bonus picks first, plus the hero unit gives you a more immediate bonus. If you're trying to fill a specific support role with a unit you know you won't be spamming, it may be better to get a single hero than to try to add it to your recruit list.

Mind you, it's not an either/or proposition to begin with: if you want to maximize your numeric strength, pick both the hero and the gold bonus. This doesn't give you a lot in terms of long-term advantages, though, which is the main weakness of the gold bonus to offset the relatively large short-term advantage it confers. I find it extremely useful on scenario 2, since going from the first island to the second is a pretty big jump in AI strength and you haven't had much time to build up your army yet. However, a strong finish on scenario 2 can be parlayed into a large gold reserve going into scenario 3 which makes the gold bonus somewhat redundant.

[Des]

Ah, I see now. I forgot to look at it in terms of campaign and not scenario. Good points.

[JW]

TL: this is pure awesomeness. Truly awesome awesomeness.

[TL]

I've been reticent to scale back the difficulty too much on this; the campaign format tends to create a snowball effect, so small adjustments tend to pile up into big ones over the course of a couple scenarios--and I'd rather have a tough initial curve that might take a few tries to get a good running start on than a campaign where you coast for 5-10+ hours of gameplay and then run into a brick wall. Still, in response to playtesting feedback I've made a couple more tweaks which I've just uploaded to addons (version 0.33). With preliminary testing the balance seems to be roughly about where I want it to be. You can be both sloppy and unlucky, and... well, you'll probably still lose that way, but it feels a lot more fair.

[Lucerne]

Just like to say, awesome map! Really enjoy this one a lot.

Just a observation: I'm not sure if you intended to let the players set up the map parameters themselves or not (i.e. map size, etc.), but it does currently let me set these up myself. However, if I do give custom parameters, it doesn't seem like these custom settings are carried over to subsequent scenarios. Anyways, just throwing it out there.

Again, thanks for the nice map

[JW]

Hey buddy, just a couple thoughts:

1) Perhaps putting all scenarios after the first in shroud? Sailing to new islands would probably mean not knowing the terrain - plus it's harder and more exciting.

2) There might be too much rough terrain for loyalists to handle without focusing both on new recruits and perhaps forestry as well. Is there a way to help them out?

3) How about that feeding item? (it would also add a static amount of hp if you forgot the convo)

4) Not an idea, but I'll try to work on that thing we were talking about soon!

[Wintermute]

2) There might be too much rough terrain for loyalists to handle without focusing both on new recruits and perhaps forestry as well. Is there a way to help them out?

I agree that you would only play loyals if you wanted some extra challenge right now. I think UD and northerners are also a bit weak, compared to dwarves, drakes and elves. What about giving loyals an extra starting pick for the first three scenarios, UD for the first two, and northerners for the first one? That might give them enough of a boost to be interesting.

EDIT: Maybe giving the outlaw leader a boost as well, taking outlaws I guess is the same as northerners eventually, but at the start it's pretty rough I think.

[TL]

I'm working on wrapping up the 1.6 port today, which will have numerous small changes. I'm running into some problems with the way it renders menus, but I don't know if this is a problem with my WML, a problem with my computer, or a problem with the engine itself.

I agree that there are some factional balance issues, but I think they tend to be somewhat exaggerated in practice. In particular I think undead picks work just fine; their units represent a lot of extremes, so new abilities and new units benefit them greatly. The AI's counter-recruiting is a bit spotty too, so they can really take advantage of all their high resists. Moreover, I find the general pacing of most scenarios tends to be favorable to chaotic factions.

Northerners and loyalists do suffer a bit, but they're quite playable--they both share excellent fodder for early scenarios, with some nice levelups if you can manage them. They're not going to break any overland speed records, but any faction is going to spend a fair amount of time here slogging it out and loyalists/northies do just fine there. One of the things that hurts them most is the arbitrary segmentation of their respective factions (this stings for undead as well), which is something that changes in the forthcoming update. Different leaders still get different starting recruits for variety's sake, but things are mixed up a bit--which should help even out dorf and outlaw leaders a bit.

Even so, I realize loyalists and northies are still going to be a little disadvantaged. To keep things simple I just started them off with a heroic sergeant and a heroic augur respectively, in addition to the two random starter units everyone gets. It probably doesn't sound like much, but it should make an appreciable difference--and I don't think there's all that much needed anyhow.

[jb]

Northerners and loyalists do suffer a bit, but they're quite playable

I agree. I think the problem is much smaller than the complaints warrant. It's not that hard for a player to expand their faction options, even in the early game.

I'm working on wrapping up the 1.6 port today

Excellent. Nice work.

[Ken_Oh]

I'm working on wrapping up the 1.6 port today, which will have numerous small changes. I'm running into some problems with the way it renders menus, but I don't know if this is a problem with my WML, a problem with my computer, or a problem with the engine itself.

Any details? Is this the problem? https://gna.org/bugs/?12940

This one just got fixed today. There are a bunch of differences with the menu/message system, so that might not be your problem. I'm interested to hear about it.

[TL]

That sounds like it, yeah.

[Wintermute]

Even so, I realize loyalists and northies are still going to be a little disadvantaged. To keep things simple I just started them off with a heroic sergeant and a heroic augur respectively, in addition to the two random starter units everyone gets. It probably doesn't sound like much, but it should make an appreciable difference--and I don't think there's all that much needed anyhow.

Actually, that sounds great, and much more elegant than more starting picks (which could be abused). I think what I was looking at was fooling around with 3 random leaders, and if you get a bad draw with a few loyalist sides things are much trickier I think. Adding a good loyal unit with leadership sounds like a great perk. Ideally, maybe keying off the leader would be another idea. Getting a Rocklobber or Slayer is a bit sad considering how great a level 3 troll is later, for example. Still, in the grand scheme of things it is not that big a deal.

[TL]

I have a terribly untested preliminary version uploaded on the 1.6 campaign server. Note that menus don't work all that well in 1.6 (this seems to be exacerbated by lower resolution), so caveat... uh... dudes that play this-tor. Also I'm not sure what bugs are left lurking in the WML. Quite a lot has changed in this version, although a lot of the changes aren't particularly visible in-game.

[Velensk]

I'm experianceing a bug playing on 1.5. When given a menu where I should be able to pick from a magic item, hero, or recruit I cannot select anything. I am forced to get the top option.

[TL]

This is a problem with the current 1.5 build that causes menu issues with large menu lists (theoretically if you have sufficiently high resolution you can get around it). If you stick to the keyboard to scroll up/down you should be OK, but trying to use the mouse on those large sub-menus results in glitchiness (if you fiddle with maximizing/minimizing Wesnoth this can sometimes get it to snap back to normal... and sometimes gets it to crash).